Can't we all just get along?

by Karl

Back when there was a Czechoslovakia, American students learning geography might naturally assume that there were people called “Czechoslovaks,” just like in Italy there were Italians and in Germany there were Germans. But this was a long name, with weird spelling to boot (“cz” pronounced like “ch,” and “ch” pronounced like “k”—what’s that about?), so “Czechoslovak” was often shortened to “Czech.” This didn’t get rid of the weird spelling issues, but it did save three syllables, so its use was widespread. If there were an Olympic hockey match between the U.S. and Czechoslovakia, the Americans were said to be playing “the Czechs.”

This seemed innocent enough to Americans—after all, people from other countries in the western hemisphere might object to the way we hogged the title “Americans,” but what were we supposed to call ourselves? “U.S. Americans”? Ungainly. “North Americans”? Well, that would still include Canada—and Mexico, too, technically, though they were part of “Latin America,” and so not really in North America, except to some stickler of a geography teacher.

So we were equally comfortable calling ourselves “Americans” and referring to people from Czechoslovakia as “Czechs.”

But if you happened to study the history or geography of the region more closely, at some point you had the surprising discovery that there were actually two different … peoples in Czechoslovakia: Czechs and Slovaks. What’s the difference? It can be summed up with history, religion, economics, and language.

The Czech state in some form can trace its roots back to a dukedom centered on Prague with historically documented princes as early as the 9th century. The princely family came to dominate the other Slavic princes in more or less what is now the Czech Republic, and through astute politics (i.e., providing military help to the Holy Roman Emperor at the right time) got themselves upgraded to Kings of Bohemia. As part of the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdom played a major role in central European history.

The 14th century Emperor Charles IV was also, as King of Bohemia, Charles I. On his father’s side he came from the Luxembourg family, but his mother was from the Přemyslid family that had ruled the Czech lands since before the reign of St. Wenceslas back in the 10th century. Under Charles, Prague was the capital of the empire and the Czech lands were the emperor’s power base. The kingdom took on a different kind of importance in the 15th century, with the Hussite religious reformation and the wars that grew out of it. In the 16th century the Kingdom of Bohemia, along with the Kingdom of Hungary, formed the true basis of the Habsburg Empire. The family itself was important, but their Austrian domain was not a significant European player. Well-chosen dynastic marriages put the House of Habsburg in position to pick up both the Crown of St. Wenceslas (Bohemia) and the Crown of St. Stephen (Hungary) in 1526, and the rest is history.
 

Habsburg Empire, 1526-1740. The northern part is the lands of the Czech crown.  The southwestern part with the solid outline is the Habsburg lands before 1526. The big eastern part is Hungary, but the reason the Habsburgs got it in 1526 was that the previous ruler had just died in a big battle against the Ottomans, so most of Hungary de facto belonged to them, not to the Habsburgs.  Map from here.

After 1620 the political independence of Bohemia was completely subsumed in the wider Habsburg realm, but the Awakeners of the 19th century could build on a tradition of Czech statehood reaching back a millennium.

In contrast, what is now called Slovakia was known for a long time as “Upper Hungary.” Slavs had lived there presumably from the time of the Slav migrations in the 6th century, but there had never been a Slovak state. After the Ottoman conquest of the Hungarian heartland in 1526, Upper Hungary had become the seat of what Hungarian statehood remained.

The map shows the borders of Hungary (within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) up to 1918.  The inner red outline is modern Hungary.  The area to its north is today's Slovakia.  Map here.

The cities of Košice and Nitra were important religious centers, and the city of Poszony—what we now call Bratislava—became the site of the coronation of Hungarian kings, and retained that role even after Budapest was reconquered. The development of a sense of Slovak nationhood came later than for the Czechs, and it had to take place without the centuries-long tradition of statehood that the Czechs could draw on.

Emblem of the Dual Monarchy (1867-1918). The left-hand shield is the "Austrian" lands, with the Bohemian two-tailed lion top-center, and the Silesian and Moravian eagles somewhere in there too, all on the background of the Austrian two-headed eagle (what's up with all the deformed animals?).  The right-hand shield represents that parts of Hungary, with the Slovak cross on the mountains just right of center.

