Civil society in postsocialist transformation

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Sociology - Politics, Majorities, Minorities, grade: 1, , language: English, abstract: The concept of civil society has become very popular in the last decades. The end of communistic governments in the communist countries of the Eastern part of Europe has increased the interest and research on if and how much civil society contributed to these events. Under the light of the constant conflict of 'civil society vs. the state' a legitimate question might be to which extent civil societies have any right to exist in liberal, so-called western democracies that have allready fullfilled most of the civil society's demands and is based largely on 'the will of the people.'[8] Serbian Civil society faced in many aspects a historical development sui generis. Being under Austrian and Ottoman rule for a long time, Serbia and its people, as a (and maybe the most dominant) nation in the Kindom of Yugoslavia in the interwar period were largely occupied with the formation of the state and its complex ethnic composition.