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New sovereign states as subjects of international law come into existence either through fusion (most frequently - and unsuccessfully - attempted in the Arab world) or through division, separation and emancipation. Since the virtual completion of the decolonization process in Africa in the 1970's, it was the collapse of the communist experiment in Europe that triggered the last wave of changes keeping the cartographers busy and adding new flags in front of the United Nations headquarters. The German Democratic Republic expired through unification, and all three federations in the Soviet orbit - the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia - disintegrated. Fifteen Soviet republics went their separate ways leaving Russia with altogether eighty-nine (according to the latest count) not entirely harmonious components with Chechnya the prime example. Yugoslavia (six republics and two autonomous regions) begot a conundrum beyond solution by the impotent world community. "Ethnic cleansing" as a novel variety of genocide prompted the establishment of a war crimes tribunal, first such initiative since the days of Nuremberg.
The Czechoslovak federation of merely two components - the Czech (population 10 million) and the Slovak Republic (population 5 million) - dissolved at midnight on December 31, 1992. Without a single nose bloodied, the two former spouses divided common property, hoisted flags, sent ambassadors to each other and took separate seats in the United Nations. The playwright Vaclav Havel in the best tradition of the theater of the absurd, changed residence from jail to castle, switching roles of a dissident to that of a president - first of one country (Czechoslovakia), then, of another country (Czech Republic) - this all accomplished within three years. The Guinness Book of World Records may take notice.
Some attention should be paid to this development as an eventual welcome precedent of a fruitful alternative to future instances of liquidation, dismemberment of dysfunctional states, lacking a rational prospect of successful resuscitation. In other words, if the conditions are right, the world community should applaud rather than automatically reject and even condemn such a radical surgical measure.
GENESIS OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA
The Czechs had their own state (Kingdom of Bohemia) from the tenth to the seventeenth century when it fell victim to the ravages of the Thirty Years War. Three centuries later, their independence was...