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The politics of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) features a number of phenomena
that arguably have very clear parameters and straightforward ways of measuring change
and progress.1
Whether it is economic reform, party system consolidation, European Union
(EU) accession, voter behaviour, or ethnic relations, political science offers many different analytical
tools and benchmarks with which to assess transformation in these various realms.
Transitional justice (TJ) is decidedly not one of those fields. In this chapter we will show
how the rubric of ‘transitional justice’ constitutes a dizzying array of meanings and foci (Bell
2009, Fletcher and Weinstein 2015). Moreover, we will argue that scholars would do well to first
map out this range of phenomena before simply selecting a single measure and seeing it as the
incarnation of TJ.
A further occupational hazard of TJ research is that it is eminently about how individuals,
groups, and whole countries take an explicit, normative stance towards a particular period of
the past. Transitional justice is often about dictating the permitted narratives regarding that past,
about determining the socialisation of future generations in relation to this past, and about making
certain people culpable for the past although this culpability is rarely clear-cut.
It is no wonder, therefore, that TJ lacks a third essential parameter, which is a yardstick for
determining when countries have reached an adequate level of transitional justice, sometimes
declared as ‘reconciliation’. Hence, not only do we not have good measurement tools for our
work, but we also have no intrinsic standards for when enough transitional justice has achieved
tangible objectives or outcomes. Because the phenomenon of transitional justice concerns such
core political issues as legitimacy, accountability, and recognition, it is perhaps impossible to
define absolute values or justifiable thresholds of ‘justice’. This, however, only exacerbates the
ambiguities the field must deal with now and in the future.
We will endeavour to illustrate these claims by presenting an overview of the field that is
structured largely along methodological grounds. We echo in this respect the approach taken by
Stan and Nedelsky (2015),who organise their work (as we will) around determinants and impacts
of transitional justice along with some supplementary phenomena such as temporal waves of TJ
policy and memory issues. However,what is missing in their volume is a more rigorous mapping
out of what exactly the term ‘transitional justice’ encompasses. In this sense, our first analytical
section aims at conceptualising the field as such in order to fill this gap more meticulously.
We will compare how different scholars have conceptualised the notion of transitional justice,
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particularly the range of empirical phenomena that authors have decided to encompass when
they have dealt with truth and justice issues.
Second, we will show how, depending on an author’s empirical delineation of the phenomenon,
the independent variables chosen across time or across countries have also varied. This is
crucial,since if we as scholars each shoot at different targets (phenomena),it is no wonder that our
arrows (methods) will be different, and we end up lamenting the fact that there is no consensus
in the field or that we have no universal explanations for what has taken place.
Third, we will turn the methodological equation around and examine those (albeit far fewer)
scholars who have examined transitional justice as a causal phenomenon and sought to answer
what transitional justice (in whatever form it is conceptualised) actually bring to society. These
approaches often pose the most important normative topics, such as whether transitional justice
has achieved ‘closure’, greater rule of law, deeper societal trust, or more consolidated democracy.
Here again we face important challenges regarding the conceptualisation and operationalisation
of these phenomena. Yet, for obvious reasons these also remain some of the most vital questions
surrounding the field.
Lastly, we will present a set of sub-themes in the field of post-communist transitional justice,
namely the comparative study of institutions devoted to TJ, the growing importance of international
influences on TJ, and the place of specifically post-conflict TJ in the context of former
Yugoslavia.
The meaning of ‘transitional’
It is widely believed that the first scholar to actively employ the term ‘transitional justice’ was
Neil J. Kritz, who pioneered the concept in the early 1990s in connection with a path-breaking
international comparative project on how newly democratising countries were dealing with their
repressive past (Kritz 1995,see also Bell 2009). The timing of his scholarly revolution underscores
two points about how TJ in CEE has been studied. On the one hand, Kritz and other participants
in that project were clearly drawn to the topic by the explosion of justice issues facing the
recently freed countries of post-communist Europe. In other words,post-communist Europe has
driven an important part of the overall field thanks to its wide-ranging empirical set of cases and
the simultaneity with which all of these countries began to engage with their past.
