Bratislava, 4th May 1992

In my tram this morning, I sat opposite a skinhead. He looked the usual dispirited, flea-bitten sort of youth one sees every day in London. In one respect, though, he was different. On his forehead were tattooed the letters SSS, or Samostatny Slovensky Stat, which is Independent Slovak State. Now, rather than set him apart from, these letters connect him to a large body of respectable opinion within Slovakia. Whatever disgust they might feel for him as a person, there are hundreds of thousands in this small republic of five million who share his wish for the dissolution of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. There are perhaps millions more who want an extent of further devolution from Prague so wide as to mean the same thing.

It counts for little here that the Czechs and Slovaks have much in common. They speak almost identical languages. They were both once ruled by the Habsburg Monarchy, and more recently were a single province in the Soviet Empire. It is their differences now that count - and most particularly their different experiences of economic reform. For the Czechs this has proved a splendid opportunity - but for the Slovaks a crippling burden. For all their record of corrupt oppression, the socialists left the Czechlands with something like a modern industrial base, something able to prosper in a free market economy. They turned Slovakia into the world's largest weapons factory: and the world since 1989 has needed neither Slovak weapons nor the steel and chemicals used in their manufacture. Accordingly, while unemployment in the Czechlands is stable at around 4 per cent, it has already reached 14 per cent in Slovakia, and is expected to rise still further.

The effect of this on Slovak politics has been striking. Just over a year ago, the Christian Democratic Movement and the Civic Democratic Forum, which are the two main coalition partners in the present Slovak Government, and the strongest supporters of economic reform, had between them exactly 40 per cent of the popular support. Today, their combined popularity stands at 17 per cent, and looks unlikely to recover in time for the June elections to the Slovak Parliament. Indeed, the CDF looks likely to vanish altogether. From 24 per cent last year, its popularity has now fallen to two per cent, less than half the five per cent needed to secure places in the next Parliament.

The beneficiaries from this decline have been the nationalists and the various kinds of socialist - who tend also on the whole to favour Slovak independence. There is, most notably, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, a strange coalition of Christians, old Communists, nationalists, fascists and social democrats. Its leader, Vladimir Meciar, has an equally strange past. Elected Prime Minister of Slovakia in the June of 1990, he was dismissed less than a year later for alleged incompetence and misuse of power. There have since then been further allegations of collaboration before the 1989 Revolution with the Federal secret police, and thereafter with the KGB, and generally of massive political corruption.

The Slovak electors have tended to ignore these allegations. Meciar's support currently stands at 38 per cent, and he has consistently been voted the most popular man in the republic. His message of greater or total (he is vague on this point) independence, combined with an easing or stopping (he is vague here as well) of economic reform, has attracted many more than his supposed past has repelled. Assuming this support for his party next month, he will certainly return as Prime Minister. What he will do then is, of course, open to doubt. But his likeliest partners will be the Communist Party, with 14 per cent, or the Slovak National Party, with 15 per cent, or both. Whatever his private wishes, he may be pressed into resocialising an already damaged economy, and diverting attention from the resulting chaos with some Balkanesque declaration of independence.

This will mean trouble. A dissolution of Czechoslovakia by any but the most cautious and gradual steps will cause endemic instability throughout the whole region. Though tidier than before the 1945 mass-expulsions, Central and Eastern Europe is still a jumble of nationalities. In greater or lesser degree, every border is an artificial line, leaving large national minorities on either side. Almost every border, therefore, is either disputed or resented. If one is changed, the precedent is set for other changes. Civil or some other war becomes alarmingly possible.