Introduction

Extremism, climate change, political polarization – how can societies counter these developments? In the search for answers, the call for citizenship and civic education has been playing an increasing role for several years (Kolleck, 2022). At the same time, it has become clear that citizenship and civic education cannot be generalized and encounter different social traditions and conditions depending on the country and region. This chapter turns to this challenge and asks for the conceptual meaning of citizenship and civic education in CEE. Due to the specific contexts of civic and citizenship education in post-communist states, the countries of CEE are defined less by strict geographical boundaries than by their shared history and societal similarities (for example, regarding dictatorship and social transformation).

The development in CEE is particularly exciting. In the course of the post-communist transformation and the efforts towards Europeanization, the topics of citizenship and civic education gained increasing relevance. At the same time, ambivalences and dilemmas emerged that can be attributed to the specific situation in these countries. Since the end of the Cold War, however, citizenship education and civic education have been promoted not only by the countries themselves but also by the European Union (EU) and the European Council in particular, in order to support processes of democratization and the establishment of a market economy. However, it is apparent that this external promotion of citizenship and civic education, for instance in the European Partnership programme of the EU, led to actions that marginalized important goals inherent in the concepts of citizenship and civic education such as the development of democratic and responsible citizens and the integration of individuals into civil society, which are inherent in the concepts (Segert, 2016).