Introduction
The formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 was the conclusion of the long struggle of the Czechs against their Austrian rulers and of the Slovaks against their Hungarian rulers. The independence of Czechoslovakia was officially announced in Prague, the nation’s capital, on October 28, 1918. The new state was plagued by problems because of its wide ethnic diversity, separate histories and differing religious, cultural, and social traditions of the Czechs and the Slovaks.
The Czechoslovakian state was conceived as a parliamentary democracy. The constitution named the Czechoslovak nation as the creator and principal constituent of the Czechoslovak state. Czechoslovakia was the only central European country to remain a parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1938. After taking power in Germany, Czechoslovakia was to become Hitler’s target. On September 29, 1938, the Munich Agreement was signed by Germany, Italy, France, and Britain, and the Czechoslovakian government agreed to tolerate the agreement. Czechoslovakian military units, however, fought alongside the Allied forces during World War II. Except for the brutalities of the German occupation, Czechoslovakia suffered relatively little from the war. In late November 1938, Czechoslovakia was reconstituted in three sovereign units: Czechia, Slovakia, and Ruthenia.
The Third Republic came into existence in the month of April in 1945. Its government was a National Front coalition which contained three socialist parties: the KSC, the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, and the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party. Following Nazi Germany’s surrender, some 2.9 million Germans were kicked out of Czechoslovakia with the approval of the Allied Forces. Czechoslovakia then fell victim to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. In February of 1948, when the Communists took power, Czechoslovakia was declared a “people’s democracy”, which was seen as an initial step toward socialism and communism (Pynsent, 1994).
Background to Dissolution
Anti-Soviet demonstrations in August 1969 ushered in a period of harsh tyranny. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the National Assembly was confronted by would-be individuals and organized groups connected to independent thinking and activities. The first anti-Communist demonstration took place on March 25, 1988 in the city of Bratislava. It was an unauthorized peace gathering containing almost two-thousand Catholics; the anti-Communist revolution, however, did not start until November 16, 1989, with a demonstration of Slovak university students for democracy in the same city where the first demonstration had took place a year and a half before, Bratislava. On November 17, 1989, the communist police violently broke up a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration, and brutally beat many student participants.
While facing overwhelming refutation by the people of Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party all but collapsed. The first free elections in Czechoslovakia since 1946 took place in June of 1990, and more than 95% of the population participated in the voting. Members of Czechoslovakia’s parliament, divided along national lines, were barely able to cooperate long enough to pass the law officially separating the two nations in late 1992, and on 1 January 1993, the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia were simultaneously and peacefully founded. The Czech Republic has since joined NATO and the European Union, in 1999 and 2004 respectively (Cohen, 1999).
Politics of the Czech Republic
The government that is currently in power in the Czech Republic is a multi-party parliamentary representative democratic republic. According to the Constitution of the Czech Republic that was adopted in 1992, the President is the head of state, while the Prime Minister is the head of government, and has the ability to exercise supreme executive power. The President is elected by parliament for a five-year term, not more than twice in succession. In accordance with the Czech Constitution, if a new President has not been elected by the end of a President’s term, some powers are moved to the Prime Minister, while others are moved to Head of the Chamber of Deputies. While most of the president’s powers are only ceremonial, he does have the presidential power of veto, in which he can return a bill back to parliament; but the veto can be ultimately overturned by parliament. The current President of the Czech Republic is Vaclav Klaus, and the current Prime Minister is Mirek Topolanek (Wolchik, 1996).
The Legislative Branch of the Czech government is bicameral, containing the Chamber of Deputies (considered the lower house) and the Senate (considered the upper house). The Senate has eighty-one members, who are each elected to six year terms. The Senate has one President and four Vice-Presidents, and the members are required to participate in certain specialized committees and commissions. The Chamber of Deputies contains two-hundred members, who are each elected to four year terms, and is headed by the chairman and five vice-chairmen. Like the Senate of the United States of America, every two years one third of the members are up for elections; candidates who are running for a seat in the Senate do not need to be on a political party’s ticket like they must be when running for a seat in the House.
