Stupid question, I know: Why shouldn't Ukraine split in two?

[Igel]

101. It was entirely internal, along fairly well-established internal borders.

The Slovaks wanted to go free from Czechs. There were differences of opinion, and most of the political power was in the West. There was also an East/West split that went back a long ways, with Czech Lands being more pro-Western and Slovakia being more East- and South-looking.

The Czechs assumed, with some accuracy, that the Slovaks, having benefited from the Czechoslovak economic policy under Soviet rule, believed they had the better chance to be an economic engine. They'd take off and didn't want to have to either lose industrial dominance or bail out the Czechs. Slovakia had the heavy industry.

The Czechs were also better educated and believed they'd have a good go at prosperity without the Slovaks.

The Czechs would benefit from changing the social order. Less state planning, less emphasis on social planning, and being a bit more laissez faire so that individual initiative mattered more. That would lead to less money for maintaining all the benefits that were showered on the self-styled proletariat, those who worked in industry and in factories. The Slovaks were afraid that all the heavy industrial workers would suddenly lose their perks, perks that the farmers enjoyed less. (Yes, there wasn't a clean split here: Slovak farmers and others didn't want to split; the ironworkers in Kladno weren't happy with the new economic order in the West. However, it was a clean ethnic split, the ethnic animosities were concentrated in areas that were nearly 100% Slovak or Czech so there wasn't much actual hatred in evidence. That allowed it to be a neat, orderly split by referendum and agreement on both sides.)

A side effect of the split, however, was ethnic cleansing and persecution. The Hungarians in the south of Slovakia had been allowed to stay Hungarian (unlike the Slovaks in Hungary, which had been forcibly assimilated in the previous 50-70 years). The Slovaks, nationalistically proud of their new-found independent state, took down Hungarian signs, made Slovak the national medium of instruction, and generally pissed off the Hungarian minority. I thought of them as a juvenile nation, one that needed to grow up and, to some extent, finally did--it was the first time the Slovaks had their own state.


The rest of your post is basically a trope. My mother loved it. No intervention was worth it: Let all the South Americans get killed, she had her problems--men made more than women, and some women felt like they had no place to go if they were battered. (She had no use for non-women-based civil rights. Headstart wasn't to help the kids, it was to be daycare. Rwanda? Maybe they deserved it, let them work out their own problems, our problems are worse.) Space program? Waste of money. Environmental regulations? Waste of money. Interstate system? Waste of money. NIH? Unless it helped poor women, a waste of money. Instead of "guns or butter," a viable argument, she wasn't past "education or butter." A high-school drop-out, the only reason for a college education was to make more money. Everything had a $ amount attached to it. And she voted straight-party (D) from the time she turned 21 until the year she had her voting rights stripped by reason of mental incompetence. (Even got over calling Obama "that damned n****r" after HRC lost and ended up voting for him.)

Her motto was "Looking out for #1."