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The Carefully Organized Separation of Czechoslovakia as an Example How to Peacefully Solve a Nation State Problem

English Pages, 27. 2. 2014

Ladies and Gentleman,

Many thanks for giving me a chance to address this distinguished audience on such an interesting topic. I want to declare at the very beginning that I don´t pretend to be an expert on federalism or regionalism and that I don´t have any strong views about the rationality and legitimacy of creating or breaking up the existing states, about the secession of regions, provinces or nations, about the separation of countries or other similar topics. I have “only” the unforgettable experience with dividing one country into two. Plus I have a strong compass in economic theory.

I am a true believer in the power of the economic way of thinking and – together with the Nobel Prize laureate George Stigler – in the almost imperialistic position of economics among social sciences. My economic background gives me some helpful arguments about the importance of sufficiently homogenous entities as independent economic (or monetary) units, about centralization and decentralization of economic decision-making, about the effects of size, about the economy of scale, etc., but I know that these arguments are in reality not decisive. Only supportive.

As is well known, I have a very unique personal experience with managing the – both for us and for the rest of the world unexpected – separation of Czechoslovakia into two parts, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which happened more than twenty years ago. I should stress that this is – for us, for the people in my country – already a part of history, not a part of the present day. It has practically no relevance for any one of the two newly established countries now.

The organizers of this conference could not have found a better place for it. Everyone who knows at least partly history of this place and the shifting of this town and region from one state to another in the past centuries, who knows the original name of Eisenstadt as a Hungarian Kismarton, who knows the name and the historic role of the original owner of this palace, must appreciate the irony or perhaps the sophisticated intention of the choice of this location. He or she must raise a question or a warning about the possibility and meaningfulness of attempts to formulate general theories about how states are created and/or liquidated.

I am not a theoretician of secessionism or separationism, I am neither an advocate nor opponent of such processes. I am sorry to say, however, that I am sometimes considered to be one. In the last twenty years, various political leaders of Catalonia, Scotland, Flanders and Quebec approached me repeatedly asking for advice. I usually disappointed them. I always told them that I did not plan, prepare, propose or propagate the separation of my own homeland. Due to the fact that my wife is a Slovak, that we spent most of our common holidays in the communist era with her family in Slovakia, I was more informed about Slovakia than an ordinary Czech and I have never had any anti-Slovak prejudices. I felt quite happy living in Czechoslovakia and the idea of splitting the country had never come to my mind – till the beginning of the 1990s. The specific situation which developed after the fall of communism and my high political position in the country at that moment forced me to realize the inevitable split.

The split was indeed inevitable, but we – on both sides – understood very rapidly one important thing. We felt obliged not to let chaos, anarchy, dangerous spontaneous processes with their unexpected and unknown dynamics, the growing hostility among initially friendly people develop.

I know that one of the Friday afternoon sessions of this conference is called “Is there a 3^rd Way?” I would like to be very explicit and very unambiguous in this respect. We – it means responsible politicians on both sides – rejected such an idea resolutely and flatly. We did not have to contemplate it for a long time. People like me did not and do not believe in the concept of third ways generally and we laughed at the suggestions of some of our compatriots to create a brave new world of “new models of sovereignty”, which is the subtitle of another of this Friday´s sessions. There are no new models of sovereignty; sovereignty either is or it is not. (The same is true about the so called new models of sovereignty propagated by means of the current Orwellian eurospeak in Europe now. The individual EU member states already lost their sovereignty. All the talk about new models of sovereignty is a wishful thinking by some people, conscious and intentional lie by the others.)

The Slovaks wanted to be alone. They wanted to have a sovereign state, not to be just part of Czechoslovakia, and the Czechs accepted that they did not have the right to block such an ambition. This was absolutely crucial. We both understood that the split had to be done quickly, friendly and generously, that there had to be simple macro-rules for dividing all kinds of common assets and liabilities, and that we had to do it ourselves, without letting foreigners to quasi-help us, which means to intervene. The developments in Yugoslavia in the 1990s (and I am similarly afraid of the developments in Ukraine now) confirmed that we made a very shrewd decision. The split of Yugoslavia and especially its form was in my understanding provoked from abroad more than from the inside. The international community failed at this moment in a tragic, irresponsible way. The Czechs and Slovaks should be happy that we avoided such a development. I dare say that they probably are.

It should be stressed that what we carried out in Czechoslovakia two decades ago was a voluntary and organized separation. Both adjectives were important. Only our political adversaries were – for political reasons – against it. Neither me, nor the leading Slovak politician Vladimir Mečiar were separatists. We had, of course, true separatists around us in both our countries, more in Slovakia than in the Czech Republic, but they did not play a significant role. Their names are irrelevant now, the evolving historical processes were much stronger than the voices of one or another individual.