Czechs are, for the most part, very private people and are very formal and reserved; Do not be surprised if you pass a Czech, and they do not acknowledge your presence if they do not know you. Once you develop a personal relationship with a Czech citizen, they tend to open up to you slightly, but will never appear overly emotional. While they are always polite towards others, Czechs seldom call an acquaintance, outside their extended family or very close friends, by their first names without the permission of the person to do so; they take the invitation as a sign of friendship.
One major part of Czech culture is its fine cuisine. Czech cuisine is marked by a strong emphasis on meat dishes. Pork is quite common, and beef and chicken are also popular, while goose, duck, rabbit and wild game are also served regularly. Fish dishes are rarity, with the exception of trout and carp, which is most usually served during the Christmas holiday. Roast pork with dumplings and cabbage is considered the most popular Czech main dish; while Knedliky or bread dumplings are one of the mainstays of Czech cuisine as a side dish. For desert, fruit dumplings are almost always the food of choice. As far as drinks are concerned, a Czech meal is often accompanied by the national beverage, which is of course beer, specifically a pilsner. Czech beer has been made since the early twelfth century, including the original pilsner type which has found its way into America in the form of Budweiser; all food dishes in the Czech Republic are made to be drank with a glass of beer.
The citizens of the Czech and Slovak states shared a joint state between 1918 and 1939, and again between 1945 and 1993. Joint statehood was in part an experiment in coping with the problem, already very obvious, of being a small state in Central Europe, since the conjoining of two smaller nations into a somewhat larger one was an exercise in self- defense against predatory neighbors. This certainly was not a sufficient deterrent to Nazi or Soviet expansion. Ultimately, Czechs and Slovaks would seek their security in a broader European framework after the collapse of the communist regime in the peaceful “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 (Innes, 2001) .But by that time, the original rationale for a common state had eroded so badly that two new Czech and Slovak Republics sought their security separately after the final decision to divide the state in 1992. This oddly peaceful disintegration of a functioning country has been tagged the Velvet Divorce by those who want to contrast it with the more violent and tragic events in Yugoslavia.
In percentage, the people of the Czech lands remained nominally more Catholic than the Slovaks, who possessed a sizable Protestant minority, but it was the Slovaks for whom religion was most clearly an integral part of national identity. Tension over religion was a distancing factor between Czechs and Slovaks even before the joint state; Slovak nationalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worried that making common cause with the Czechs would secularize the next Slovak generation, whereas a number of Czech national leaders regarded their Slovak counterparts as benighted and “priest-ridden.” ((Innes, 2001)
Nevertheless, the difference in outlook was very pronounced. The religiously based Slovak Populist Party tried to defend Catholic values as part of the national birthright of Slovaks, clashing with Czechs over religious education and relations with the Vatican as well as over broader social values. Many Czechs in turn regarded the Slovak orientation with impatience and even condescension, earning a reputation for insensitivity to the religious differences that many scholars have noted. The higher levels of Slovak religious identification, particularly with Catholicism, remained very evident even through general erosion of religious belief in the communist period, despite the efforts of the party and state to restrain it. Difference in religious outlook was embedded in the difference in national identity and raised a powerful barrier to communication between Czechs and Slovaks.
Czechoslovakia was more ethnically diverse than any East European state except Yugoslavia. Time and historical experience have streamlined the former complexity. The Czech lands were only about two-thirds Czech in 1938, and Slovakia only two thirds Slovak. By 1989, the year the communist regime collapsed, Czechs made up 94 percent of the Czech Republic’s population, and Slovaks constituted 87 percent of Slovakia’s. (Leff, 1998) World War II was a watershed in this evolution. First, the state as a whole, lost three quarters of its Jewish population to the Holocaust. Jews had accounted for only about 2 percent of the interwar population, but the Jewish community had played a disproportionately important historical role in culture and the economy. Nazi rule was also indirectly responsible for the other major war-induced population movement: The postwar Czechoslovak government undertook to deport all but a few hundred thousand of its 3 million German citizens in retaliation for their alleged complicity in Hitler’s designs. Slovakia, less successful in attempts to deport its Hungarian minority, remained substantially more heterogeneous. In 1989, there were nearly 600,000 Hungarian citizens in the Slovak Republic, 11 percent of the population. Hungarian settlements are concentrated on Slovakia’s southern border with Hungary itself.