The religious cultures of the two peoples were also quite distinct. The Czech experience includes the Hussite revolution mentioned earlier, which combined with the Lutheran and Calvinist movements of the 16th century to create by the early 17th century a community that was majority Protestant and had a hard-won statute of religious tolerance—imperfect by modern standards, but remarkable in Europe for its time. Then after 1620 there was forced recatholocization with an undercurrent of secret Protestantism, replaced by slowly growing open Protestantism with successive relaxations of religious strictures in the late 18th and mid 19th centuries. This left its mark on Czech nationalism, so that although Catholics—including priests and Jesuits—had played important roles in the preservation, revival, and spread of the Czech language and the idea of a Czech nation, Czech nationalism was nonetheless imprinted with an anti-Catholic, anti-clerical, even somewhat anti-religious flavor. The Czech lands were the least church-going part of Europe at the beginning of the century, and as European religious observance declined, Czechs stayed ahead of the curve and remain the continent’s least churched population today.

Slovakia, in contrast, was and is a staunchly Catholic place. Although it provided refuge to Protestants who had to flee the recatholicization of the Czech lands, and Protestants played a disproportionate role in the formation of Slovak identity and the modern literary Slovak language, the population was overwhelmingly Catholic and religiously observant, and priests were generally held in high esteem.

On the economic front, the industrial revolution came to the Czech lands early in the 19th century with the growing and processing of sugar beets, and the area never looked back. By the end of the century, Bohemia was the industrial heartland of the Habsburg Empire, and while much of that industry was owned and operated by Germans, that tended to be in textiles and glassmaking, while heavy industry was more Czech, along with the financing that supported it. So Czech society had a wealthy bourgeoisie, a modern working class, and a generally high level of literacy.

In industrial terms, Hungary was a backwater of the Habsburg Empire, and Upper Hungary was a backwater of Hungary. Mining had been important in earlier centuries, but had faded. The economy was almost entirely agricultural, and the society was marked by a lower level of education and widespread illiteracy.

Which brings us to the last major issue, that of language. There’s a linguistic school of thought (and one that makes sense to me) that there’s no objective line telling when two people are speaking different languages and when they’re speaking different dialects of the same language. I read somewhere that there’s more difference between speech in rural Georgia and in the Scottish highlands, than between the average speaker of Czech and the average speaker of Slovak. Yet the Georgian and the Scot are considered to be speaking dialects of English, while Czech and Slovak are different languages.

In the early 19th century, literate Slovaks generally wrote in Czech—there was no Slovak literary tradition to draw on, in contrast to the Czech situation. During the middle of the century, however, a group around the writer Ľudovit Štur succeeded in creating a literary form of Slovak based on the dialect of central Slovakia.

"And what have you done for Slovak romanticism?" (Not an actual quote from Ľudovit Štur)

This was important for Slovak literacy and culture, since it allowed Slovaks to write in something that much more closely matched how they spoke. But for the Czech Awakeners trying to restore their culture’s ancient glory, this was an unwelcome development. They saw the Slovaks as brethren, as an offshoot of the Czechs. From a practical point of view, they would have liked to have seen their small group augmented with the addition of the Slovaks, and the creation of a separate literary language made that more difficult.

But written Slovak took hold, against much stiffer odds than Czech had to contend with. The authorities in Vienna sometimes doubted the loyalty of Czechs who promoted the broader use of their language, and there were Bohemian Germans who quite openly claimed that the spread of Czech was the leading edge of a program to break up the Habsburg Empire. But sanity and tolerance generally won the day, and despite some episodes of slipping back, Vienna generally looked on as Czech became more common in newspapers, in books, in theater, in high school education, eventually even at the university level.

The Hungarian approach was much different. Higher education in Slovak was blocked, and professional advancement was only possible in the Magyar (i.e Hungarian) language, and probably with a Magyar name. A Slovak named Štěpan Kováč might rename himself Kovacs Istvan, and thus ease his way in the world. And yet, literary Slovak grew and eventually displaced Czech as the written language of literate Slavs in Upper Hungary.

