The Czechs in a Nutshell

In 1946, in the first elections after the war, a staggering 36 percent of Czech voters supported the Communist Party, and thus enabled them to establish a government. In Slovakia, however, the agrarian Democratic Party won in a landslide with 62 percent support. In other words, while the Czechs largely paved the way to the communist dictatorship themselves, the Slovaks got it stuffed down their throats.

Peculiarly enough, by the time of the political thaw of the late 1960s, the roles had changed completely. Now, a vast majority of the Czechs enthusiastically supported the Prague Spring’s reforms, while most Slovaks expressed reservation and sometimes even condemnation. The fact that the only Prague Spring reform that survived the invasion was the federalization of Czechoslovakia — the country was formally transformed into two republics — didn’t make the Slovaks particularly popular with the disillusioned Czechs. “While we have to put up with the Soviet occupation troops, they got their federative republic, which we subsidize with billions of korunas every year!” the Czechs groaned.

Given this background, it’s not too mysterious that Czechoslovakia finally fell apart once the Velvet Revolution put an end to the communists’ grip on power.

Sure, the Czechs had no intentions of breaking up the federation. They only took it for granted that Czechoslovakia consisted of two equal nations, and they were a bit more equal than the Slovaks. And yes, a majority of Slovaks wanted to keep the benefits (not least the economic ones) that the federation offered, but at the same time dreamt of international recognition of Slovakia’s sovereignty. Basically, the Slovak stance in the early 1990s was strongly reminiscent of Winnie the Pooh’s famous slogan: Yes please, I’ll have both milk and honey!

Another obstacle was the two nations’ diverging perceptions of how the communists’ command economy should be transformed into a market economy.

The Czechs declared that they wanted to move quickly and implement immediate reforms to regain what was lost during the communist stagnation. The Slovaks, on their side, knew perfectly well that a substantial part of their economy was based on heavy industry and military production, both of which were hard to reform overnight. A slow pace for reforms, they argued, was necessary to avoid social distress. What’s more, Slovakia’s Catholic Church, traditionally an important opinion maker, skilfully used people’s distrust of the market economy by warning against the godless Czechs’ addiction to consumerism.

If the Slovaks and Czechs had lived in a marriage, a therapist would have probably concluded: “The marital partners have never managed to establish a common identity. They have been living side by side for twenty years, and now their personal interests have become stronger than their will to keep the marriage together. Divorce is the most sensible solution.” And that’s how it ended. The Czechs and Slovaks conducted a divorce that was almost as smooth and quick as the Velvet Revolution four years earlier. Quite an achievement compared to the terrible slaughter that was going on in Yugoslavia.

So how has the separation affected the relations between the Czechs and Slovaks? As one might expect, lots of Czechs were maliciously pleased when the lugubrious Mečiar government in the middle of the 1990s led “separatist Slovakia” into international isolation and thousands of liberal-minded Slovaks into Czech exile. But the incredible work later governments in Bratislava have done to change the course has evoked great respect among most Czechs, and there is no more paternalistic talk about spoiled little brothers.

The same attitude also seems to apply for the Slovaks. Gone are the days when they could blame the “damned bureaucrats in Prague” for everything that went wrong. Now, the Slovaks can only rely on themselves, so in one sense, it seems that the separation has made relations between the Slovaks and Czechs better than they were before.

And, of course, not all ties from the Czechoslovak days have been broken. Some 300,000 of the Czech Republic’s citizens still regard themselves as Slovaks. What’s more, Slovaks make up the largest group of foreigners in the country (officially 61,000), and the Czechs are the largest minority in Slovakia — excepting the indigenous Hungarians living alongside the Danube.

Sokol

You can find the building in practically every town and city in the Czech Republic. Centrally located and often with rich architecture, the Sokol (Falcon) gymnasiums have been a cornerstone of Czech cultural life for almost 150 years. True, their importance has somewhat faded with the years, but in the collective consciousness of what it means to be Czech (see: Beer; Cimrman, Jára; Golden Hands; Ice Hockey; National Identity),Sokol is still an institution to be reckoned with.