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National Divorce? One Country Did It
The Velvet Divorce
The phrase “national divorce” has been circulating in recent days. Some people have floated the idea that the United States should go its separate ways. Blue states over here. Red states over there. This rhetoric is the result of historically high rates of polarization and mistrust between adherents of the two political parties. It is also the result of the rise of extremism on both ends of the political spectrum.
Many people have scoffed at the idea of a national divorce. Countries don’t just peacefully split up, do they? One country did. On the last day of 1992, Czechoslovakia split into two countries. The Czech Republic and Slovakia were born overnight. No civil war. No bloodshed. The process was so smooth that it was called the Velvet Divorce (after the Velvet Revolution.) Stunningly, Czechoslovakia managed to both rid itself of communism peacefully in the Velvet Revolution and also peacefully split itself into two during the Velvet Divorce. These are two things that most people would have claimed to be impossible.
How did Czechoslovakia manage to navigate a national divorce when few other countries had?
The Velvet Divorce
One of the most interesting aspects of the Velvet Divorce was the fact that opinion polling showed just over a third of Slovaks and Czechs were in favor of dissolution in 1992, the year that the divorce took place. Those numbers are lower than the current polling numbers in the United States. New polling shows that over 40% of most political demographics in the United States are interested in a national divorce. Interestingly enough, more people in America today seem to be in favor of dissolution than there were in Czechoslovakia before it broke up.
The Velvet Divorce happened when everyone came to the table and decided that a peaceful resolution to all of their national problems was the goal of everyone involved. Shockingly, the debates worked. Resolutions were hammered out. New borders were drawn. The debt was split up. And the country agreed to go its separate ways on December 31st, 1992.
It was the model breakup of a nation.