Despite the disappointment this represented for Czechs, the Czecho-Slovak idea continued to have adherents among both Czechs and Slovaks. But in practical terms it was caught between the two different visions of how to make the Habsburg Empire a fairer place for those who lived within its borders, how to make the empire into some sort of federation of the diverse peoples who had in various ways come under Habsburg rule.

One approach was based on historical kingdoms and provinces, so there would be the lands of the Czech crown, the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria proper, Bosnia, Galicia, etc. This would keep Czechs and Slovaks apart, with Czechs in the lands of the Czech crown, and Slovaks in Hungary.

The other approach was ethno-linguistic, with territories created so as to keep together people from the same ethnic or linguistic groups, as much as possible. In this framework you’d have a province for Czechs, a province for Poles, one for Ukrainians, another for Romanians, one for Hungarians, one for South Slavs, one for Germans. This solution obviously allowed the possibility of putting the Slovaks together with the Czechs, but it also meant that Bohemia and Moravia would lose parts of their border lands, where the population was overwhelmingly German.

"The United States of Great Austria" The upper yellow area is the Czechs (most of Bohemia and Moravia).  The mauve to the south is Germans attached to Austria proper and includes parts of Bohemia and Moravia. The brown in the northwest is the Bohemian Germans, and the purple is the Sudeten Germans and Silesians.  The green area to the east of the Czechs is Slovaks.

Whatever their benefits and complications, both of these proposals were still-born, because Vienna could never find a solution that would satisfy enough of the powerful interest groups in the monarchy, so the status quo won by default. But the First World War created new possibilities, and as the monarchy fell apart at the end of the war, Czechs were able to get control of all of Bohemia and Moravia (not just the parts that were predominantly inhabited by Czechs), and also append to them Upper Hungary, creating Czechoslovakia, something new under the sun. This creation was blessed by the victorious allies, who couldn’t save Austria-Hungary and who had an interest in having a line of viable states to limit German ambition in the east and prevent Bolshevik contamination from seeping out of Russia.

Czechs and Slovaks had come together on the basis both of resistance to Habsburg rule at home, and also in the form of the “foreign resistance,” led by the Prague sociology professor and politician Tomáš G. Masaryk, who had fled Austria-Hungary early in the war. One of the key documents was the Pittsburgh Agreement, drawn up by representatives of Czechs and Slovaks living in the United States, which expressed their desire to live together in a common state.

The Pittsburgh Agreement promised a separate parliament and administration for the Slovak part of the new country, along with Slovak as the language of education and administration, but that’s not how it ended up. Because of Slovakia’s economic condition and the active repression of Slovak education by the Hungarian authorities, the Czechs were concerned—rightly or wrongly—that there wouldn’t be enough qualified Slovaks to run the government. Then there was the little matter of the war with Hungary in 1919.

"A stop of the Czechoslovak home army in Bratislava" (The banner reads, "From the Šumava to the Tatras"; the Šumava is a low mountain range in southwest Bohemia, and the Tatras being an alpine area in northern Slovakia.)

The treaties that ended World War I had taken the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire and cut it down to about one third of its former size. If you were making borders based on ethno-linguistic factors, most of this made sense, since most of the people in lost areas were either Romanians or some variety of Slavs. But there were the Szekelys, Hungarians living in an enclave surrounded by Romanians. If Hungary and Romania were each to have a continuous territory, there would have to be either Romanians living in Hungary, or Hungarians living in Romania. Hungary was on the losing side in the war, so you can guess which way that turned out. In the case of Czechoslovakia, the new country would gain economic viability if Upper Hungary was understood to have a somewhat more southerly border, taking in more of the Danube valley. This also meant taking in half a million Magyars who lived contiguously with what was left of Hungary, but the Allies in Paris were interested in a strong Czechoslovakia, so they approved the expanded borders.

This map shows pieces of pre-1918 Hungary being pulled away to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Austria.

And so it came to war, which Hungary might have opted for in any case: the Czechs and Slovaks meant to have Bratislava as their capital city, but the Hungarians were not reconciled to the loss of their coronation city of Poszony. Although the Czechoslovaks eventually beat back the Hungarian attack (partly with French help), the war went badly for them at first and the penetration of Hungarian troops into Slovakia made Slovak autonomy seem impossible.

