At first glance Paul Henderson and Ilona Vercseg's book might be taken as one ‘on community and civil society’. A more perceptive observer might add ‘European’ as an important qualification. Upon a deeper reading, however, it will become obvious that this is not just a book on community and civil society in Europe. The piece in the reader's hands is a product of civil society and community practice of European significance.

Realising this makes the work a lot more worth exploring, and not only for the initiated community practitioner. In fact, referring to it as a ‘product’ does not do justice to the nature of the achievement. Albeit in a professedly ‘modest and personal’ way, the volume makes available a veritable harvest of several decades of sustained effort in national and European-level community building, and spells out its relevance for civil societies.

Put in this perspective, the wealth of the experience encapsulated within the text's confines is nothing short of arresting. When writing a ‘foreword’ to the authors’ output, one cannot but recall how improbable such an outcome looked like from Hungary in the 1970s when the first attempts were made in that ‘other part’ of Europe at charting how the heritage of community development could be harnessed for the survival of civic traditions under the central European conditions of the day. One of the motives was given by the institutional erosion driven by soviet-type rule: people were deprived in general of the effective chance for building and running their own institutions beyond the (repressed) private and family sphere. The apparatus of community development, accessible from a few foreign books in a Budapest library in the mid-1970s, looked both ‘presentable’ and suitable for resuscitating inhibited institutional functions, those of civil society included, at least within the compass of local communities.

The idea immediately met resistance, if not outright rejection, on two fronts: hardliners of the prevailing regime saw it as a Trojan assault on their externally imposed monopoly of power, while radicals of underground opposition circles regarded it, on the one hand, as too gradualist and, on the other hand, as amenable to manipulation by ‘reformers’ of a party-state that fundamentally was unreformable.