At the same time, much of the study of post-communist transitional justice stands apart from
the broader international comparative scene, with few if any scholars venturing outside the
conventional area-studies context. To do a comparative study of, say, Bulgaria and Bolivia would
seem almost unthinkable, even though ‘transitional justice’ as a subject designation ostensibly
applies to both (exceptions are Kaminski and Nalepa 2006, Curry 2007). Scholars of postcommunist
transitional justice have rarely sought to speak to the wider field. Instead, the focus
has been on understanding the particularities of what seemed to be a separate genus of political
processes: dealing with the legacies of repression carried out during totalitarian and/or posttotalitarian
regimes as opposed to authoritarian ones.
Needless to say, if we take as important this distinction between political regimes (going back
to Linz 1975), then the quiet separation of post-communist transitional justice as a sub-field
was entirely warranted in analytical terms (see e.g. Killingsworth 2010). The magnitude of
communist-era repression,its infiltration into all aspects of social life through agents and informants,and
the much greater degree of ambiguity between perpetrators and victims made the cases
of TJ in post-communist Europe somehow distinct from those encountered even in nearby
Greece or Spain. Some scholars even aimed to characterise the phenomenon in a particularly
contextual manner by speaking of ‘decommunization’ (Sadurski 2005, Czarnota 2009).
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Still, it has taken time to build bridges across regions and phenomena. Some scholars, most
prominently Elster (2004: 3), undertook this by extending the analytical focus of transitional
justice back in time, not only to recast our understanding of earlier justice moments such as
the Nuremberg trials, but also to stretch the lineage as far back as ancient Greece (see also Teitel
2003). Stan and Nedelsky (2013) have also expanded our horizons greatly by editing the first
encyclopaedia of TJ that examines measures and institutions of TJ around the globe.
A second ambiguity about how the field has evolved concerns how scholars have semantically
understood the word‘transitional’in transitional justice. In his pioneering work,Kritz established
much of the conventional interpretation of ‘transitional’ as representing the political process by
which new democratic regimes seek to find a balance between seeking revenge against past rulers
and at the same time establishing democratic credibility by adhering to and fostering rule of
law. This understanding that transitional justice writ large has something to do with ‘coming to
terms’ with past repression is widespread and largely unproblematic. At the same time, writers
like Teitel (2000) have treated ‘transitional justice’ from a more legal-philosophical perspective,
examining how law and justice are thrown into uncertainty during times of political transformation.
While Teitel clearly erected a landmark in the field by entitling her treatise Transitional
Justice, her approach needs to be understood as above all a normative reflection on the meaning
of justice amid political change.
Further semantic nuance to the notion of transitional justice has been given by the meaning of
transitional that is ‘temporary’ or intended at some point to come to an end (Rožič and Grodsky
2015: 169). While many policies adopted by governments to deal with past wrongs have indeed
been time-delimited, this understanding of TJ as simply an intermediate reform process has
ultimately not proven to be true. Many countries have explicitly prolonged TJ measures when
their initial mandates had expired. Transitional justice has rarely been seen as something that is
confined to the period of democratic consolidation. It has generally been an open-ended political
arena, where time and again the past is reignited as an object of contention.2
A final perspective on transitional justice has come to the fore only in the last decade or so, as
struggles over the past have indeed resurfaced years after the regime change. These examples have
led several authors to talk about ‘protracted transitional justice’ and in particular ‘late lustration’
(Horne 2009, Szczerbiak 2015). This phenomenon is certainly widespread across CEE, where
many political elites have sought to revise previous TJ settlements and to reshape the narratives
surrounding the erstwhile democratic transition. The most prominent case discussed in this
regard has been Poland, where the first lustration law was adopted as late as 1999 and efforts to
revise both it and the narratives of the anti-communist struggle have recurred repeatedly in the
2000s. An analytically more nuanced interpretation of this phenomenon has been put forward
by Raimundo (2013) and further developed by Pettai and Pettai (2015), who define these latterday
struggles as ‘post-transitional justice’. With this they not only clearly delineate the temporal
boundaries of transitional justice as being confined to the immediate regime transition, they also
point to the substantive difference between the TJ politics that surrounds transition as opposed
to that which develops later.
