World Notes NAMES

Legislators in Prague took a historic vote last week: by a landslide, they renamed their country the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, removing a hyphen they had inserted only four weeks earlier. The new monumental mouthful was a concession to the country's 5 million Slovaks, who have resented the dominance of the 10 million Czechs ever since the country was formed in 1918 from the Austro-Hungarian empire's two western Slavonic provinces.

The March 23 decision to name the country the Czecho-Slovak Federative Republic was intended to appease angry Slovaks. Instead, it only increased nationalist ire. In the following weeks thousands marched in their provincial capital of Bratislava, calling for Slovak independence. The new designation is intended to provide equal ethnic billing.