page_title: Dissolution of Czechoslovakia
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Dissolution of Czechoslovakia / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Czechoslovakia in 1969-1990
context_page_description: The Dissolution of Czechoslovakia, which took effect on 1 January 1993, was the self-determined split of the federal republic of Czechoslovakia into the independent countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. These polities mirrored the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic created in 1969 as the constituent states of the Czechoslovakian federal republic.
  It is sometimes known as the Velvet Divorce, a reference to the bloodless Velvet Revolution of 1989 that led to the end of the rule of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
context_section_description: Czechoslovakia was created with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I. In 1918, a meeting took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, where 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 after, the philosophy of Edvard Beneš pushed for greater unity and a single nation.
  Some Slovaks were not in favour of this 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. Occupation by the Soviet Union after World War II oversaw their 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 (although a Slovak himself) returned most of the control to Prague. This approach encouraged a regrowth of separatism after the fall of communism.
caption: Czechoslovakia between 1968 (Constitutional Law of Federation) and 1989 (Velvet Revolution)
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