Two-day workshop Finally Alone: The Nation State, Representation, and Sovereignty in Central Europe after 1989 was held in Bratislava on 25-26 September, 2019. Its concept sought to tell an non-triumphalist story of the peaceful revolutions that brought Communist dictatorships in East-Central Europe to end. In the workshop narrative, 1989 represented not only the beginning of liberal democratic transformations, but also a period of ethnic-political claims, separatism, new borders and divisions. It was no coincidence that none of the three former Socialist federations – Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union – survived the early 1990s.
On the first conference day, academic papers by Adéla Gjuričová, Tomáš Zahradníček, Jure Gašparič, and Ivan Sablin, comparing the respective institutional routes to the break-up of federal states, were accompanied by a panel discussion of Czech and Slovak former actors of the events, members of the Federal Assembly and the National Councils. Bratislava University hosted the second day during which both a keynote lecture by Darina Malová and analytical papers by Jiří Suk, Kristina Andělová, Adam Hudek, and Jaroslav Cuhraprovided more detailed historical background for the Czecho-Slovak case.
The workshop was a joint event organized by the Czech Institute of Contemporary History, the Slovak Institute of History, the Czech Centre Bratislava, and Comenius University Political Science Department.