ABSTRACT
The events of the decade since the ®rst edition of this book was written could scarcely have been predicted. That edition, published in 1992, ended with the words: `Czechoslovakia in 1989; Scotland tomorrow?' A number of people commented on the apparent prescience of these words, assuming they referred to the so-called `velvet divorce' which divided the Czech lands and Slovakia into separate states. In fact, they were meant as a comment on the collapse of communism, and in particular the role of civil society in its downfall. I, at least, had no way of knowing that a mere three years later, in 1995, two new states would be born out of the old socialist one, and in a peaceful, almost absent-minded manner, that it would be a velvet divorce.