There was one more reason for Czechs to favor centralism. If Czecho-Slovakia were a state made of a Czech region and a Slovak region, then the Czech part had relatively unfavorable demographics. The Czechs did have a majority, but Germans were a very large minority. If they were not reconciled to the new state, it would be hard to govern the country without near perfect agreement among the Czechs themselves, which could hardly be expected. But if Czechoslovakia were a unitary state built around a single Czechoslovak people, then things looked better. The eastern part of the country had a small Magyar minority, along with some Germans and a few Poles, but it was predominantly Slovaks (or rather, Czechoslovaks), so the Czechoslovaks in a unitary state had a larger majority than the Czechs alone in the Czech part of the country. So a centralized, unitary state it was.

Czechoslovakia was economically and politically more successful than the other states that appeared in the space between Germany and the Soviet Union. Its industrial heritage built up under the Habsburgs continued to serve it well. And though the German and Hungarian minorities had some legitimate complaints about their civil rights, the country was a functioning democracy with rule of law and far better standing for its minorities than elsewhere in the region. But there was the unresolved Czech-Slovak issue.

Czechs went east to teach in schools, to take up administrative positions, to help the economically backward part of the country to develop. Many of them meant well, and some truly respected the Slovaks, but an element of paternalism was hard to avoid, a sense that “we skilled, educated Czechs are going to help our little brothers, the Slovak branch of the Czechoslovak people.” And the whole group of them was perceived by some Slovaks as carpet-baggers.

On top of that, Slovaks resented the failure to implement autonomy. The Czechs’ skeptical attitude toward religion and the anti-clerical strain in Czech politics was also an irritant to the more devout Slovaks. And as happens in such relationships, the Czechs grew resentful of what they perceived as Slovak ingratitude. “We freed you from Hungarian oppression. We’re educating you, we’re building up your economy. Why are you still harping on autonomy rather than supporting us against the German minority?”

The tension was manageable when things were otherwise going well, but it represented a weak spot for the state in more difficult times. In the second half of the 1930s Hitler took good advantage of discontent among Czechoslovakia’s Germans, supporting their opposition to Prague and playing them up as an oppressed minority. It’s not clear how well Czechoslovakia could have resisted Germany without French and British support even in the best case, but its chances were even smaller as Slovak leaders saw the Czechs’ difficulties as an opportunity to improve their own people’s autonomy. In September 1938 the Munich agreement among Germany, Italy, France and Britain stripped away the borderlands where most of the country’s Germans lived—and where Czechoslovakia had built up fortifications for defense against Germany.

The reduced state tried to make itself viable by providing the Slovaks with the autonomy they’d always wanted and by trying to be accommodating to Hitler. But the border areas were only the first bite for Hitler, who actually wanted the whole of the Czech lands. Without the fortified border, without western support, with a demoralized public, the Second Republic was in no condition to resist Germany, and it was put out of its misery in March, 1939. The Czech lands that hadn’t already been taken away were turned into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia became a nominally independent puppet state of the Reich.

The green areas went to Hungary, the blue to Poland, and the dark area around the Czech lands to Germany.  The light-colored area was the reduced Czechoslovakia that lasted for 6 months; the part with the red dots became the Protectorate, the part without was the Slovak State.  (from http://sdhhurka.cz/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/protektorat_cechy_a_morava.gif)

The post-war settlement restored Czechoslovakia almost to its original borders (the far eastern “tail” of Subcarpathian Ruthenia had been added to Czechoslovakia after World War I because none of the diplomats could figure out where to put it, and after the war there was a certain amount of sense in attaching to Ukraine). The communist period that started in earnest in 1948 changed the Czech-Slovak dynamic. The development project begun during the First Republic came to fruition, with universal education and widespread industrialization. The promotion of Slovak identity was sometimes persecuted as a “bourgeois” deviation from the supranational ideals of communism, sometimes promoted to show that communism was the only system under which the various cultures of the world could flourish to their full potential. As far as Slovak independence, that was simply out of the question, and autonomy was more about form than substance when not even Prague was truly independent of Moscow.

