In the renegotiations of borders and cultures currently underway in former Soviet Europe, the situation in Slovakia stands out as one in which uncertainty itself is perhaps the primary obstacle to renewal and growth. The Slovaks were occupied by Hungarian forces for a millennium, emerging as a modern nation first under the shadow of the Czechs in the first republic, then clouded by a Nazi-style clerico-fascist state which discredited the moral impulses of much Slovak nationalism, and finally dominated by a colonial Comecon culture in which the interests of an integral, cohesive Slovak state were always compromised by its role in a larger international Soviet politics. By virtue of the remarkable Velvet Revolution, the Slovaks have been able to claim unique nationhood for the first time since the Great Moravian Empire in the 9th century. Yet the thousand years between has created a culture which lacks the foundations for the kind of quick, assured policy-making that will succeed financially, and in the international culture market, for the new countries of Europe. Separated from the Czechs, the Slovaks now face a slower pace of industrial conversion, slower ecological recovery, a fading currency, and the legacy of a violent nationalism—personified in Meciar's leadership—that has not made the transition from government by executive fiat to reasoned debate and majority politics.