6. History, truth, and dealing with the past

Unlike in the realm of legality, it is impossible to draw a ‘thick line’ in the realm of collective memory, truth and reconciliation. Apart from retributive, restitutive and rehabilitative policies, transitional justice, therefore, commonly includes specific public policy measures, such as recording and publishing accounts of past political injustices and crimes to remind present and future generations of the autocratic or totalitarian past. The emergence of various forms of truth and reconciliation commissions in post-authoritarian societies in Latin America and South Africa and the establishment of institutes of national memory in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe show the importance of the ‘archive imperative’ in democratic transitions.

The political present is always a starting point for dealing with the past (Halmai & Scheppele 1997: 155). Dealing with the past, therefore, is a form of dealing with the present and every past to be dealt with is selected by present agents and their interests. Truth and reconciliation commissions and institutes of national memory typically function as semi-legal, quasi-judicial and administrative bodies with a distinct agenda of supporting the emerging democratic public, its ethics and political unity. Their goal is to substitute for the limitations of legal justice and political compromises driving the democratization process and to give voice to the victims of the past authoritarian regime. However, these bodies commonly support some measure of legal justice, especially civic rehabilitation and material or financial restitution to the victims of the regime.

Lustrations and vetting laws

Apart from the institutionalization of truth and reconciliation processes, democratic transitions are characterized by specific administrative measures, such as laws giving public access to former secret police files and lustration or vetting laws protecting the new regime from officials of the previous authoritarian regime.

Lustration or vetting laws are enacted as a way of both dealing with the past and stabilizing the present process of democratization (de-Nazification, de-communization, etc.). They are a reminder of the simple truth that the rule of law and democratization are irreducible to institution-building and constitution-making alone. These political reforms always involve the personal aspect and public trust in new democratic institutions and their representatives (David 2011: 17).

These laws, therefore, typically scrutinize any past activities of police and army officers, civil servants, judges, prosecutors and other public officials which may justify administrative and other sanctions against them. Drawing on the principle of ‘a democracy defending itself’, the lustration laws list categories of officials of the past regime who are not trustworthy and therefore cannot serve in the post-authoritarian regime. The fact-finding process may be judicial or primarily administrative, with the possibility of judicial review. It may be conducted by government or specific bodies established to deal with the files of the former regime. Furthermore, this process may be supported by a preliminary legal request that a candidate for any job must ‘speak the truth’ and ‘be honest’ about her or his past; failure to do so may result in dismissal and a financial penalty or even imprisonment (Mayer-Rieckh & De Greiff 2007).

The variety of lustration procedures reflects the variety of truth and reconciliation processes. Though legitimized as preventive measures protecting democracy, lustration laws often conflate moral and juridical judgements and, using files and facts collected by the past regime’s secret police, actually obscure the problem of the guilt and crimes of the authoritarian past. They thus highlight the profound controversies and limitations of any form of transitional justice and the complexities of the process of transforming transitional justice measures into the rule of law in a consolidated democracy.

7. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Varieties of democratic transitions correspond to varieties of democracy as their final achievement. Common global trends are as important as local, regional and historical differences and the general modern drive towards democratization hardly can obscure political contingencies and reversibility of the whole process.

Transitional politics finds its juridical forms and historical traditions shape common dreams of the democratic future. Politics of democratic transitions has its local, national, international and global contexts. Though profoundly depending on the state and activism of its citizens, the possibility of democratic participation, liberalization and constitutionalism is increasingly affected by global social and political developments.

Complexity of structural preconditions and mechanisms of democratic transitions calls for equally complex academic perspectives and methodologies. Interdisciplinarity combining political, legal, historical, cultural and social anthropological approaches, therefore, is both necessary and typical of democratic transition theories. Recursive influence of these specific theories on general legal, political and social science has been remarkable in last three decades.

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