Conceptualizing transitional justice
Against the backdrop of this terminological multiplicity, it is perhaps no surprise that the empirical
content of what scholars have studied under the rubric of transitional justice in the postcommunist
context has also greatly varied. By far the most frequent object of analysis has been
lustration policy or the adoption of laws aimed at either exposing, vetting and screening, or
altogether removing current and/or future members of the political elite or state administration
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based on individuals’ possible prior involvement with repression under the erstwhile regime
(Nalepa 2009,2010,2012,2015, David 2011,Appel 2005,Letki 2002,Haughton 2013,Williams
et al. 2005, Calhoun 2002). Since practically every country in CEE has considered enacting this
kind of legislation at one point or another, the phenomenon has come to dominate much of the
discussion surrounding transitional justice.
This predisposition to reduce TJ to a single legal domain is understandable to the extent
that policies in this area are often controversial and attract public attention. However, it can
also detract from a multitude of other justice issues that may be pursued in post-communist
society and that more often than not are happening in parallel with this question about what
to do with former members of the security services (Grodsky 2009). Therefore, scholars such
as Stan have pursued a more comprehensive approach to the topic by examining multiple truth
and justice dimensions and demonstrating interlinkages between them. Beginning with an
initial volume covering the entire post-communist space and later producing a separate casestudy
of Romania, Stan (2009a, 2013) has shown the way in which post-communist societies
have often had to grapple with numerous truth and justice issues at once. In her profile of
Romania, Stan covers no less than eight different truth and justice domains, including court
trials, access to former regime files, lustration policies, property restitution and rehabilitation/
compensation for former political prisoners. She also deals with symbolic or mnemonic aspects
of truth and justice, including official condemnations of the former communist regime, the
rewriting of history textbooks, and various ‘unofficial projects’ such as the changing of place
names or grassroots campaigns to put communism as an ideology on trial. As an overview of
topics relating to post-communist transitional justice, Stan’s work is a key point of reference.
Other comprehensive country studies include Tamm (2013) on Estonia and Kim and Swain
(2015) on Hungary.
However,if we are to make progress in explaining the causes and effects of transitional justice,
more conceptually driven frameworks are needed. Many scholars have sought to move in this
direction by structuring transitional justice along sub-categories. This approach often begins
with the classic distinction between measures that are aimed at punishing perpetrators and those
that are aimed at helping victims. Tucker (2006a, 2006b), for example, writes in this vein about
negative and positive justice (see also Tucker 2015). Meanwhile, David (2012) distinguishes in a
review of transitional justice in the Czech Republic between ‘retribution, reparation, and revelation’
as forms of TJ. And most recently Rožič and Grodsky (2015) survey the field in terms of
three sub-categories: retributive justice, administrative justice, and restorative/reparatory justice.
The first area examines criminal cases or legal proceedings brought against leaders or operatives
of the communist regimes; the second encompasses not only lustration, but also more symbolic
measures such as opening former security files to the public and allowing everyone to see who
was in them; and the third turns attention to the victims of repression by profiling policies that
deal with rehabilitation, property restitution, apologies, and overall memorialisation. Some of
this approach draws on Grodsky’s (2011) earlier synthesis of truth and justice measures into a
spectrum of policies that politicians can adopt depending on their costliness in terms of political
capital. In that one-dimensional model, Grodsky ranked measures as ranging from simply a
cessation of human rights abuses (as being lenient) to full-scale prosecution of commanders of
repression. Within this scale, one could find measures relating to both victims and perpetrators.