The Prague Spring of 1968 brought widespread Czech admiration for, and adulation of, the new communist leader, Alexander Dubček, who was a Slovak.

Alexander Dubček, image from here.

The aftermath, when “normalization” was imposed through the Warsaw Pact invasion, brought much more negative feelings for Dubček’s successor, Gustav Husák, who was also a Slovak—he was, in fact, one of the people the communists had imprisoned in the 1950s for what they deemed bourgeois Slovak nationalism.

Husák (right) with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev

For another 20 years, there was no visible change in Czech-Slovak relations. The official story was of two closely related Slavic peoples, wrapped up together in the joyous work of building socialism, arm in arm with their brother socialist countries throughout the Soviet bloc. The only lasting official legacy of 1968 was the change to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR), a federal structure uniting two components, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. The change was prepared in the heady days of 1968, but not implemented until 1969 when it was mere window dressing, a little something to make at least the Slovak part of the country a bit less frustrated with the state of affairs.

The revolution of 1989 started with a common euphoria—a majority in both republics was happy to see the end of communist rule, and the joint appearance of Havel and Dubček on the balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square made the tie between 1968 and 1989, it made it clear the Velvet Revolution was not just a Czech event, but a Czech and Slovak event, a Czechoslovak event. But the euphoria of revolution always wears off, and in the wake of 1989, the old Czech-Slovak questions resurfaced.

The country was renamed from ČSSR to ČSFR, the word “federal” replacing the word “socialist.”

The emblem of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic: the Bohemian two-tailed lion quartered with the Slovak cross over a three-peaked mountain

But how much power did each of the constituent republics have, as opposed to the national government? Economics of course came into play. Part of the successful industrialization of Slovakia under communist rule had been through building up the arms industry; many of the former dissidents around Havel wanted to reduce the country’s dependence on selling weaponry, and some Slovaks worried that this would hit them disproportionately. There were deeper differences of political philosophy as well. Václav Klaus was the moving spirit of the Czech government, even when he was the finance minister of the federal Czechoslovak government, and he was an admirer of Thatcher and an advocate of rapid privatization and economic liberalization. On the Slovak side, the leading figure was Vladimír Mečiar, who favored greater continued involvement by the state.

Simple emotion played a role as well. A term that Mečiar used could be roughly translated as “making Slovakia more visible,” a reference to Slovak annoyance at such things as foreigners referring to anything from Czechoslovakia as “Czech,” blithely unaware that there even were such people as Slovaks.

The federal parliament was unsure of what to do with the whole mess, and they had the reasonable thought that a referendum might be a good idea: let the people have their say directly. But the outcome of a referendum is often influenced by the precise phrasing of the question, and this was a question whose wording had to be agreed in two languages, even if they were closely related. During my year in Plzeň a recurring theme in the newspapers was the latest possible variant of “the question.” In the winter, a Czech newspaper had a big headline on its back page:

Proposed referendum question

Slovaks!  Are you nuts?!

A comment from one of my English students in Plzeň may be representative of how Czechs felt about the situation. He wasn’t in favor of splitting up the country—he thought both parts would lose economically—but if the Slovaks were always going to be keeping things uncertain by raising the possibility of independence, it would be better to go ahead and get it over with. And that’s what happened.

The elections of June 1992 confirmed the position of Mečiar in Slovakia and made Klaus the prime minister in the Czech Republic. Mečiar’s push for Slovak independence was strengthened, and Klaus perhaps figured it would be easier to implement his liberal reforms if he didn’t have to cut deals with less-liberal Slovakia. Compared to the wars accompanying the separation of Yugoslavia’s components, the Czech-Slovak split was a model of sanity and earned the nickname the “Velvet Divorce,” mirroring the almost bloodless “Velvet Revolution” the still-unified country had accomplished in 1989. Not that there weren’t hiccups and arguments over symbol and substance. On the substance side, there was federal property to be divided—military equipment and bases, buildings of ministries, and so on. The basic ideas were either allotting based on physical location, or splitting in accordance with the population distribution, which was roughly two-thirds Czech. A Slovak cartoon at the time showed two beggars sitting on the sidewalk with three hats in front of them, upturned and awaiting coins from generous passersby. One of the men says, “And our common property we’ll divide in the ratio of two-to-one.”

