Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems

This book explores the background to the cataclysmic changes which have occurred in the former world communist systems.

It applies the idea of civil society - a traditional concept of political theory - to the processes of radical political and social change which have been engulfing the socialist world since the late 1980s.

The basic elements of the civil society paradigm are applied to a number of case studies: the USSR, China, Poland, Hungary, the former German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia and Vietnam - with the objective of clarifying the reasons behind the success or failure of a functional civil society to develop in these countries in recent years.

A distinctive feature of the collection is the combination of theory and practical application to concrete cases.

The contributors trace some of the principal 20th-century trends in the understanding of civil society to see which of them have had the most bearing on these developments.

The result is a book which may be of interest to students and specialists involved in the study of communism and the individual countries of the communist world. "The contributors are all recognized specialists in the respective countries, and the editor, Robert F.

Miller, has had more than thirty years of study and field research on various aspects of the politics and economics of the former Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe.

He has been able to draw on the expertise available at the Australian National University and other nearby centres to expand the coverage of the book to include key Asian communist systems.".