The population balance between Czechs and Slovaks also shifted over time. In 1918, Slovakia made up about a quarter of the new state’s population. Seventy years later, the Slovak Republic had grown to one-third of the Czechoslovak population; the higher Slovak birthrate was attributed even by communist-era scholars to the impact of Slovak Catholicism. A substantial size differential remained between the two nations, however, and reinforced the developmental gap that put Slovakia in a politically and numerically subordinate position as well as an economically weaker one.
However, a demographic statistic that is nearly as important as ethnic diversity is the country’s relatively modest population size. With a population of 15 million, the state of Czechoslovakia was smaller than any East European country except Hungary and Albania. After the country’s division into two states in 1993, the Czech Republic registered only 10 million citizens (about the size of Hungary), and Slovakia’s numbers fell well below Hungary’s to rank it next-to last place in Eastern Europe with a population of 5 million. For Americans accustomed to national size and strength the implications of living in a country less than one-twentieth the size of the United States may be difficult to imagine. Small countries cannot sustain economic growth through reliance on their own domestic markets alone, which are too limited in size to support efficient production and to permit taking advantage of economies of scale. They must become trading states. Small countries are also unlikely to be able to defend themselves. Neutral Switzerland is a rare exception to the painful and often futile quest of the small state to gain security through negotiation with external powers. This quest often fails, as it did so frequently for Czechoslovakia.
Maps defining the changing boundaries of the Czech lands and Slovakia are dispersed at appropriate points throughout the book; they are a visual record of the concrete shifts in the Central European balance of power and Czechoslovakia’s place in it. (Bren, 1993) The maps underline Czech proximity to the West. Prague is considerably further west than Vienna, for example, and communist Czechoslovakia bordered both East and West Germany. The post-communist Czech Republic borders only two former communist countries, Slovakia and Poland. Slovakia, in contrast, is almost completely surrounded by former communist countries, the exception being Austria. The differing Czech and Slovak geographical distances from the West are, as we will see, also reflected in differing socioeconomic distances from the West.
Dividing an empire into subunits is no assurance that new borders will follow the borders of economic activity. Suppliers were separated from their customers, migrant laborers from their hirers. Transportation systems linked cities in different countries, but not necessarily to neighboring cities within the new borders. In the beginning, for example, there was no northern railroad line linking the Czech lands with Slovakia until Polish Silesian territory was added to the settlement. The old rail network had run north south, from the Czech lands to the Austrian center and from Slovakia to the Hungarian. Prague and Bratislava had closer ties to Vienna and Budapest than to each other. Trade in the region of the former imperial market was considerably hampered by the fact that the old Austria-Hungary was now seven different successor states, each with its own economic regulations and tariff barriers.
Moreover, the relative economic prosperity of the interwar state was still further strained by the stresses of both politics and national divisions. The complicated, delicately balanced political system did not adapt creatively to the depression crisis of the 1930s, for example, with the result that the depression lingered longer there than in some other countries.
Issues Prior and Subsequent to Dissolution
The most serious political tensions in the military prior to 1993 probably revolved around the Czech-Slovak conflict. Slovaks were dissatisfied with their under representation in the Ministry of Defense (Slovak presence in the ĈLA officer corps itself was proportional to population size), the assignment of Slovak conscripts to service in the Czech Republic, and the speed with which defenses were being built up in Slovakia. The tensions in the military, in fact, were a microcosm of the general national tensions in Czechoslovakia (Kopecký, 2001).
