official site for visitors to Bratislava  

The inability of the political elite of the time to find a compromise led to the break-up of Czechoslovakia. At the stroke of midnight on 31 December, 1992, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist for the second time, and on 1 January, 1993, Bratislava once more became the capital of an independent Slovakia. The status of capital led to radical changes in the character of the city. At the beginning of the 1990s visitors sometimes referred to Bratislava as a city where the war seemed only just to have ended. Nowadays it is regarded as being at the centre one of the fastest-developing and most-promising regions in Europe.