Hence,many of these works have remained relatively taxonomical. A third level of conceptualisation,
pioneered by Offe, draws explicitly on typologies and conceptual models. Offe (1992)
highlighted very early in the literature that truth and justice measures should be distinguished not
only by the perpetrator/victim dimension, but also by the level at which measures are adopted
(see also Calhoun 2004). Whereas Offe worked with only two levels of measures, criminal law
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and civil law,others have added a third,symbolic level in order to separate out those measures that
may be codified in legislative acts,but do not have direct effects on either perpetrators or victims.
In this manner, opening up old security files is distinguished from other more retributive forms
of lustration, since the former merely shames individuals, while the latter may force them legally
to resign or be banned from office. Likewise,within the realm of victim-oriented policies,having
a separate category devoted to symbolic measures helps to delineate acts such as commemorative
activities or truth commissions from more personalised measures such as compensation schemes
or legal rehabilitation.
A genuinely conceptual understanding of transitional justice would therefore look like
Table 21.1. All of the different measures generally associated with post-communist TJ can easily
be located within this matrix, and in so doing we can begin to compile a more complete picture
of the patterns of transitional justice that one or another country may have used over the last
quarter-century. Pettai and Pettai (2015) illustrate the utility of this framework by comparing
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in terms of the justice measures these countries have adopted in
relation to both repression during the late Soviet era as well as that which was inflicted during
the Stalinist period (something they differentiate as transitional vs. retrospective justice). They
find that when looking at composite patterns of transitional justice, we can distinguish between
étatist countries, where the state takes the lead in promoting measures across the full range of TJ
domains, and inactive countries, where governments leave transitional justice to civil society to
deal with or get involved only with temporary measures. Replicating this kind of comprehensive
overview of transitional justice in other post-communist countries represents one of the future
research trajectories of the field.
The three approaches to TJ conceptualisation outlined in this section admittedly entail certain
epistemological choices to be made by any scholar interested in contributing to the field.
Those who seek to limit the meaning of transitional justice to just one or two TJ measures (for
example, lustration) gain from a high degree of analytical precision and specification, especially
if the phenomenon can be reduced to a dichotomous variable (e.g. the presence or absence of a
lustration law), which in turn lends itself well to comparative quantitative testing (Letki 2002).
However, what is lost in this approach is not only terminological consistency (especially when
transitional justice is used as a synonym for lustration), but also a broader appreciation of the
complexities of post-communist Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past.
Meanwhile, empirical case studies that cover many TJ measures at once help to advance scholarship,but
at the same time can imply an epistemological belief that ultimately each country has its
own unique communist legacy to manage, and that over-generalised conceptual frameworks can
end up being artificial or distortive of reality. Frameworks that seek to map out full-scale patterns
of transitional justice argue in favour of both comprehensiveness and comparison,but require the
largest amount of empirical data collection as well as a more intricate aggregation model when
summing up precise patterns of TJ in order to be fully effectual.
Table 21.1 An integrated conceptual framework for examining transitional justice
Perpetrators Victims
criminal-judicial trials rehabilitation
political-administrative purges/vetting compensation, property restitution
symbolic-representational voluntary self-reporting recognition/truth-telling
Source: Pettai and Pettai (2015: 21).
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Explaining variation in post-communist transitional justice
Continuing our methodological analysis of post-communist transitional justice, it is again no
surprise that where scholars have decided to focus on only one aspect of truth and justice, the
explanatory variables that they have put forward to explain variation across countries have
not always been the same that more multi-dimensional studies have proffered. Across studies
that aim to explain the specific phenomenon of lustration across CEE, explanatory variables
have included both structural and actor-based factors (Welsh 1996). Structural determinants
begin with the type of communist regime,often drawing on Kitschelt’s (1995) famous distinction
between national-accommodative, bureaucratic-authoritarian, and patrimonial regimes
in the communist world. This distal variable is subsequently linked to the type of democratic
transition that eventually took place in the late 1980s, the argument being that bureaucraticauthoritarian
regimes were generally more rigid than national-accommodative ones and
therefore collapsed more quickly. This, in turn, led to a different rapport de force between
pro-lustration and anti-lustration groups with former bureaucratic-authoritarian countries
(like the Czech Republic) implementing harsher lustration measures,while erstwhile nationalaccommodative
countries (like Poland or Hungary) saw roundtable talks that (at least initially)
thwarted the tendency towards harsh measures (and might even have set the stage for a reprise
of these issues later).