The consequences of our peaceful solution, of our friendly divorce, have been positive for both countries. It led to the continuation of a maximum of cooperation afterwards, to the prolongation of the existence of the customs union and the free-trade zone. In contradiction to our plans and intentions, we were not able to keep the monetary union – it outlived the liquidation of the political and fiscal union only by six or seven weeks. Our experience, however, suggests that it is administratively and even economically relatively easy to dismantle a monetary union. I am sorry the EU doesn´t want to hear it. They should pay attention to the title of a recent article in a Canadian monthly: “Saving the Euro by Opening the Exit Door.” But going into it would be a topic for another conference. I am absolutely sure that the secession of some countries from the European monetary union would be a victory for them, as well as for the rest of us.

With the benefit of hindsight, I am more and more convinced that the split of Czechoslovakia was a right decision and a success. I have not yet discovered any details (not to speak about substantial things) which could have been done conceptually better. Not everything was perfect but the split of a country is not a chess game or an exercise in applied economics or any other social science but I do believe that our basic strategy and its general framework were correct. The history has proved it.

What I understood much more with the passage of time was the fact of the inherent instability and frailty of the old Czechoslovakia which I didn´t feel sufficiently in the past. The common state more or less functioned in the first 20 years after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the Czechs and Slovaks felt a genuine joy of finally being free and sovereign after three centuries of being deprived of it in the context of the Habsburg monarchy. The Czechoslovak republic collapsed under the attack of Hitler and we, the Czechs, underestimated the importance of the fact how rapidly and spontaneously the Slovaks used this special moment to declare their own Slovak State. I must also admit that I always spoke about being born in Czechoslovakia which is actually not true. In fact, I was born in Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren.

For four decades, communism succeeded in prohibiting everything, including the thinking about national sovereignty and authentic national identity. Such thinking requires some elementary degree of freedom which we did not possess. I always assumed in that era that I lived in a unitary state and was surprised in the late 1960s, in the era of the so called Prague Spring, that Slovaks asked for a federal solution. At that moment our main preoccupation in Prague was political democracy and fundamental economic reform. Nevertheless, the Slovak ambitions were quite visible and clear and we once again underestimated them.

The same story was repeated 20 years later. After the fall of communism, the Czechs were satisfied with the task to accomplish a fundamental systemic change, the Slovaks wanted more – they wanted their independence. We were surprised again, but looking at it with a proper historical perspective tells me that the split of Czechoslovakia was inevitable and that blocking it would have been wrong. Czechoslovakia was a heterogeneous entity, its split made both the successor states more homogenous which is always an advantage. It helped to create one “demos” in both countries which is a precondition for efficient manageability of the country, as well as for the functioning of its democratic arrangements.

It brings me to the EU. I don´t believe in the possibility of creating one authentic entity out of 28 (or finally perhaps 35 or 40) European countries and I reject the dreams about the possibility to organize democracy at a continental level – regardless the best imaginable institutional arrangements. I would be very much in favour of an entity called something like The Organization of European States which is an idea advocated in my recent book “European Integration without Illusions”,[1] published in the last two years in eight European languages. Last week I presented its Danish version in Denmark.

The EU context has substantially changed the debate about secession and separation. It has unfortunately changed the ruling paradigm. The old model of thinking was based – at least since the Peace of Westphalia – on states and their interactions, both friendly and unfriendly ones. It created the irreplaceable basis for parliamentary democracy and civil rights.

The new, EU model is based on the preference of the continental unification, on the suppression of nation states and on the elevated importance of regions. It will bring the end of parliamentary democracy, the beginning of global (and eventually subglobal, e. g. continental) governance, and the victory of human rights over civil rights. That would be, however, a different debate.

What I presented here is the outline or summary of my position. One of the tomorrow´s afternoon sessions will deal with the issues of secession from the “Central Perspective”, meaning the perspectives of UK, Belgium and Spain. I am afraid that the real “Central Perspective” in Europe is the EU perspective now. I don´t like it but this is the contemporary state of affairs, the current status quo. We have to make another Velvet Revolution to change it.

Thank you for your attention.

[1] „Evropská integrace bez iluzí“, Euromedia, Prague, 2011. There are also English, German, Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Danish, Russian and Polish editions.

Václav Klaus, Opening lecture at the conference „Qualified Autonomy and Federalism versus Secession in the EU and its Member States“, Esterházy palace, Eisenstadt, Austria, February 26, 2014.