Summary: Murray N. Rothbard, “Ex-Czechoslovakia” (1992)

This short September 1992 political commentary is a polemical essay on the breakup of Czechoslovakia, framed as part of Rothbard’s broader argument for national self-determination and secession. It is a compact intervention in the post-Communist “nationalities question.” Rothbard’s thesis is blunt: Czechoslovakia, like Yugoslavia, was an artificial state created by the Versailles settlement, and its dissolution should be welcomed because it allows subject nationalities—above all the Slovaks—to escape Czech domination.

Rothbard opens by linking Czechoslovakia’s impending dissolution to Yugoslavia’s collapse, treating both not as tragedies of fragmentation but as overdue corrections to the post-World War I order.

We at Triple R were among the first to hail the breakup of that misbegotten whelp of Versailles: the “country” called Yugoslavia.

His central conceptual move is to deny the legitimacy of multinational states manufactured by great-power diplomacy. For Rothbard, the problem is not merely administrative centralization but a false nationalism imposed from above. Versailles becomes the symbol of this artificiality.

At Versailles, the English, the French, and the Wilson administration set up the phony “nation” of Czechoslovakia, carved out of the beaten Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I.

The essay proceeds by analogy: Yugoslavia masked Serb power; Czechoslovakia masked Czech power. Rothbard lists the Sudeten Germans, Teschen Poles, southern Slovak Hungarians, Carpatho-Ruthenians, and Slovaks as peoples subordinated within the Czechoslovak state. His argument is therefore both anti-imperial and anti-centralist: a state’s international respectability does not make it nationally authentic.

And just as Yugoslavia was a mask for Serb tyranny over other ethnic nationalities, so Czechoslovakia was a cover for despotism of the Czechs over other nationalities in the area: specifically, over the Sudeten Germans, Poles in the Teschen area, Hungarians in Southern Slovakia, the “Carpatho-Ruthenians” in the eastern tail (actually western Ukrainians), and in particular, the Slovaks in the eastern part of the country, west of the Carpatho-Ruthenian tail.

Rothbard also attacks Western liberal opinion, especially the press and foreign-policy establishment, for romanticizing Czechoslovakia and demonizing separatist movements. In his account, the Slovak case resembles the Croatian one: both were condemned in respectable Western circles through associations with wartime collaboration, while the deeper issue of domination by a favored central nationality was ignored.

The historical structure is rapid and compressed. He moves from Versailles, to interwar national conflicts, to World War II, to postwar Soviet-backed border changes and expulsions, and finally to the post-Communist moment. The postwar settlement, in his telling, removed several non-Czech groups from the problem but left Czech predominance over Slovakia intact.

This left the Czechs, Slovaks, and some Hungarians, with the Czechs continuing to dominate under Communism.

The relevance of the essay lies in its defense of peaceful secession as the proper libertarian and national answer to multinational state conflict. Rothbard is especially interested in the fact that, unlike the Serbs in Yugoslavia, the Czechs did not attempt to hold the federation together by force. He praises them for accepting Slovak independence despite reluctance.

Let secessionists depart: would that all attempts at secession, including that of the South in 1861, had been treated the same way!

The piece closes with a celebratory reversal of establishment anxiety: the end of Czechoslovakia is not a geopolitical disaster but a liberation of political communities from an imposed national fiction. Its final gesture welcomes both successor states as more legitimate than the federation they replace.

So, farewell Czechoslovakia, what took you so long?