Overview: Few developments in the recent history of Central Europe have been more momentous than the emergence, or more precisely the re-emergence, of civil society, of organized citizen activity outside the boundaries of the state and the market. Indeed, the re-emergence of civil society was the key to all the other momentous developments that have characterized the extraordinary past two decades of Central European history - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet empire, the re-emergence of the market, the appearance of democratic government, and now the re-integration
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