Breaking up is not always hard to do: The case of Czechoslovakia

Last month (November 17th, to be precise) was the 20th anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution,” the transition from Communist despotism to democratic rule that was extraordinary for its lack of violence. But January 1st 2010 will the eighteenth anniversary of an even more extraordinary event -- the “velvet divorce” between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992, which took place by a peaceful vote of the Czechoslovakian Legislative Assembly.

Here is a question for whoever reads these posts: How many other peaceful secessions or dissolutions of nation-states have occurred in world history? Offhand, I can think of only a handful – Singapore’s secession from Malaysia in 1965, for instance, or the slow and peaceful dissolution of much of the British Empire. But the latter was peaceful precisely because the constituent parts were not geographically contiguous and had no reason other than British imperial ambitions to remain within a single unit. In particular, the Malaysian Federation was an artificial and short-lived result of British colonial policy, tacked together from the pieces of British Borneo in 1963: Easy come, easy go. By contrast, Czechoslovakia was more than eighty years old when it fell apart, was geographically contiguous, and involved territory with mixed populations speaking different dialects and practicing different religions. How did the divorce proceed with so little acrimony?

I ask, because there are numerous unwieldy states cobbled together by colonial policy of the European powers that might be much more politically successful if broken apart into more manageable and less fractious pieces. (Nigeria, for instance, comes to mind, as does Iraq). But the costs of dissolution are usually too high, because the elites from the component parts cannot agree on how to divide territory and resources. If we could bottle and sell whatever magic potion led to Czechoslovakia’s amicable dissolution, then world would be a much happier place. So has anyone ever figured out whether the Czech-Slovak experience is replicable elsewhere? For information, citations, opinions, etc, I (and one of my students who is writing a paper on the topic) will thank you.