At the same time, lustration can also be seen as driven by ‘present politics’ or political calculations
made by different actors depending on the degree to which they or their opponents
have ‘skeletons in their closet’. This approach helps to explain more proximate variations in
terms of how individual politicians or political parties have behaved in pushing lustration issues
or avoiding them. It can also be very fruitfully modelled using rational choice and game theory
(Nalepa 2010). Somewhat in between these structural and individual levels of explanation lie
more circumstantial explanations that draw attention simply to the amount of reliable information
(e.g. files) available to the democratic regime about individuals’ past involvement with the
security services. This pertains particularly to some of the post-Soviet cases,where KGB files were
removed to secure areas in Russia before the USSR collapsed.
In terms of research design, most explanations for lustration come from qualitative comparative
studies, some constructed in explicit Millian terms, others more casually. Among the
former is Nedelsky’s (2004) structured comparison of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, taking
as its point of departure the common political origin of these two countries (Czechoslovakia),
yet highlighting the remarkable disparity between the two states’ lustration policies. Meanwhile,
Nalepa (2010) and David (2011) each draw on Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland to test
their (albeit very different) hypotheses regarding lustration. Several other studies (Appel 2005,
Ellis 1997, Stan 2009a) attempt to examine almost all of the countries of the region, but as a
consequence tend to be descriptive and draw few causal conclusions.
Among our other types of truth and justice policies, comparative and inferential research is
scant. One reason is that the measures themselves have sometimes been too rarely enacted to allow
for multi-case testing. For example,within the realm of criminal prosecutions,very few countries
in CEE have attempted to put their erstwhile repressive leaders on trial. Fijalkowski and Grosescu
(2015) have put forth the notion of ‘transitional criminal justice’, but no generalised hypotheses
exist for explaining when democratic governments seek such prosecutions,much less what types
of criminal paragraphs are used.
Studies of truth-seeking commissions in CEE are likewise limited. On the one hand, some
scholars have lamented the absence of real truth commissions in the region (akin to the famous
truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa), explaining this with the fact that in some
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countries the 1989 roundtable talks between regime and opposition already served as a necessary
moment of catharsis (Garton Ash 2002, Mink 2013). At the same time, where certain investigative
commissions have been created (e.g. in Germany, Romania, and the Baltic states), scholars
have tried to treat these nevertheless as truth commissions (Stan 2009b, Ciobanu 2009, Beattie
2015). However, the question remains whether in conceptual terms these officially appointed
commissions can fruitfully be considered as truth commissions in line with well-established
definitions for such bodies (Hayner 2002, see also Brahm 2009). Because these post-communist
commissions have often had a historical and highly academic focus (looking back at Stalinistera
crimes), they have lacked the strong victim-oriented, restorative justice component usually
associated with truth commissions (Pettai 2015). Moreover, in the Romanian case Ciobanu
(2009) has shown how the so-called Tismaneanu commission was mostly a product of political
manoeuvring by the president at the time in order to discredit political opponents and reanimate
anti-communist sentiment. In this respect, it has been difficult to generalise across the region.
Other restorative justice measures such as rehabilitation,compensation,or property restitution
for victims have all, of course, been widely practised in the post-communist world. Rehabilitation
began already in the post-Stalinist era (McDermott and Stibbe 2015), while compensation
or special social benefits for political prisoners or deportees were often added after 1989 (see in
particular Schroeder and Küpper 2010). Communist-era nationalisation of property was also
righted through large-scale restitution policies implemented throughout the 1990s and often
stretching out into the 2000s (Blacksell and Born 2002, Kuti 2009). However, we do not have
truly explanatory comparisons across any of these domains as yet, since individual case studies or
broad-brush overviews predominate in the literature.
