Dissolution of Czechoslovakia
The Dissolution of Czechoslovakia (, ), which took effect on 1 January 1993, was an event that saw the self-determined split of the federal state of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, entities that had arisen before as the "Czech Socialist Republic" and the "Slovak Socialist Republic" in 1969 within the framework of a federal republic.
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.