EN
The end of the Cold War greatly reduced the military risk worldwide and resulted in a search for new areas of interest for security sciences. One of the new trends, which originated in the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, was the societal security, focused on the issue of safeguarding identity of social groups – national, ethnic and religious. The concept developed by the Copenhagen school was later extended to other subjects with common identity, such as professional groups, economic classes or local communities. This articles presents the issue of the societal dimension of security in contemporary Europe. Its focus is on finding a universal defi nition of societal security, determining the subject of this kind of security and on analyzing the main threats for the societal dimension of security in Europe.