This article is devoted to the study of civil society in the European Union. It shows the existence of two terms - “European civil society” and “civil society in Europe”. There is a vagueness of the term “European civil society” because it does not disclose the principle of belonging to a “European civil society” - a socio-cultural or geographical. There is a doubt about the possibility of the application of the civil society concept developed to describe the realities at the level of the nation-state, to the description of the phenomenon at a transnational level, for example, in the case of the European Union. The article shows three periods of civil society participation in the European integration process. The article concludes that is premature to consider the European civil society as an autonomous social sphere, opposing the state.