Not available to order

Publication date:

28 June 2000

Length of book:

368 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781461600343

This unique volume brings together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars as well as Czech and Slovak decisionmakers who were personally involved in the events leading up to the separation of Czechoslovakia. Asking whether the dissolution was inevitable, the contributors bring a range of different approaches and perspectives to bear on the twin problems of democratic transitions in multinational societies and ethnic separatism and its origins. The blend of analysis and insider experiences will make this book invaluable for all concerned with nationalism and ethnicity, democratization, and transitions in Eastern Europe.
Amidst an avalanche of books on the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, this is the first comprehensive study of the peaceful divorce of Czechoslovakia. It provides a rare combination of perspectives from both sides of the divide and puts them in a broader comparative framework. Neither a lament on how Czechoslovakia could have been 'saved' nor, making virtue out of necessity, the discovery of a 'model' for future candidates for 'separation with a human face' in Canada or Belgium, this work provides a clear, informed, and thoughtful assessment of the dissolution of a European state.