No one strove for that harder than federal President Vaclav Havel, a dissident playwright in the communist era who was hailed after the revolution as a sort of philosopher-king, transforming Prague into a capital of new ideas and new polities. His dream of quickly incorporating Czechoslovakia into the democratic European mainstream was thwarted by the resentment of the Slovaks, who regard themselves as a downtrodden minority. Now Havel’s leadership appears to be doomed. He is up for re-election by the federal Parliament next month, but he has said that he cannot preside over the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. “I will not swear on the Constitution of a country that evidently will not exist in half a year,” he said recently. “I will not be a caretaker clerk.”
In truth the country never was a natural fit. Despite close linguistic ties, the Czechs and Slovaks have vastly different cultural and historical backgrounds. The predominantly rural and Roman Catholic Slovaks were ruled by Hungary for centuries, while the Czechs, more urban and secular, lived under Austrian rule. During the communist era the authorities tried to boost Slovak living standards by building heavy industry, such as arms factories, in the less-developed region. But those are precisely the enterprises that are having the most trouble adjusting to the new economic environment. Unemployment in Slovakia is at 12 percent, more than triple the Czech rate.
The catalyst for the breakup was an election earlier this month that produced diametrically opposed results. While Czech voters supported Klaus and the pro-unity position of his right-wing Civic Democratic Party, Slovaks endorsed Meciar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which promoted the idea of a stripped-down monetary and defense union between two independent states. Their differences didn’t stop there. Klaus supported Havel, a fellow Czech, for re-election while Meciar bitterly opposed him. Klaus advocates strict free-market policies; Meciar, a former communist, wants to spare Slovakia the worst pains of economic shock therapy.
Czechoslovakia’s split is among the gentlest expressions of nationalism in a region where other countries–notably Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union-have been torn apart by independence movements and ethnic strife. The 10.5 million Czechs may actually benefit from the breakup, once they no longer have to support the weak Slovak economy. But Slovakia’s emergence as an independent nation of more than 5 million people will not be easy. If Meciar makes good on his promises to increase government subsidies to ailing industries and to expand the budget deficit, international aid and foreign investors may be scared off. The newly independent country also will have to deal with a nationalist problem; the leaders of 600,000 ethnic Hungarians who live in Slovakia already want autonomy. If the divorce goes through, the Czechs may rejoin mainstream Europe while the Slovaks slip into a second tier of troubled new nations that have little hope of keeping pace.
