title: Civil Society against the State? Historical Experiences of Eastern Europe
abstract: This chapter begins with the common assumption that the contemporary attractiveness of the civil society concept received a major impulse from the popular movements against the geographical order of 'Yalta'. The situation after the Congress of Vienna and the subsequent hegemony of the Holy Alliance over Central and Eastern Europe provided the historical folio onto which the civil society notions of the dissent since 1945 had been projected. The contemporary ongoing attempts at region-building in