Finally, hypothesis testing has remained limited among works that offer truly composite studies
of transitional justice, since these studies have either focused on single cases (Offe and Poppe
2005),they deal with arguably too diverse cases (Grodsky 2011),or they remain analytically very
preliminary (Pettai and Pettai 2015). Nevertheless, for studies that adopt this perspective, we see
that the explanatory variables tend to be structural. For example, Pettai and Pettai find that Lithuania’s
more activist pattern of transitional justice as opposed to Estonia’s more hands-off stance
can be explained by historical-contextual circumstances such as the fact that the post-1945 partisan
war was much more intense in Lithuania, leading to not only many more latter-day criminal
trials of former KGB officials, but also more victim rehabilitation, compensation, and memorialisation.
Likewise, they show how emerging party systems have a decisive impact on truth and
justice policies across all domains. Thus, where the post-communist party system is defined by
ethnic cleavages (as in Latvia) or ex-communist/anti-communist divisions (as in Lithuania), the
resulting polarization of the political field has a tangible effect on the degree to which elites have
engaged in issues of retrospective justice (see also Bernhard and Kubik 2014).
Effects of transitional justice
Wherever post-communist truth and justice measures have been advocated or adopted, their
predicted effects have included any number of normative, behavioural, or attitudinal goals. First
and foremost,transitional justice is said to underpin a firm commitment to rule of law in democratising
countries. Both perpetrator-oriented and victim-oriented TJ policies should contribute
to a restored ethos of legalism, respect for human and civil rights, and confidence in the judicial
system. Additionally,many have maintained that transitional justice will prevent future politicians
from abusing power or engaging in repressive activities. It is also argued that the new political
system as a whole will perform better without the influence of those compromised or tainted by
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the former regime. Lastly, truth and justice policies should increase citizens’ overall satisfaction
with democracy or their feelings of trust towards politics, political institutions, or in each other
(generalised trust) (for a general review of these issues, see Thoms, et al. 2010).
True empirical research into TJ as an independent variable has been rather preliminary
until now, not least because of the same methodological issues already mentioned involving
conceptualisation and operationalisation. How can outcomes such as improved rule of law or
enhanced human rights be properly assessed or measured? Global datasets such as the Transitional
Justice Data Base project have been used to test the effects of a tripartite conceptualisation
of TJ (based on the existence of trials, amnesties, and/or truth commissions) on broadly
defined variables such as democracy and human rights (Olsen et al. 2010). In these studies,
CEE countries have been included alongside post-authoritarian and post-conflict TJ cases.
Meanwhile, more focused research on post-communist Europe has been presented by Lynch
and Marchesi (2015) drawing on another dataset prepared by the Transitional Justice Research
Collaborative. In this dataset, numerous truth and justice policies are measured, including
domestic criminal prosecutions, amnesty policies and lustration policies; moreover, lustration
is operationalised into separate sub-categories depending on the severity of a country’s policy.
However, in a preliminary analysis of the data, Lynch and Marchesi look mostly at the effects
of lustration on subsequent levels of political and civil rights in a country, and they find very
few statistically significant relationships. A composite variable of TJ measures also yields no
statistically significant results.
Studies of the attitudinal effect of lustration have been led by Horne (2012, 2015), who has
attempted to test the impact of lustration on trust in public institutions and national government.
Although her basic measure of lustration is limited to just three levels (no lustration,‘insufficiently
lustrated’, and ‘sufficiently lustrated’), she runs numerous statistical models controlling for the
timing of lustration, the degree of other TJ measures present, as well as additional political and
economic factors. Her findings indicate that ‘countries with more extensive lustration programs,
more severe lustration programs, and more extensive transitional justice measures have higher
levels of trust in public institutions’, whereas the impact on trust in national government is
inconclusive (2012: 433).
