This chapter examines the ways in which Czechs and Slovaks interacted between 1900 and 1950 with Hungarians, both with the Magyars incorporated against their will inside the new state and with those in the reconstituted kingless kingdom of Hungary. The main themes are how perceptions were created and perpetuated, and how these related to the changing reality of ethnic relations. In this three-sided pattern of connections, the Slovaks long remained comparatively subordinate, reckoned ‘neutral’ — or innocent — by both the other parties. Even the status of the Magyar minority within Czechoslovakia, largely unreconciled to the new dispensation, apart from certain exceptions such as the young Sarló movement, only furnished a pretext for the more squarely antagonistic contest between Czechs and Hungarians which rested on, and consciously invoked, historical and contemporary prejudices.