As for symbols, in its waning days, the federal parliament passed a law that neither successor state would use the flag or other insignia of the former Czechoslovakia. The parliament of the newly independent Czech Republic took that under advisement and chose as its flag … the flag of the former Czechoslovakia. Perhaps the legal theory was that, since Czechoslovakia no longer existed, laws passed by its parliament had no force. More seriously, it pointed to a difference in feeling between the two peoples of the former country.

Certainly many Slovaks had some identification with Czechoslovakia, but even those who were loyal to the federal country had separate symbols of Slovak identity, most prominently the national emblem, a shield displaying a cross rising above three mountain peaks. This shield was placed on the shoulder of the royal lion of Bohemia to form the basic emblem of the Czechoslovak Republic.

The small state emblem of Czechoslovakia

 (The communists changed the shape of the mountain, replaced the cross with a flame--can't have Christian symbols, after all--and replaced the lion’s crown with a red star--can't have monarchist symbols either.)

The new, "improved" state emblem from 1960

It had also figured in the symbolism of the nominally independent Slovakia that Hitler created, which tarnished it somewhat, but it was still clearly Slovak.

In contrast, what symbols did the Czechs have? There was the lion of Bohemia (without the Slovak shield), and the eagle of Moravia, and the slightly different eagle of Silesia, but these were more in the nature of administrative signifiers rather than symbols that people took as their own. The symbols that Czechs really identified with were actually Czechoslovak symbols. Despite sometimes being frustrated with Slovaks, Czechs took Czechoslovakia itself as their own, without reservation. Slovaks took Czechoslovakia as sort of “ours,” but also as sort of “theirs, and we also live in it.” In that sense, referring to things from Czechoslovakia as “Czech” was not so wide of the mark.

So the countries finished their “Velvet Divorce,” and went their separate ways on more or less good terms. Economically, they’ve had similar levels of growth—not outstanding, but respectable (some Czechs were convinced that the Slovaks on their own would be an economic basket case, and this has certainly not been borne out). Both countries entered the European Union in 2004 (along with Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia, together making up the clearest cases of post-communist success). The Czechs have cultivated a greater degree of Euroskepticism (distrust of the bureaucratic reach of the EU), while the Slovak Republic became a full member of the eurozone in 2009. (The bailout of Greece by eurozone countries has led to some smug contentment on the part of Czechs that they still have their own koruna, while Slovakia has made difficulties for the eurozone by refusing to make its allotted contribution to the attempted rescue.)

There’s still a degree of fondness for the “other” country, and for the old Czechoslovakia. In international sporting events, it seems common for Czechs to root for Slovaks and vice versa, as long as they’re not playing each other. Last fall a Slovak vodka brand splashed ads all over Prague subways and billboards showing two hip young dudes, and with a text—in Slovak—that started off something like, “When it comes to brothers, there can’t be boundaries!” Indeed, one of the useful features of the European Union is that it allows small nations to have something that is their own and still be part of a larger unit that’s big enough to be economically functional, and with the Schengen Agreement getting rid of passport control among most of the EU’s members, in practical terms there are no borders between the Czech and Slovak Republics, nor with Austria, Germany, Poland, or Hungary. So the story has a happy ending.

… Back when there was a Czech Republic, American students learning geography might naturally assume that there were people called “Czechs,” just like in Italy there were Italians and in Germany there were Germans.

But if you happened to study the history or geography of the region more closely, at some point you had the surprising discovery that there were actually two different … peoples in the Czech Republic: Bohemians, and Moravians. (Well, actually three, if you counted Silesians, but they were really very few, and they didn’t cause any trouble, so let’s leave them out of this, shall we?) What’s the difference? It turns out that’s a much harder story to tell than in the case of Czechs and Slovaks.

The large state emblem of the Czech Republic.  The two-tailed lion of Bohemia gets two fields, while the eagles of Moravia (top right) and Silesia (bottom left) get one each.