Choi and David (2012) take a unique experimental approach to testing the effects of lustration
on public trust. First, drawing on the cases of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland,
the authors operationalise lustration as a categorical variable involving three types of lustration
systems: dismissal, exposure, and confession. They then embed these variants directly into a survey
questionnaire by developing fictional vignettes about a former informant being subjected
either to dismissal or no dismissal, exposure or no exposure, confession or no confession. When
one or the other narrative is read to a respondent, one can compare the respondent’s subsequent
degree of trust in government along with his/her trust in the fictional official in order to arrive
at a controlled, individual-level measurement of attitudinal change. While David and Choi
hypothesise that all three types of lustration should increase trust in government,only respondents
exposed to dismissal and confession showed higher levels of trust as opposed to being told that
there would be no dismissal or no confession. Moreover, the effect of being told there would be
a dismissal policy (versus no dismissal) was much stronger than the effect of confession, hinting
that respondents generally welcomed dismissal more than any other option in terms of increasing
their trust in government. Meanwhile, the study showed that trust in the tainted officials was
likely to improve if the officials went through a process of confession, while exposure would
decrease this trust. These results clearly represent one of the more sophisticated and original
research designs concerning the effects of transitional justice. In separate work, David and Choi
(2006) also examined victims’ readiness to forgive perpetrators using similarly original survey
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data. While such endeavours are costly and require meticulous preparation, they do exhibit how
important empirical and comparative results can be achieved in the field.
Sub-fields of research
As studies of post-communist transitional justice have evolved, a number of sub-themes have
developed as additional focal points for different clusters of scholars. The first concerns the
comparative study of national institutions established to deal with different TJ policies. Whether
it is individual government offices set up to review secret police files (e.g. the German StasiUnterlagenbehörde
[Stasi Records Agency]) or full-scale institutes for national remembrance
(including in countries like Ukraine and Moldova), the way in which transitional justice policies
have spawned entire administrative structures in some countries arguably constitutes a corollary
field to TJ policies themselves. On a conceptual level, these institutions represent an interesting
link between TJ and the politics of memory. Many of them, like the Polish Institute of National
Remembrance or the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre work in close cooperation
with state prosecutors in tracking down surviving perpetrators of Stalin-era atrocities,
or they assist victims of past repression in seeking rehabilitation and compensation. At the same
time,these institutions are often home to extensive museums and other commemorative activities
aiming at much larger audiences and actively shaping collective perceptions of the communist
past (Mink 2013). In the past decade, moreover, these institutions have become increasingly
inter-connected through transnational networks, the aim of which is to lobby for greater recognition
and scrutiny of communist crimes on a pan-European level. While these new actors and
constellations concerned with the politics of memory pose an interesting field for the study of
transnational practices and agency,the networks also play a role in the field of transitional justice,
as they push for lustration in different countries, examine best practice, or serve as watchdogs for
ongoing justice processes in different states.
Related to the study of transnational memory actors is an emerging field of study that looks
at how domestic transitional justice processes have traversed borders of nation states and national
jurisdictions into European judicial and political institutions. Thus, on several occasions the
European Court of Human Rights has been asked to cast judgments on the legal permissibility
of certain national TJ measures such as lustration or the criminal trials of former secret police
agents. Several scholars have used these rulings to compare different legal and historical perceptions
of communist-era crimes and to theorise about the politics of memory through criminal law
(Brems 2011, Mälksoo 2014). Additionally, attention has been paid to how memory institutions
in CEE (mentioned earlier) and individual politicians from new EU member states have lobbied
European representative bodies (such as the European Parliament or the Parliamentary Assembly
of the Council of Europe) to condemn the crimes of communism and raise awareness about
those crimes. The objective of these efforts has been to secure the adoption of not only landmark
declarations denouncing the communist regimes, but also financing for civil society programs
aimed at the commemoration and remembrance of past sufferings. In analytical terms, authors
have established a connection between the degree to which states have previously engaged in
public remembrance and transitional justice and their ability to secure European resources for
further activities in these areas. Although arguably many of these studies relate more to the study
of memory politics than to transitional justice, they have shed light on new areas of contestation
around TJ issues beyond individual national contexts (Gledhill 2011, Neumayer 2015).
