VELVET DIVORCE INTELLIGENT MIND
AFTER the VELVET DIVORCE OBSERVATIONS OF A DOUBLE INSIDER MARTIN M. ŠIMEČKA
T
ires quietly swish on the motorway, gliding on the smooth surface almost untouched by cars right up to the Czech state border. This is one of the few motorways in Europe that has seen the number of cars using it go down. Once it was known for heavy traffic, but that was a long time ago, before two nations turned their backs on one another. In 1992, in a touching display of cooperation, these two nations erected two concrete buildings for customs and border officials on the border they shared. It was as if a river had been artificially diverted into a newly built canal. The stream of cars that used to flow westwards from Bratislava to Prague has almost dried out, the current now flowing eastwards, into Slovakia’s heartland. Political engineers have succeeded in completing a project about which their colleagues in construction could only dream. When the Czech and Slovak Republics entered the Schengen space in 2008, the customs officials vacated their concrete bunkers, but the two nations did not reunite. These days the Bratislava - Prague motorway, the first one to be built in Czechoslovakia, only comes alive once you’ve crossed to the other side of the Czech border, near Břeclav. Pounded by millions of cars and heavy lorries over
The astonishing similarity between Slovakia and Czech Republic is likely to prompt an outside observer to ask a logical question: what, in that case, was the point of the separation? The answer is simple. The secret of national identity is in the details that escape an outside observer. They are numerous and their causes are varied, ranging from the historical and psychological to random phenomena that may have the appearance of historicity but often stem from quite banal causes. We present a provocative analysis of causes and consequences of the Czechoslovak split.
the years, it is now making our drowsy heads sway fitfully to the rhythm of the minibus as it bumps along on the uneven highway. As one of the ten Slovak friends of Václav Havel travelling to Prague for his funeral, I recalled an interview in which Havel spoke of his resignation from the office of President of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1992 – after he realized that the state that the Czechs and Slovaks shared, to which he had sworn allegiance, could not be saved – describing it as the most difficult decision in his political career. The week that passed between Havel’s death and his funeral was one of those peculiar moments that occur only once in a very long while. They are the moments when nations transform from an amorphous mass of frustrated individuals into communities posing the existential question of their identity. For the
first time since 1989, I witnessed mass gatherings of people showing their desire for a better world and voicing their longing for the “love and truth” embodied by Václav Havel to prevail. His death sent the Czechs out into the streets and for a whole week transformed this nation of pragmatic ironists into a community of romantics mourning their spiritual king. However, the strange thing was that his death had a similar impact in Slovakia, where the government went so far as to declare a day of state mourning. Slovak society found itself in a schizophrenic situation, saying a heartfelt and tearful goodbye to a man it had abandoned twenty years ago, in exchange for the fulfillment of their longing for an independent state. When, on one of his last visits to Bratislava as President of Czechoslovakia, he directed his car to drive past a crowd demanding that the federation be dismantled, his car was nearly over51