Waking the Dead: Milan Hodža and the Slovak Road to Europe.
Waking the Dead: Milan Hodža and the Slovak Road to Europe.

Summary/Abstract: The author analyses the 2002 reburial of Milan Hodža, which took place two months before the September 2002 elections. She focuses on the change in identity politics that occured between the 1998 and 2002 elections and examines the role of the reburial in the light of these changes. She argues that SDKÚ and the Prime Minister Dzurinda appropriated Hodža for their political aims and turned him into a symbol of "Slovak Europeanness", and at the same time they used him to consolidate their "EU-monopoly" in the eyes of Slovak voters. Thus, Hodža's reburial shows a situation where the cultivation of a European identity was closely tied to the domestic interests and perhaps the survival of local power elites.

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