Last week Slovak government announced that our country will refuse to accept passports issued by the government of Kosovo. If a citizen of Kosovo find himself/herself being on the Slovak territory, he/she will be considered to be an illegal immigrant despite having a valid Schengen visa.PM Fico repeated the official Slovak stance on the issue of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence. He compared it to the 1938 Munich betrayal, i.e. the agreement that allowed Nazi Germany to annex large parts of the then Czechoslovakia and he hasn't excluded the possibility that our country will never recognize Kosovo because its creation as an independent state was a violation of international law.
This question is one of the few that bring the Slovak political spectrum together. With the exception of the Hungarian minority party, all political subjects (whether they are just pro-European or fanatically pro-European) agree upon refusal of Kosovo independence. Its roots can not only be found in a moved history of the 20th century (when Western countries enabled Nazis and their allies from "anschlussed" Austria and Hungary by series of agreements to seize nearly half of our country's territory, while Czechoslovak representatives weren't invited to the talks with Hitler), but also in a lurking feeling of general public (that is consistently being abused by politicians, especially by the Slovak National Party) that Hungarian minority living in the south is a threat to our state's most important interests and that they still plan to break away and become part of Hungary.
The latter is of course nonsense and can be described only as a vulgar nationalism of some politicians that secures them votes of less educated (yet numerous) voters, although a behaviour of some Hungarian representatives hasn't been very helpful in order to calm down the situation.
But back to Kosovo. The reaction of the Slovak Republic is similar to that of other countries concerned about possibility of a recurrence of identical scenario in their own case, for example Spain (and their problems with Basques) or Israel (conflict with Palestinians). But the list is much much longer: Transnistria, Kashmir, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Turkish Cyprus, Corsica etc.
I do not like talking rubbish about international law and its unbreachability of the international law as I think that you cannot always play by the rules if facing a danger that knows no bounds (terrorists, rough states...), but Kosovo really set a precedent that a state territory is not ‚sacred‘; that it is no more a matter of an exclusive state's sovereignty and that there is an option for a certain part of it to declare independence without a consent of a central government and still be recognized by international community.
And this is simply something I do not like.
If you have a different view of things, let me know in the Comments.
UPDATE: I would like to recommend you THIS article by Margarete Minar that further analyses the Kosovo issue.
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