Introduction

Civil society has blossomed along with competing political parties, new legal and constitutional systems, and a market economy. The great power to the east under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative, has also been drifting in the direction of authoritarianism. Russia is the main successor to the Soviet Union, which dominated the countries of the region “formerly known as Eastern Europe” militarily and politically for half a century. To Kundera, Central Europe was the “Eastern border of the West,” and it had been “kidnapped” in 1945 by the Soviets with the complicity of the West. The concept of Central Europe had a history before Milan Kundera, mainly as Mitteleuropa. The Germans first used it probably in 1808 as a topographical term. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.