In any country where the capital city is also the major economic hub, there’s a tendency for the metropolis to get disproportionate attention—just ask non-Parisian French about Paris—and Moravians complain about “Pragocentrism.” It also doesn’t help that the Czech word for Bohemia is “Čechy” (the “č” sounds like “ch” in English “chair,” and the “ch” in “Čechy” is sort of like the “ch” in the Scottish pronunciation of “loch”), and a “Čech” is either a Czech (a person from the Czech Republic) or a Bohemian (a person from the western two thirds of the Czech Republic).

For related reasons, there isn't an agreed informal name for the country. Nobody says they spent last week in the French Republic, or in the Federal Republic of Germany. Those are the official names, but people just say "France" or "Germany." But what's the alternative to "Czech Republic" ("Česká republika" in Czech)? Many people use "Česko," which is formed like Dansko (Denmark), Polsko (Poland), Rusko (Russia), and many more, but others consider this poor taste (I was mildly chastised for this just last week).

Sometimes you’ll see a letter to the editor or an on-line comment from somewhere like Brno, the Moravian capital, saying “We’re not Czechs, we’re Moravians, we have our own culture, and we’re sick of the way you Czechs run everything and take us for granted.” In the 1990s, the country redrew the boundaries of the “kraj,” the administrative units that are somewhat like states in the U.S. The new territories didn’t follow the historical division between Bohemia and Moravia, with the kraj of the Czech-Moravian Highlands spilling across the border that traditionally separated the two. There's even a site called Kde je Morava? (Where is Moravia?) which explains, among other things, which municipalities of various kraj are actually part of Moravia.

The two lands have also had distinct historical experiences: the Hussite wars had a bigger impact on Bohemia, and Moravia declined to support the nobles’ uprising in 1618 that led to the defeat at White Mountain and the decline of Czech in both Bohemia and Moravia.

And there are differences in language. Just as people in Boston sound different from people 100 miles away in Maine, and even people from Boston’s southern suburbs don’t sound like people from the western suburbs, the use of Czech varies from the western border with Germany to the eastern border with Slovakia. So of course there are Moravian patriots who want official sanction for different spelling rules in Moravia, to better reflect how people speak there. Shades of the mid-1800s, when Slovaks moved away from using Czech as their written language and developed modern literary Slovak.

It’s quite possible that if I knew the situation better I would understand the justification for it, but I can’t help but laugh ruefully at this. Formal written Czech doesn’t just differ from Moravian, it also doesn’t match how people speak in Prague or West Bohemia. Lots of words that start with “o” get a “v” stuck on the beginning: “To je vono! – That’s it!” The letter ý is supposed to be pronounced like a long version of “ee”, but it comes out “ej” (sort of like the vowel sound in “hay”), while the letter é is supposed to pronounced somewhat like “eh,” but comes out “ee.” The plural noun endings for the instrumental case (don’t ask) should be -y, -i, or -ami, depending on the gender of the noun, but spoken Czech has taken the “-ama” ending from the obscure dual case, which is used for all of about four words, and applied it to everything; the corresponding adjectival endings -ymi and -imi have similarly lost out to -yma and -ima.

This all probably sounds confusing to a reader unfamiliar with Czech, but it’s no different in principle from looking at the sentences “I’m going to be there,” and “I’m going to Boston,” and knowing that in some American dialects, the first “going to” might be reduced to “gunna,” while the second can only be “goin’ ta” or “goin’ a,” if it isn’t kept in its original “going to.” The rules may vary across the U.S., never mind other parts of the English-speaking world, but we all write “going to” and none of us stays up nights worrying about how our written language doesn’t match our speech. Any educated Praguer or West Bohemian speaks one way and writes another, unless they’re writing to friends, in which case they bring in elements of the way they speak, so as not to sound too stuffy and formal. And they don’t give it a moment’s thought, it’s just the way languages are.

But in Moravia there are people who want to change the way … Moravian is written, so that everybody knows they’re not Czechs. I think the number of people who take this seriously is too small for it to ever turn into anything--the "Moravist" parties have apparently already had a rise and fall--but check back in 80 years and see how things are going.

In the meantime, can’t we all just get along?