So is it Slovakia or Slovenia?

There will be readers who will think this is a question worthy of a third grader. Yes, there will be one or two such readers. The rest of the world is confused. Separate countries? Do we know which is which?











An article in the IHT (here) reports the following:

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 northeastern border. "I'm very happy to be here today with the prime minister of Slovakia," Rop recalled him saying, adding politely in a recent interview, "It was very strange..."

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, but 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.
….
Erwan Fouéré, the head of the European Commission's delegation to Slovenia, recalls getting a memo recently intended for the commission's office in Slovakia. A Slovene ambassador in a European capital, who asked not to be identified. says his staff meets someone from the local Slovak embassy at least once a month to exchange wrongly-addressed mail.

Why the mix up? If one remembers that there once was a Czechoslovakia, then it’s easy, isn’t it? The word gets broken down into the two countries that were born of it. Slovenia thus is simply the “other one.” [The flags, of course, are also confusing. Note Slovakia is on the left here, and 'the other one" is on the right.]

The real challenge, I think, is to distinguish between something that is Slavic rather than being a Slovak or Slovene. For instance, being Polish makes one Slavic. So does being Belorussian, Bulgarian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Russian, and Ukrainian. Thus, if you are from Slovenia, you are Slavic, but not a Slovak.

And as we’re brandishing national identities here, I may as well ask – if I am Polish (I have not formally relinquished my Polish citizenship, though I have become an American a decade or two back), does that mean, in addition to being Polish and Slavic and American, that I will be as of May 1st, also EU-nian? Does that make me a walking multinational treaty of sorts?