Slovak Issue May Imperil Prague’s Economic Reforms, Havel’s Future : Czechoslovakia: The controversy could drag on past the June election, with Slovakian nationalists pressing for a looser confederation with the Czechs.

The deadlock among Czechoslovak politicians over Slovak nationalist demands now seems likely to persist until after parliamentary elections in June, political figures here have concluded, and the controversy could cast a shadow over the country’s economic reforms and the political future of President Vaclav Havel.

The federal Parliament spent the past week debating the first three sections of a new federal constitution, but parliamentary deputies from Slovakia say the constitution has virtually no chance of passage.

The Slovak lawmakers say they prefer to wait until after the elections, when they expect that Slovakia’s nationalist politicians will be in an even stronger position to press their demands for a looser confederation with the Czechs.

“What we want is at most a loose form of coexistence,” said Martin Kontra, parliamentary leader of what is now perceived to be the strongest Slovak political party, the Movement for Democratic Slovakia. “This is the principle with which we are going into the election.”

A draft treaty aimed at resolving the dispute was quashed earlier this month by Slovakia’s national council, which is composed of the republic’s leading politicians. The draft gave each republic the right to leave the Czechoslovak federation, but only on the basis of a referendum. Each republic would have had a limited right to conclude international treaties on regional issues. A common defense, foreign policy and currency would be maintained, but each republic could form its own armed security forces.

The problem with the treaty, the Slovak politicians said, was that it contained too many concessions.

Slovak nationalist politicians have been pressing for separate economic policies, and the most extreme have suggested an independent national guard force.

Virtually all of them, however, have opposed any referendum on the issue, since public opinion polls have shown that the overwhelming majority of Slovaks favor a continued federation with the Czechs.

The Czechs and Slovaks were first united in 1918 with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although the Czech and Slovak languages are similar, the two peoples brought vastly different cultural experiences to the union. The Czechs, under German or Austrian influence, were the more secular of the two, while the Slovaks, under the sway of Hungarians, were solidly Roman Catholic.

Today, after four decades of communism, the more rural Slovakia, with about one-third of the federation’s land area, is poorer, generally rural and less developed. It is also saddled with some of Czechoslovakia’s heaviest industry, state-owned and mostly in deep economic trouble. Slovakia’s unemployment level, around 10%, is twice that of the Czech lands.

Critics of the Slovak nationalists--from both the Czech and Slovak sides--say the nationalists are playing on the fears and uncertainty faced by a public concerned with rising unemployment and the specter of economic reform, for which the driving force is coming from the Czechs.

“The nationalists have nothing better to do than to exploit the poor Slovak people,” said Frantisek Sebej, a Slovak member of Parliament representing the Civic Democratic Union, formerly the Public Against Violence, the group that led the Slovak forces in the 1989 revolution against the Communists. Once the leading post-Communist party in Slovakia, the moderate party has lost ground steadily to more fervently nationalist parties and now is estimated to command what would amount to about 5% of the region’s votes.

“This is what you have,” Sebej said, “when a large group of people feel threatened this way. For the last 40 years they were led to believe in the horrors of capitalism--so it’s a sort of collective fear and insecurity. It is the best time for demagogues to appear with simple solutions for our problems--a fear of conspiracies, a fear of outside forces.”

Political observers note that the nationalist forces include Christian Democrats and former Communists, and all share a distrust of economic reform and private enterprise and a belief in a strong state.

“They don’t think the old system was wrong,” Sebej said, “they just think the wrong people were running it.”

“With the exception of the politicians,” said Beata Bernikova, a journalist with the Slovak magazine Verejnost, “I can’t think of a single person who wants independence for Slovakia.” But, she noted, the nationalist politicians of the region give voice to the fear of uncertainty unleashed by the overturning of the old system.

“There are real problems,” said Jan Sokol, a Czech who is the deputy chairman of the Parliament. “It is not totally the crazy idea of some ambitious politicians. The economic situation in Slovakia is very difficult. The unemployment there is twice as high as it is here.” In a more charitable mood than many Czechs display these days, he suggested that Slovakia’s nationalist politicians are simply using what muscle they have to right the balance.

“Politicians are using this nationalist idea as a sort of drug to hold the people’s attention, to keep them in a battle mood,” Sokol said. “I think in the end, not much will happen. There will be a continuing debate, and in a couple of years it will settle down.”

Others are not so sure. If the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia triumphs in the June parliamentary elections, as many now expect, the stage could be set for difficult and protracted wrangling over right-wing, free-market policies of Vaclav Klaus, whose party is expected to dominate in the Czech lands. Klaus, political observers say, would like to bring his hard-nosed market principles to bear in Slovakia and will resist the government credits, subsidies and bailouts demanded by the Slovaks.

President Havel, meanwhile, rebuffed by the Slovak veto in the present Parliament in his attempt to decide the Slovak national issue by a referendum, has made it clear that he will refuse to preside over the dissolution of the Czechoslovak republic.