Czech Republic

The lands of the modern Czech Republic, comprising the historic regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia, were inhabited from prehistory by Celtic peoples, including the Boii, from whom the Latin name Boiohaemum and the later term Bohemia derive. Germanic groups such as the Marcomanni and Quadi displaced or absorbed the Celts in the first centuries of the common era, and Slavic settlers arrived during the great migrations of the sixth century. In the ninth century the Moravian Slavs founded Great Moravia, a polity notable for its adoption of Christianity through the mission of Cyril and Methodius, who developed the Glagolitic script for Old Church Slavonic liturgy.

After the collapse of Great Moravia in the early tenth century under Magyar pressure, political gravity shifted to Bohemia, where the Premyslid dynasty consolidated a duchy centered on Prague. Elevated to a kingdom in 1198, Bohemia became one of the most influential constituent states of the Holy Roman Empire. The Premyslid line ended in 1306, and the throne passed to the House of Luxembourg; under Charles IV, who reigned as both Bohemian king and Holy Roman Emperor from 1346, Prague flourished as an imperial capital, gaining Central Europe's first university in 1348. The fifteenth century was convulsed by the Hussite movement, a religious and national reform current sparked by the execution of Jan Hus in 1415, which produced two decades of crusades and shaped a distinctive Czech religious identity.

In 1526 the Bohemian crown passed to the Habsburgs, who would rule the Czech lands for nearly four centuries. The defeat of the Bohemian estates at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, early in the Thirty Years' War, ushered in forced re-Catholicization, the loss of noble autonomy, and the gradual germanization of public life. A Czech national revival in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries restored the literary language and built modern political and cultural institutions within the Austrian, and after 1867 Austro-Hungarian, framework.

The dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War allowed Tomas Masaryk and Edvard Benes to proclaim the independent state of Czechoslovakia on 28 October 1918, joining the Czech lands with Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The interwar republic was among the most stable democracies in Central Europe until the Munich Agreement of 1938 ceded the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, followed in March 1939 by the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After liberation in 1945 and the expulsion of the German-speaking population, a Communist coup in February 1948 installed a one-party regime aligned with the Soviet Union. The reformist Prague Spring of 1968 was crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion, and orthodox rule continued until the nonviolent Velvet Revolution of November 1989 brought Vaclav Havel to the presidency.

On 1 January 1993 Czechoslovakia separated peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, an event commonly called the Velvet Divorce. The new state joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, anchoring itself firmly in Western political and security structures. Today the Czech Republic is a parliamentary democratic republic with a directly elected president and a bicameral legislature, operating under the 1993 Constitution that frames the institutions described in the remainder of this dossier.