Czecho/Slovakia: Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fissure, Negotiated Breakup

As the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1992, Czechoslovakia, the only genuine democracy in post-World War I Central-Eastern Europe, broke up into two independent successor states. This book explores the failed search for a postcommunist constitution and it records in a lively style a singular instance of the peaceful settlement of an ethnic dispute.

For more than three years after the implosion of the Communist regime in 1989, the Czechs and Slovaks negotiated the terms of a new relat...