Slovakia
The Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic went their separate ways after 1 January 1993, an event sometimes called the Velvet Divorce. Slovakia has remained a close partner with the Czech Republic. Both countries co-operate with Hungary and Poland in the Visegrád Group. Slovakia became a member of NATO on 29 March 2004 and of the European Union on 1 May 2004. On 1 January 2009, Slovakia adopted the Euro as its national currency.
Czechoslovakism
Breakup of Czechoslovakia came about though there was no vigorous independence movement on either side; according to opinion polls, only slightly more than one third of both Czechs and Slovaks supported dissolution. However, there was no vigorous movement in defense of the common state either; its key advocate was president Havel, at the time a moral authority rather than a political leader. In general, the dissolution is attributed to Slovak unease about a state union with Czechs, a formula which many of them considered Czech-biased by default; some claim that Slovaks rejected common state as means of advancing Czechoslovakism. Some scholars pointed also to different visions of socio-economic transformation or even suggested that things got out of hand. As there were no serious points of disagreement, e.g. in terms of mutually coveted territory or national minorities, negotiating a divorce was fairly easy. Factors which prompted Czechs and Slovaks to build a common state in 1918 did not exist anymore. There was no real threat of German or Hungarian revisionism in the early 1990s; there was virtually no German minority in Czechia, while in Slovakia the ratio of Slovaks to Hungarians went up from 3:1 in 1918 to 8:1 in 1991.