Managing a Very Civilized Breakup : At midnight tonight, Czechoslovakia will be no more

In 1926, near the end of his life, the great Czech composer Leos Janacek wrote a work entitled “Slavonic Mass.” Janacek was not a religious man. His best-known work is the opera “The Cunning Little Vixen.” But his nation was sacred to him, and he wrote his Mass to express a secular faith in the nation’s destiny and, as it were, its eternity.

Slavonic is, roughly, the Latin of the Slavic world. Derived from a South Slavic dialect spoken in the regions first evangelized by Sts. Cyril and Methodius, it became the liturgical language of the Slavic churches as well as, during the Middle Ages, the language of Slavic literature and culture.

Slavonic was a living language before the emergence of Slavic states, lived on through their long subjugation by Turkish and German conquerors and was still alive after their re-emergence. Janacek, at one level, was celebrating the new Czechoslovak state when he wrote his Mass. At another, less conscious level, he was acknowledging a deeper, cultural reality that leads and follows, underlies and surrounds, mere statehood.

At midnight tonight, Czechoslovakia will cease to be. Slovakia will become an independent state. Bohemia and Moravia, perhaps together to be called Czechia, will continue as a smaller nation. The division is both an end and a beginning, which is to say, of course, that it is a continuation. The deeper reality that Janacek wanted to honor is still there.

And the Czechs and Slovaks, in the intelligence of their post-divorce settlement as well as in the civility of the divorce itself, are giving the rest of the world--the rest of the Slavs, to start with--a richer clue to the new world order than any yet seen.

The Slovaks, chafing under Czech economic domination, asked for the divorce. The Czechs, somewhat to everyone’s amazement, consented. There is, even in a no-fault divorce, property to divide. But both parties have agreed to a free trade zone, joint pension and social security arrangements and a common currency. In what may prove a far-reaching precedent, they have permitted the residents of each state to choose citizenship in either. (Many Slovaks are choosing Czech citizenship.)

Yugoslavia, another post-World War I Slavic state with a coined, neologistic name, is also breaking apart into its older constituent parts. To be sure, the closer you look, the greater the differences between the two federations loom. And yet at least some portion of the Czechoslovak solution may yet prove relevant in the South Slav agony. Janacek’s “Slavonic Mass” was a hymn to and for all the world’s Slavs.

Meanwhile, as the clock strikes, Czechoslovakia is dead. Long live the Czechs and the Slovaks.

And God save Bosnia.