Czech Republic is a nation.
The Czech Republic ( [ ˈtʃɛkiə ] , ; Česko , [ ˈt͡ʃɛsko ] ) , is a nation state in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west , Austria to the south , Slovakia to the east and Poland to the northeast . The Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union ( EU ) in 2004 ; it is a member of the United Nations , the OECD , the OSCE , and the Council of Europe . This is a list of countries by inequality-adjusted human development index ( IHDI ) , as published by the UNDP in its 2016 Human Development Report . A nation state is a type of state that joins the political entity of a state to the cultural entity of a nation , from which it aims to derive its political legitimacy to rule and potentially its status as a sovereign state . A unitary state is a state governed as a single power in which the central government is ultimately supreme and any administrative divisions ( sub-national units ) exercise only the powers that the central government chooses to delegate .