Lastly, when we examine the place of transitional justice in Eastern Europe outside the overriding
backdrop of former communism, it is necessary to note that there has been considerable
transitional justice also in the context of war-torn ex-Yugoslavia (Simić and Volčič 2012). Much
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research in this context has gone into examining ‘the politics of cooperation’ with the International
Criminal Tribunal for the FormerYugoslavia (Ostojić 2014;see also Subotić 2015),raising
interesting questions about the impact of international judicial bodies on domestic TJ processes
more broadly,and of the Milošević trial on domestic debates in particular (Dragović-Soso 2014).
Indeed, an important outcome of these studies has been the realisation that courts have a rather
mixed impact on transitional societies. Studies on Serbia in particular show how the international
discourses on TJ contributed more to ‘silencing’ critical public and political debates on
the conflict and related responsibilities than to their opening (Obradović-Wochnik,2013). Some
authors have, moreover, argued that by linking compliance with the Tribunal’s demands to the
EU accession negotiations, Brussels often did more to constrain rather than strengthen domestic
truth and justice policies (Spoerri 2011). Ultimately, however, this particular area of research is
concerned with processes of coming to term with an ethnic conflict, rather than with the prewar
communist regime and its human rights violations. As Subotić (2015) shows, the Yugoslav
case involves many legacies that other CEE countries do not have such as ethnic warfare,multiple
transitions to democracy, and strong international intervention. This makes a meaningful crossregional
comparison of TJ, including the former Yugoslavia, rather difficult.
Conclusion
This chapter began with a claim that transitional justice in CEE was different from other subject
areas in political science because it was more dispersed in its conceptual landscape and analytical
approaches. We end with an observation that although truth and justice remains a salient issue
in many CEE countries, it does have a half-life and in phenomenological terms it fades at some
point into memory studies and history. The political incentive or imperative to continue investigations
of octogenarian perpetrators, to enact supplementary social benefits for aging political
prisoners, to complete the processing of property restitution claims, or to issue recurrent parliamentary
declarations condemning the communist past is bound to become less acute over time.
Certainly, rhetoric and controversy surrounding the legacies of communism will continue, but
transitional justice as policy will gradually diminish.
This leaves the field with a challenge. With new analytical material appearing to ebb,research
on transitional justice should focus on integrating what we know into a broader international
context. In what ways do countries with long authoritarian regimes resemble those of communism
and how might the lessons of transition justice in CEE serve these newly democratizing
countries? Consider countries such as Egypt,Iran,or Myanmar. How can strong internal security
services be dismantled, former perpetrators prosecuted, past human rights abuses investigated,
and victims acknowledged in these countries when and if democratic leaders come to power?
Irrespective of the conceptual distinctions we may hold between communist and authoritarian
regimes,there may be useful lessons to be drawn from the policy structure and political sequencing
of truth and justice measures that have been adopted in Central and Eastern Europe. This
requires a broader comparative approach.
Another dimension of future research focuses on the place of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in
many of the still-democratising countries of the region such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova,
not to mention authoritarian regimes in Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia. While
the lack of democratisation in these societies in the 1990s can be explained by any number of
different factors, the lack of any real processes of transitional justice should also be looked into
as a counterfactual set of cases to CEE. This would make the field likewise more balanced and
integrative.
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291
Notes
1 This research was made possible by institutional research grant (IUT) no. 20–39 from the Estonian
Research Council.
2 Indeed, the notion of transitional justice has become particularly stretched when it has been applied to
regional and political contexts that have nothing to do with democratic transition and involve measures
(such as truth and reconciliation commissions, official apologies or reparations) intended to redress past
human rights violations against aboriginal groups (Winter 2014).
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