Държава и национална идентичност: случаят с Чехия и Словакия
State and Nation Identity: Special Focus on Czechia and Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: Democratisation in many of the post-communist states revealed problems of national identity. Stable democracies do not only require legitimacy and prosperous economies, they also need a nation state and citizens (civil nation). Majority of citizens must have no doubt which political community they belong to. In the ethnically homogeneous countries it is not a great problem - local, national, Central-Eastern European and European identities are complementary there. But in other countries (for example in Great Britain, Spain, Belgium, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, etc.) we can find contradicting identity structures having roots in ethnicity: local-national identity structure on the one hand and Central-East European-European identity on the other hand. Integration of these states into inadequate state structures may sharpen national problems and bring them from the national to the higher level. Therefore, builders of European Union are often discouraged to create a federal super-state, but rather union of nation states. Otherwise, they may easyly repeat the failure of builders of Soviet-style federations, where problems may emerge, if people or groups of people in different nation states will have substantially different expectations and ideas concerning European integration or even stateness.

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