Slovakia

The half of Czechoslovakia that asked for more and got everything. Slovakia was inside Hungary for a thousand years rather than inside the Austrian half of the empire, which is the underlying reason it entered the 1918 union less industrialised, more rural and more Catholic than the Czech lands, and was governed under a Czechoslovakism that treated the two as one nation. A clerical-nationalist state under Jozef Tiso existed from 1939 to 1945 as a German client, and it deported most of its Jewish population, paying Germany a fee per person; the Slovak National Uprising of August 1944 fought against it and is the country's principal wartime commemoration. Communist industrialisation transformed the republic, much of it into arms manufacturing that collapsed after 1989. Federal arrangements repeatedly failed to satisfy Slovak demands for parity, and the separation agreed in 1993 was negotiated by two prime ministers without a referendum in either republic. Vladimir Meciar's governments left the country briefly isolated before it caught up, joining NATO and the EU in 2004 and the euro in 2009 - the only Visegrad state to adopt it. Bratislava sits on the Danube within sight of two other countries. Car assembly dominates the economy. Kosice is the second city. The country has about 5.4 million people. The High Tatras are the smallest alpine-scale mountain range in the world. Slovak and Czech remain largely mutually intelligible. The Roma minority is among the largest in Europe as a share of population. Bratislava was the coronation city of Hungarian kings for over two centuries.

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