ABSTRACT
In the wake of the collapse of Communist systems, conflicts and tensions between ethnic groups have not only brought about the disintegration of multinational federations of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, but many of the new successor states also face the prospect of further territorial divisions. When in the early 1990s Czechoslovakia found it paralyzed by Czech-Slovak disputes, the roots of the crisis reached back into an earlier era. Slovak weapons industry also figured prominently in the most serious political crisis of the post-Communist Czechoslovakia. The incipient pro-federalist Czech-Hungarian alliance inside Czechoslovakia was clearly a factor with international dimensions, linking up as it did with relations with Budapest. The date marked not only the death of Czechoslovakia and the rise of new frontiers in Europe, but also the inauguration of the Maastricht agreement, the birth of a “Europe without frontiers.”.
