As the referendum on Scottish independence nears, I recall the feeling of deep depression that came over me 21 years ago at the time of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce”. Two new small countries appeared on the map – the Czech Republic and Slovakia – and beyond their borders nobody understood why they had separated. A broader and larger “unionist” (federal) state that bound citizens together gave way to two smaller states more reliant on ethnic definition.

From today’s perspective, that divorce was just a historical episode. It happened in a different time, in a different geopolitical space, long before the two new countries worked their way – separately – into Nato and the European Union. It was also largely seen as a positive achievement because at the time Yugoslavia was falling apart violently.

However, the Czechoslovak decision was not made through a proper democratic process. It was sprung on “unionists” as well as on “secessionists” in a somewhat despotic fashion by two national leaders, energised by electoral success: one a Czech, on the victorious political right, the other a Slovak on the equally victorious left. It was made over a cup of tea (or was it a beer?) in the garden of the famous Tugendhat modernist villa in Brno. After the decision taken by then Czech prime minister Václav Klaus and Slovak prime minister Vladimír Mečiar, there was no way back.

The questions surrounding Scotland’s possible departure from the union are not the same. Nevertheless it’s worth reflecting that whatever the certainties of the campaigns, nobody can be sure what happens next, in the short or long term. This is the surprise that’s waiting. There is a cost in lost time on both sides: the prospect of years needed to find a new way and a new identity, both for the nation and its individual people.

The Slovaks at least had a sense of their future, of what they were doing. They were building a new country. But in the process they nearly missed the train to Europe and to Nato, and in the end they made it at the last minute. Before that, they first had to turn round the nationalistic, populist and corrupt politics of the post-divorce period and get rid of that same leader who decided upon independence for them under the Tugendhat tree. It took five or six years.

The Czechs are generally still not even aware of the time they’ve lost. This has something to do with the fact that their country came out of the divorce with no deeper sense of being, with no obvious purpose or role to play. The Czechs woke up on 1 January 1993 in a different country but didn’t realise it. In a way one can see what went on as a replay of what happened to the Austrians when the Czechs and others in 1918 left their “union”, the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Austrians ended in Austria, now a country that was “left over”. It took them half a century to become a nation again, albeit a very different one. The traumatic loss was about much more than lost time and lost dominance within a lost empire.

The western part of what used to be Czechoslovakia is also a “left-over” country. It still struggles to find a less difficult name than the Czech Republic, and has meanwhile not found anything better than just half of the old one – “Czecho”. The country, lucky at the time to still have Václav Havel as its president, drifted into Nato in 1999 and into the EU in 2004 while sometimes giving the impression that it is even now not sure it has done the right thing. Its politicians occasionally come up with some odd statements, are sometimes disloyal to allies, sometimes rubbishing the politics of human rights (which under Havel passingly gave the country some sense of identity), and recently tried somewhat bizarrely to befriend China.

It is not clear either what the population desires and where its emotions belong. One of the results is the rise of little-Czech nationalism, populism and xenophobia in a nation that no longer shares its fate with its historical partners or minorities – Slovaks, Germans, Jews, Poles, Hungarians. The Roma Gypsies have become the new “other”. Such small-nation nationalism and parochialism comes with a lot of negative sentiment: anti-politics and anti-politicians, anti-Roma, anti-homeless people, anti-Islam, increasingly anti-American, anti-European and still quite anti-German. Curiously, pro-Russian sympathies are growing, as reactions to the crisis in Ukraine tend to demonstrate.

On the other hand, sheltered by its link to German industries and to exports, economically the country is fine. Wealth is growing (despite the monstrous spread of corruption), the nation is still relatively egalitarian, and though the general trend is one of growing inequality, its national health system is better than in the UK.

In the end, “Czecho” is a wandering nation in a wandering country, less important and far less interesting than its predecessors, and the world doesn’t really care. At home, for nearly two decades there has been a widespread feeling of depression. “Blba nalada”, silly mood, as Havel once coined it. It all began then, with the split of Czechoslovakia. But we didn’t know.