It was not easy at all for the initiators of the SCCH to revive the mutual ties of Slovaks and Croats in the field of the humanities. For several reasons. Probably the most serious was the older split within the Communist International (Comintern), after Josip Broz Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, broke up with Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Tito’s Yugoslavia became de facto an enemy of the regimes the soviets had established in East-Central Europe. One of them was Post-February Czechoslovakia. See Černák, Tomáš. Roztržka medzi Titom a Stalinom a jej dopad na udalosti v ČSR počas roka 1948. In: Človek, spoločnosť, doba : Zborník štúdií z 3. vedeckej konferencie mladých historikov, zorganizovanej Katedrou histórie FF UPJŠ v Košiciach, ktorá sa uskutočnila 16. – 17. októbra 2013 v Košiciach. Ed.: Zuzana Tokárová – Martin Pekár. Košice: Faculty of Arts at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, 2014, p. 256 – 264. Although the mutual ties between the two countries began to recover after Stalin’s death, they never really reached their pre-war level, or even the level from 1945 – 1948. The creation of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Historical Commission in times of political recession in the 1960s was a sign that the relations between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia were improving.
This happened in 1966. However, its activities were characterised by excessive formalism resulting from the official communist worldview. As a matter of fact, this ideology covered the national character of the historical ties, rather than addressed them. See, for instance, Suško, Ladislav: Správa z 9. zasadnutia Československojuhoslovanskej historickej komisie. In: Historický časopis, a. 24, 1976, p. 476 – 478. No wonder the Commission stopped working when both supranational entities, namely Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, ceased to exist. Another weak point of the commission was the fact that it predominantly focused on history and neglected the rest of the humanities. Nevertheless, it can be said that the work of this commission was an important precedent for the SCCH to be established.
Another factor hampering the creation of the SCCH after the establishment of the independent Republic of Croatia and the Slovak Republic was the fact that the countries of the former communist bloc from East and Central Europe were kind of competing with each other to establish themselves first in the political and cultural institutions of the West. In other words, the natural north-south or Mediterranean vector of our common history was temporarily replaced by a western (occidental) one. Consequently, establishing official state institutions, which would study and popularise the historical North-South cultural ties of Slovaks and Croats was neglected. There is another not entirely clear but all the more noticeable factor, which to some extent complicated the establishment of official ties in the field of humanities. When trying to renew their bonds with Croatia’s cultural community, Slovakia’s cultural community felt, so to speak, a kind of a priori Croatian post-war syndrome, which consisted in the Croats being “self-absorbed” after the end of the civil war in former Yugoslavia. History did not stop with the victory of the Croats in this conflict, though. Indeed, after a while these “isolationism” and self-centeredness of the Croats gave way to a search for natural allies in the further historical development of the Republic of Croatia and its cultural policy. And it did not take long for the Croats to find their traditional (un)known friends, the Slovaks.