With England playing Slovakia in the Euros later today, there’s absolutely no excuse this time for Anglophones to confuse this country with that other European nation of a similar name. That’s because England’s previous opponents in the tournament were indeed Slovenia.
This confusion has bedevilled the two countries
The confusion between the two nations is common, and emerged after they both became independent states in the early-1990s. Yet for each country, achieving autonomy was one thing; achieving international recognition was quite another. As Michael Palin in his 2007 book New Europe observed upon arriving Slovakia, a few years after its velvet divorce from the Czechs: ‘Its sense of identity can’t have been helped by the creation of another new state, Republika Slovenija (Slovenia), not at all to be confused with Slovenská Republika (Slovakia).’
Alas, this confusion has bedevilled the two countries. Not just because of their similar-sounding names, but because of their similar flag design (based on a pan-Slavic template), location in Central Europe, and both being relatively new countries that were once junior members of a Communist state and now members of the EU. Both countries have mountains, the Alps and the Carpathians, and both share a Slavic tongue.
But the superficial similarities, as most travelling England football fans will know already – they are a famously informed lot when it comes to geography – are misleading. Slovakia, for instance, is landlocked. Linguists will tell you that while they speak West Slavic here, in Slovenia a form of Southern Slavic prevails. Slovaks drink beer, Slovenes prefer wine.
Still, mistake abound. But some slips are less forgivable than others. In December 2003 the then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi introduced the leader of Slovenia with the words ‘I’m very happy to be here today with the prime minister of Slovakia.’ Unforgivable, because not only does Italy share a border with Slovenia, but that border has been historically highly-contested. The status of Trieste, which once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire, contains many Slovenian speakers, and its status was only fully cemented in 1975.
But the Italian premier was in good company. In 1999, as Texas governor, George W Bush told a Slovak reporter: ‘the only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned first-hand from your foreign minister, who came to Texas’. Bush had not in fact met the foreign minister of Slovakia, but rather the then prime minister of Slovenia, Janez Drnovsek.
The mix-ups have continued. In 2017 at the Ice Hockey World Championships, during a game in Cologne between Slovakia and Italy, the PA accidentally played the national anthem of Slovenia instead, a mistake met by booing and jeers from the crowd. Perhaps with the prone-gaffe George W Bush in mind, three weeks after Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in 2016 Miro Cerar, the Prime Minister of Slovenia, spoke to the President-elect to offer his services as a mediator with Vladimir Putin. Knowing well that Slovenia is the birthplace of Melania Trump, Cerar afterwards reassured reporters: ‘I know that Mr Trump is very aware of the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia.’
Matters then took a bizarre twist in 2018, when headlines appeared simultaneously that ‘Slovenia’s Prime Minister announced his resignation this week’ and ‘Slovakia’s Prime Minister announced his resignation this week’ – bizarre in that both stories were correct. Both events just happened to have taken place at the same time.
To clarify matters, in 2017 the London Embassies of the two countries held an event entitled: ‘Distinguishing Slovenia and Slovakia’. As a reporter from the New Yorker magazine related from the event at the National Liberal Club, posters at the event listed fun facts about the two countries’ languages (the creator of the standardised Slovak accidentally shot himself in 1855 while hunting) and literature (8 February is a public holiday in Slovenia to celebrate the national poet, whose first name is France). As the event came to a close, guests were reminded to pick up goody bags: salt from Slovenia and cheese made in Slovakia.
The two countries aren’t the only to be the source of bewilderment. In 2013, the Swiss and Swedish consulates in Shanghai ran a campaign to help locals tell the two countries apart. We Brits sometimes confuse our North Sea neighbours, the Danes and the Dutch, while a common confusion between two further countries was epitomised in cinema in the 1994 film Dumb and Dumber. Here, Jim Carrey’s character, upon meeting a woman from Austria, exclaims: “G’day, mate! Let’s put another shrimp on the barbie!’
One story you may have heard regarding Slovakia and Slovenia is that officials from each country regularly meet to exchange mail addressed to the wrong country respectively. Alas, this is an urban myth, reinforced in the UK by an episode of QI. But it works as an urban myth because we could so well imagine it to be true.
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