Hyphen War - Background

Background

The Communist system in Czechoslovakia fell in November 1989. But in 1990, the official name of the country was still the "Czechoslovak Socialist Republic" (in Czech and in Slovak Československá socialistická republika, or ČSSR). President Václav Havel proposed merely dropping the word "Socialist" from the name, but Slovak politicians wanted a second change. They demanded that the country's name be spelled with a hyphen (e.g. "Republic of Czecho-Slovakia" or "Federation of Czecho-Slovakia"), as it was spelled from Czechoslovak independence in 1918 until 1920, and again in 1938 and 1939. President Havel then changed his proposal to "Republic of Czecho-Slovakia".

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