Decision makers in Prague were in turn appalled in July 1991 by Slovak proposals to set up its own home defense force. Although the direct inspiration probably came from observation of the territorial defense forces then emerging in Yugoslavia (an unfortunate model to emulate), Slovaks described this idea as comparable to the U.S. state-based National Guard units. To Czechs, however, the Home Defense proposal seemed a challenge to the federal government’s responsibility for military security. It also seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of the politicized paramilitary forces (Hitler’s storm troopers were only the most internationally known example of the phenomenon) that had characterized the street politics of East Central Europe–and Slovakia–before World War II. The wartime Slovak state had institutionalized such a force as a Home Guard. After heated polemics, the Slovak National Council narrowly defeated the bill. The Home Defense controversy was only part of a larger pattern of tension over the relationship between civic patriotism and national identity in the military. (Krejčí, 1996)
The dissolution of the state resolved that tension but in other respects represented an additional challenge to the coherence of the military establishment. The division of personnel went relatively smoothly; career officers were given the option of which successor army they wished to join, and the draftees served out their time wherever they had been assigned. Subsequent recruits, of course, now serve according to citizenship. The main military equipment redistribution was accomplished in a mere six weeks during November and December 1992, with some Slovak military supplies remaining temporarily in the Czech Republic pending the construction of Slovak storage facilities. (Musil, 1995) However, the necessary restructuring of two separate forces was estimated to take an additional three years. The Czech and Slovak armies have adapted to the new order slowly, but they have not represented a serious threat to civilian control. The substantial erosion of military morale and cohesion, which would be potentially catastrophic in the event of the need to defend against invasion, is less disconcerting in light of the current absence of such a threat. The post-independence militaries, therefore, had breathing space in which to regroup, and defense policymakers could concentrate on the peacetime tasks of rebuilding the armies along lines of command and control favored by the West. The biggest security problem lay elsewhere, as we have seen, in the mismatch between new conditions and old alliances in Europe.
Conclusion
What external dangers do Slovakia and the Czech Republic face? In the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, the official view was that the state had no international enemies, no neighbors whose ambitions might culminate in war. Instead, the perceived security threats have taken a broader form. Czechoslovakia, while highly nervous in the face of the dislocations of the Soviet collapse, was not concerned with any short-term Soviet effort to reconquer its lost East European empire. After the breakup of the USSR, Russian military power seems even farther away, with Ukraine intervening geographically. The current post-Soviet threat is nonetheless real. Russia still possesses economic leverage as well, since no modern state considers the interruption of the flow of its energy supplies as anything but a security threat. Russia’s potential market is also economically important, as is the fact that Russia still owed the Czech Republic and Slovakia some $5 billion in past debts at the time of the Czech-Slovak divorce.
Perhaps the most direct security threat that Russia can pose to the Czech and Slovak states in the 1990s is its capacity to block security arrangements it finds unacceptable. After failing to convince the Czechoslovak government to sign a bilateral treaty limiting Czechoslovakia’s accession to hostile alliances, the Russian government subsequently intervened directly with NATO to discourage East European membership, as we have seen. Thus, even after Soviet troops have withdrawn, and direct military intervention has become a very distant possibility, Russia continues to represent a perceived threat to regional sovereignty of countries seeking to find a voice in their own security arrangements.
References
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- Cohen, Shari J., Politics Without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999.
- Innes, Abby, Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.
- Kopecký, Petr, Parliaments in the Czech and Slovak Republics: Party Competititon and Parliamentary Institutionalization. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
- Krejčí, Jaroslav, and Machonin, Pavel, Czechoslovakia 1918-92: A Laboratory for Social Change. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996.
- Leff, C. Skalnik The Czech and Slovak Republics — Nation Versus State ( Oxford: Westview Press, 1998).
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- Wolchik, S. L. “The Politics of Ethnicity in Post-communist Czechoslovakia”, East European Politics and Societies (1996), pp. 153-88.