Alas, we alone can look backwards with a perfect clarity. Generous statements like these are, as we are about to see, more than balanced in Štúr’s writings with diatribes of an almost xenophobic character, and even here it is not difficult to sense a hint of ‘or else’ in his suggestion that, along with good will and conviction, the Magyars might be swayed ‘by prudence.’
Again, we see things that happened almost two hundred years ago quite clearly. We cannot expect the same prescience from those involved in the heat of the moment, who — like ourselves now — cannot see the future. Unfortunately, Štúr’s was an age of ethnonationalism, and it was the centripetal force of the fashionable concept of the Volk which was to lead to the premature dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, that European Unio
