The dissolution of Czechoslovakia, which took effect on 31 December 1992, was the self-determined partition of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic into the independent countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. These mirrored the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic, which had been created in 1969 as the constituent states of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic until the end of 1989.
It is sometimes known as the Velvet Divorce, a reference to the bloodless Velvet Revolution of 1989, which had led to the end of the rule of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The dissolution of Czechoslovakia is closely linked to the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of other Eastern Bloc countries such as the Dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Breakup of Yugoslavia. Unlike Yugoslavia, which was also created in 1918 and disappeared in 1992, Czechoslovakia did not experience violent clashes due to nationalism, which in the case of Yugoslavia led to the Yugoslav Wars. Its dissolution was also viewed as unpopular especially at the time, with criticism as to why no referendum was held.
Though peaceful, a similar earlier attempt that dissolved Czechoslovakia took place in 1939 when Nazi Germany partitioned the country into two client states, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and First Slovak Republic. The easternmost region of Carpathia, historically called Transcarpathia, Transcarpathian Ruthenia, or Subcarpathian Ruthenia, became Carpatho-Ukraine, before being annexed into Hungary, and later the Soviet Union in 1946, where it exists today as part of Ukraine as Zakarpattia Oblast.
Czechoslovakia was created with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I. In 1918, at a meeting in the American city of Pittsburgh, the future Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and other Czech and Slovak representatives signed the Pittsburgh Agreement, which promised a common state consisting of two equal nations: Slovaks and Czechs. However, the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920 specified a single "Czechoslovak nation".
In subsequent years, there were political tensions in the new country between Czechoslovakists and those seeking greater autonomy for the Slovaks in particular.
In March 1939, with pressure from Adolf Hitler, the First Slovak Republic was created as a satellite state of Germany with limited sovereignty. The alignment with the Soviet Union after World War II oversaw the reunification into the Third Czechoslovak Republic.
In 1968, the Constitutional Law of Federation reinstated an official federal structure of the 1917 type, but during the Normalization Period in the 1970s, Gustáv Husák, despite being a Slovak himself, returned most control to Prague. That approach encouraged a regrowth of Slovak separatism after the fall of communism.
By 1991, the Czech Republic's GDP per capita was some 20% higher than Slovakia's. Transfer payments from the Czech budget to Slovakia, which had been the rule in the past, were stopped in January 1991.
Many Czechs and Slovaks desired the continued existence of a federal Czechoslovakia. However, the politicians of leading Slovak parties in Parliament, notably the Slovak National Party, would stand to benefit politically if the country were split in two, and advocated a looser form of complete independence and sovereignty. For a few years, political parties re-emerged, but Czech parties had little or no presence in Slovakia and vice versa. To have a functioning state, the government demanded continued control from Prague, but Slovaks continued to ask for decentralisation.
In 1992, the Czech Republic elected Václav Klaus and others, who demanded either a tighter federation ("viable federation") or two independent states. Vladimír Mečiar and other leading Slovak politicians wanted a kind of confederation. Both sides opened frequent and intense negotiations in June. On 17 July, the Slovak parliament adopted the declaration of independence of the Slovak nation. Six days later, Klaus and Mečiar agreed to partition Czechoslovakia into two separate states at a meeting in Bratislava. Czechoslovak President Václav Havel resigned, rather than oversee the partition, which he had opposed.
In a September 1992 opinion poll, only 37% of Slovaks and 36% of Czechs favoured dissolution.
The goal of negotiations switched to achieving a peaceful division. Peaceful division was prioritized as the process ran in parallel with the violent breakup of Yugoslavia (another formerly socialist, Slavic federal state created in 1918 after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary).
On 13 November 1992, the Federal Assembly passed Constitution Act 541, which settled the division of property between the Czech lands and Slovakia. With Constitution Act 542, passed on 25 November, they agreed to the secession of Czechoslovakia into two entities as of 31 December 1992.
The partition occurred without violence and so was thus said to be "velvet", much like the "Velvet Revolution", which had preceded it and had been accomplished by massive peaceful demonstrations and actions. In contrast, other post-communist breakups (such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia) involved violent conflict. Czechoslovakia is the only former Eastern Bloc state that had an entirely peaceful breakup. At the beginning of 1993, as Slovakia's economy struggled, Slovaks said the dissolution was a "sandpaper divorce".
A number of reasons have been given for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, with the main debates focusing on whether dissolution was inevitable or whether dissolution occurred in conjunction with or even in contrast to the events that occurred between the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the end of the joined state in 1992.
Those who argue from the inevitability stance tend to point to the differences between the two nations, which date back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to other issues. There are differences between the Czechs and Slovaks, such as problems with the shared state during communism, the success of the state in the Czech lands, its failure in the Slovak lands that still resulted in the adoption of communism since the Czechs were more influential in the running of the state than Slovaks, and the 1968 constitution with its minority veto.
Those who argue that events between 1989 and 1992 led to the dissolution point to international factors such as the breakaway of the Soviet satellite nations, the lack of unified media between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and most importantly the actions of the political leaders of both nations like the disagreements between Prime Ministers Klaus and Mečiar.
Since the coat of arms of Czechoslovakia was a composition of those of the historic geographic areas forming the country, each republic simply kept its own symbol: the Czechs the lion and the Slovaks the double cross. The same principle was applied to the two-part bilingual Czechoslovak national anthem that comprised two separate pieces of music, the Czech stanza "Kde domov můj" and the Slovak stanza "Nad Tatrou sa blýska". Disputes occurred only with respect to the Czechoslovak flag. During the 1992 negotiations on the details of dissolution of Czechoslovakia, as demanded by Vladimír Mečiar and Václav Klaus, a clause forbidding the use of the state symbols of Czechoslovakia by its successor states was inserted into the constitutional law on the dissolution of Czechoslovakia.