Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993. By Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 296p. $22.95. Framing Democracy: Civil Society and Civic Movements in Eastern Europe. By John K. Glenn, III. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 289p. $45.00. Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of the Citizen Movements and Alliance 90. By Christiane Olivo. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 293p. $55.00.

Extract

A decade after the epochal events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, we have come to see them not as quasi miracles the way we did then but almost as prosaic way stations in the ever-present process of societal change. To be sure, there has been a stream of often pathbreaking scholarship in the fields of comparative politics and political sociology, with a special emphasis on social movements, civil society, the transition from authoritarian to democratic societies, and the complex consolidation of the latter that has rightly contributed to the demystification of these events. Yet, as citizens as well as scholars, we still remain so riveted by what happened in those few years in East Central Europe that the point of diminishing returns potentially afflicting additional research and writing on the subject remains distant.