Confronting the Devil: Europe

This dissertation traces the articulation of categories of Hungarian and Slovak nationality, sometimes glossed as ethnicity, in Komarno. Slovakia to argue that municipalities have emerged as key loci of identification and sites for the reconfiguration of state power within processes of European institutional integration and neoliberal structural convergence. During much of the 1990s, Slovakia was the east-central European paragon of state-centered nationalist politics. Acrimonious relations between the populist governments of Vladimir Meciar (1990- 1992, 1992-1994, 1994-1998) and political representatives of the country's Hungarian national minority (approximately 10% of the population) isolated Slovakia internationally and polarized domestic political rhetoric in 'Slovak' and 'Hungarian' terms. Komarno---a town of 40,000 on the Slovak/Hungarian border---featured regularly in domestic and international media as an icon of this politics of national differentiation because of municipal claims for state recognition of political and linguistic rights for Komarnoers of Hungarian nationality---the majority of the town's residents. These claims were articulated through municipal organizations and governmental structures, toward continental governance institutions---including the European Union and Council of Europe---and against the Meciarist state and its emphasis on (Slovak) nation-state congruity. Komarno emerged through these claims as an ontological problem for Slovakia and the post-national, New European ideal. Komamoers' demands for scalar recognition of rights on the basis of nationality aligned municipal institutions with concepts of universal, liberal political rights in a challenge to the concept of a unitary state-internal polity. The dynamics of representation that these claims engendered suggest that the municipal must be seen as an analytical and practical political category within European and global geopolitics. Throughout the 1990s, municipalities across Europe became proving grounds for states' adherence to the canonical values of continental governance institutions and agents of the reconfiguration of state sovereignty. As such, recognition of the emerging authority of municipal governance structures is needed to account for the interplay of local agency, claims for collective recognition of substate polities, and continental and global institutional convergence. Keywords: Municipal governance; Politics of Difference; Nationalism and Europeanization: Slovakia, Komarno