The outcome of the political transition in Eastern Europe depends not only on the politics pursued but on the understanding of politics in the countries involved. This volume examines a key aspect of this understanding, the notion of 'citizenship' as it is being defined in Eastern Europe today. Formally, 'citizenship' refers to the criteria of membership in a political community.

More broadly, it raises key questions of identity, contract and culture, which bear upon the future of such issues as human rights, mobility and the relations between state and civil society in the post-communist world.

This interdisciplinary collection brings together sociologists, jurists and political theorists from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic as well as from Switzerland, France, Great Britain and the United States. The volume seeks to articulate and compare the meanings and implications of 'citizenship' in terms of key issues and in several national contexts.

Common to all contributions is the conviction that a comparison among different understandings of citizenship illuminates national specificities and brings into focus some of the constraints on the emergence of a democratic consensus shared by East and West.