Heimann, Mary  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3541-5201
2026.
Czechoslovakia: Remembering and forgetting the failures of a state.
Komárek, J., Aasa, B., Bán, M. and Krajewski, M., eds.
European Constitutionalism the Other Way Round: From the Periphery to the Centre,
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
pp. 250-265.
(10.1017/9781009604093.014)
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Abstract
It is a rare thing for an historian to have access to sources which chart the entire history of a state, from planned creation to pre-meditated extinction. Nor is every state’s constitutional and political history as varied as that of Czechoslovakia, which was founded on 28 October 1918 and ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1992. Czechoslovakia’s experience can be seen as a compressed history of twentieth-century Europe and the many ways the modern state has been imagined. During its relatively brief existence, Czechoslovakia was federalized, centralized, dissolved, reconstituted, re-centralized and re-federalized; it also went from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy; from authoritarian democracy to Nazi colony; from people’s democracy to Soviet satellite; and from Communist dictatorship and command economy to democracy and the free market. In 2009, Yale University Press brought out a comprehensively revisionist history, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, the first full account of the state to be written by an outsider. This chapter tells the story of how the book first came to be researched and written by the present author, why its publication in 2009 caused such a furore and why former dissidents insisted, ten years later, in bringing out a Czech-language edition.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Publication |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > History, Archaeology and Religion |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| ISBN: | 9781009604079 |
| Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 16 February 2026 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Feb 2026 10:13 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/171082 |
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