the Slovak nation’.[334]
Zantovsky’s assertion was not altogether mistaken, but in context it would prove more than a little self- fulfilling. Like other former Czech dissidents, Havel and his colleagues were not always inclined to think well of Slovaks. They rather looked upon them as parochial chauvinists: at best naively chasing the mirage of sovereignty, at worst nostalgic for the wartime puppet state. Ironically, Klaus did not share such liberal prejudices, nor did he care one way or the other about Slovakia’s past. Like Meciar, he was a realist. The two men, now the most powerful politicians in their respective regions, spent the next few weeks ostensibly negotiating the terms of a state treaty for a federal Czechoslovakia.
Whether they ever could have achieved agreement is unlikely: Meciar demanded currency-issuing and borrowing rights for a virtually sovereign Slovak republic; a moratorium on privatization; the restoration of Communist-era subsidies; and a raft of other measures - all of which were anathema to Klaus, doggedly pursuing his plan for a forced march to the unrestricted market. Indeed, their meetings in the course of June and July 1992 were not really negotiations at all: Klaus purported to be surprised and upset by Meciar’s demands, but these were hardly a secret in view of Meciar’s many speeches on the subject. In practice it was Klaus who was maneuvering the Slovak leader towards a break, rather than the other way around.
In consequence, even though the majority of Slovak deputies in the Slovak National Council and in the Federal Assembly would have been quite content to approve a state treaty affording each half of the country full autonomy and equal status in a federal state, they found themselves instead facing a
On July 17th 1992 the Slovak National Council accordingly voted to adopt a new flag, a new constitution and a new name: the Slovak Republic. A week later Klaus and Meciar, the latter still a trifle dazed by his own ‘success’, agreed to divide their country with effect from January 1st 1993. On that day Czechoslovakia disappeared and its two republics re-emerged as separate states, with Klaus and Meciar as their respective Prime Ministers. Vaclav Havel, whose efforts to bind the country together had been increasingly forlorn—and altogether ignored in the final months—ceased to be President of Czechoslovakia and was reincarnated as President of the foreshortened Czech Republic.[335]
Whether divorce was good for the two partners remained unclear for some time—neither the Czech Republic nor Slovakia flourished in the initial post-Communist decade. Klaus’s ‘shock therapy’ and Meciar’s national-Communism both failed, albeit in different ways. But although Slovaks came to regret their dalliance with Vladimir Meciar, and Klaus’s star waned in Prague, nostalgia for Czechoslovakia was never much in evidence. The Czechoslovak divorce was a manipulated process in which the Czech Right brought about what it claimed not to seek while Slovak Populists achieved rather more than they had intended; not many people were overjoyed at the result, but nor was there lasting regret. As in the break up of the Soviet Union, the power of the state and the political machinery it had spawned were not threatened: merely duplicated.
The division of Czechoslovakia was a product of chance and circumstances. It was also the work of men. With other people in control—with different outcomes at the elections of 1990 and 1992—the story would not have been the same. Contagion played a small part as well: the example of the Soviet Union—and events unfolding in the Balkans—made a schism between the two ‘national republics’ of one small central European state seem less absurd or impermissible than it might otherwise have appeared. Had a federal state treaty been agreed upon by 1992—had Czechoslovakia endured for a few years longer—it is highly unlikely that anyone in Prague or Bratislava would have seen much point in pursuing their quarrels, with the prospect of admission to the European Union absorbing their attention and the bloody massacres in nearby Bosnia concentrating their minds.
XXI. The Reckoning
‘If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans’.
‘It seems as if these feuding peasants could hardly wait for the invasion of their country so they could hunt down and kill one another’.
‘We’ve got no dog in this fight’.
‘The worst thing about Communism is what comes after’.
‘Truth is always concrete.’
The peaceful fragmentation of Czechoslovakia contrasts dramatically with the catastrophe that befell Yugoslavia in the same years. Between 1991 and 1999 hundreds of thousands of Bosnians, Croats, Serbs and Albanians were killed, raped or tortured by their fellow citizens; millions more were forced out of their homes and into exile. Struggling to account for massacres and civil war on a scale not seen since 1945—in a country long regarded by Western radicals as something of a model socialist society—foreign commentators have typically proposed two contrasting explanations.
One view, widely circulated in Western media and taken up in the public statements of European and American statesmen, presents the Balkans as a hopeless case, a cauldron of mysterious squabbles and ancient hatreds. Yugoslavia was ‘doomed’. It consisted, in the words of a much-cited
According to this account, ‘age-old’ conflicts—in what the Marquis de Salaberry had described in 1791 as ‘the unpolished extremities’ of Europe—bubbled over much as they had done in centuries past. Murderous animosities, fuelled by memories of injustice and vengeance, took over a whole nation. In the words of the US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, speaking in September 1992: ‘Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it’.
In a contrasting interpretation, some historians and foreign observers asserted that—on the contrary—the Balkan tragedy was largely the fault of outsiders. Thanks to outside intervention and imperial ambition, the territory of former Yugoslavia had over the course of the past two centuries been occupied, divided and exploited to the advantage of others—Turkey, Britain, France, Russia, Austria, Italy and Germany. If there was bad blood between the peoples of the region it should be traced to imperial manipulation rather than to ethnic hostility. It was the irresponsible interference of foreign powers, so the argument runs, that exacerbated local difficulties: had the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for example, not insisted in 1991 on ‘prematurely’ recognizing the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, the Bosnians might never have followed suit, Belgrade would not have invaded, and a decade of disaster could have been averted.
Whatever one thinks of these two readings of Balkan history, it is striking to note that despite their apparent incompatibility they have one important feature in common. Both diminish or ignore the role of the Yugoslavs themselves, dismissed as victims either of fate or the manipulations and mistakes of others. To be sure, there was
