Slovenia and Slovakia: the lands of confusion

Date: 29/04/04

Last December, at a news conference in Rome, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi introduced Anton Rop, the prime minister of Slovenia, which is directly above Italy's north-eastern border. "I'm very happy to be here today with the prime minister of Slovakia," Rop recalled him saying. The Slovene premier confessed in a recent interview: "It was very strange, we asked journalists not to mention it in their reports."

In 1999, when the then Texas governor, George W. Bush, was on the presidential campaign trail he puzzled a Slovak reporter by saying that "the only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned firsthand from your foreign minister, who came to Texas. I had a great meeting with him. It's an exciting country".

In fact, Bush had not met the foreign minister of Slovakia at all, but actually the then prime minister of Slovenia, Janez Drnovsek.

The stories of wrong national anthems being played at state events and wrongly delivered mail are legion. And the two countries' virtually identical flags don't help, either. (But Slovenia just might remedy the latter situation, at least - if it adopts a new flag with 11 horizontal blue, white and red stripes linked in the middle to form four triangles that serve as symbols of the country's peaks and valleys.)

Erwin Fouéré, the head of the European Commission's delegation to Slovenia, recalls getting a memo recently intended for the Commission's office in Slovakia.

And a Slovene ambassador in one European capital says his staff meets someone from the local Slovak Embassy at least once a month, simply to exchange wrongly addressed mail.

Slovenia's soon-to-be commissioner Janez Potocnik says such incidents will surely pass with time: "Although we have also been mixed up with Slavonia."

Slavonia? As it happens, that's actually a region in Croatia . . .

Article is part of a European Voice Special Report on EU Enlargement.