Academics, politicians, journalists, foundation executives, development assistance officials, regimes and their opponents alike throughout the world – they have all joined the civil society bandwagon. Civil society's most ardent advocates could not be more effusive: it is the “hitherto missing key to sustained political reform, legitimate states and governments, improved governance, viable state-society and state economy relationships, and prevention of… political decay” (Harbeson 1994: 1-2). Its detractors, on the other hand, dismiss civil society as a “new cult” (Wood 1990: 63), an idea that “is seductive but perhaps ultimately specious” (Kumar 1994: 130).

It was not always so. Although the origins of the idea of civil society, a realm independent of the State, go back to classical antiquity and it was central to the intellectual debates of early modern Europe, it virtually disappeared from political discourse in the mid-nineteenth Century before being resurrected in the 1970s. A term that became “the motherhood-and-apple pie of the 1990s” (McElvoy 1997: 30) made no appearance in the International Dictionary of the Social Sciences written in the 1960s. The renewed popularity of civil society resulted from a variety of overlapping and sometimes contradictory forces (Keane 1988b: 1; 1998: 35).

Given the twentieth-century penchant for ideologies such as fascism, communism, socialism, and social democracy, a reaction against centralized State power should have come as no surprise, but civil society explicitly reentered political discourse during the struggle against totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.