Background
Czechoslovakia was created with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I. In 1917, a meeting took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the future Czechoslovak president Tomáš Masaryk and other Czech and Slovak representatives signed the Pittsburgh Agreement which promised a common state consisting of two equal nations, Slovakia and Czechia. Soon after, the philosophy of Edvard Beneš pushed for greater unity and a single nation.
Some Slovaks were not in favour of this change, and in March 1939, with the pressure from Hitler, the First Slovak Republic was created. Occupation by the Soviet Union after World War II oversaw their reunification into the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
In 1968, the Constitutional Law of Federation reinstated an official federal structure (of the 1917 type), but during the "Normalization period" in the 1970s, Gustáv Husák (although a Slovak himself) returned most of the control to Prague. This approach encouraged a regrowth of separatism after the fall of communism.
Read more about this topic: Dissolution Of Czechoslovakia
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