Dissolution of Czechoslovakia

The dissolution of Czechoslovakia (Rozdělení Československa, Rozdelenie Československa), which took effect on December 31, 1992, was the self-determined split of the federal republic of Czechoslovakia into the independent countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Both 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. History of Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia was created with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I. In 1918, a meeting took place in the American city of Pittsburgh, at which 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. Soon afterward, he and Edvard Beneš violated the agreement by pushing for greater unity and a single nation. Some Slovaks were not in favour of that change, and 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 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.

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