How should societies deal with their past and provide justice that has been previously denied? How do elites in a period of transition design policies that reflect their own political agenda and also socially acceptable means for dealing with those from the former regime? Over the past decade, there has been a burgeoning literature that examines the design and the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms, exploring the effectiveness of various strategies as well as the difficulties in securing shorter-term and longer-term social goals. The two books under review explore these issues by examining the persistence (or absence) of criminal trials during posttransitional justice and the origins and the effects of lustration (institutional reform) as a form of transitional justice. Both authors draw upon a comparative case study and significant fieldwork to assess variations in the design of policies, in implementation, and ultimately in the impact of the mechanisms on broader social goals.
The objectives of these two works are quite different, however. Roman David's book provides a theoretically rich analytical framework and lexicon for exploring the process of lustration in Czechoslovakia (the Czech Republic), Hungary, and Poland and for using experimental methods to assess broader social goals, such as trust and reconciliation. David's work unpacks transitional justice terminology to develop a novel framework for understanding lustration beyond a historical legacy perspective. Rather than focusing on the mechanism itself, Cath Collins's book provides a new framework for transitional justice, labeled by the author “post-transitional justice.” Drawing on a case study of Chile and El Salvador, Collins seeks to explain the absence or the persistence of accountability claims over time.
Chapters 2 and 3 of Post-Transitional Justice outline the six characteristics that distinguish such justice from that found in the traditional transitional justice literature. These characteristics involve the perfecting of democracy, the questioning of previous decisions, the nature of the actors (private versus public), multiple venues (legal and political), multiple and sometimes divergent goals of the actors, and the more limited role of the international community in domestic policymaking. Collins deemphasizes the role of international norms as crucial to renewed claims for the investigation of human rights violations (HRVs). For example, she downplays the “Pinochet effect” in galvanizing renewed calls for accountability in Chile as well as in El Salvador, and instead explores the domestic role (or lack thereof) that attorneys and the community of nongovernmental organizations played in keeping HRVs on the public agenda.
The rest of the book is a well-written and well-documented account of the abuses of, and the public and private reactions to, claims for justice. Collins concludes that the posttransitional accountability process in Chile was fundamentally different from that of El Salvador precisely because domestic actors were virtually absent from the El Salvadoran scene. Chile's long-standing legalistic culture, which was initially an impediment to justice, actually became a valuable asset in renewed claims for accountability in the 1990s. In both cases, the author finds minimal evidence that universal jurisdiction (either criminal or civil) had a significant role to play in readdressing previous HRVs.
While I agree with Collins that the framework of transitional justice needs to be expanded to incorporate longer historical trends (domestic and international), it is not clear that the proposed posttransitional framework provides us with an analytic tool for assessing these trends. Since this framework is based on a perfecting of democracy that involves nonstate actors from civil society, a fundamental question not addressed is how we identify when a country has entered a period of “posttransition.” What features signal this change? Perhaps because the author draws upon only two country cases, it is difficult to provide a more comprehensive framework for addressing the evolution from transitional to posttransitional justice. Moreover, while Collins tends to dismiss the role of the international community and emerging international justice norms in the renewed call for addressing HRVs in these two countries, the role that transnational actors play in attempts to provide justice that has been delayed needs to be carefully considered in light of institutional changes we have witnessed throughout the past two decades (e.g., internationalized tribunals and truth and reconciliation commissions, as well as the founding of the International Criminal Court). Nevertheless, her approach to posttransitional justice—or what I like to refer to as “consolidated justice”—is promising and highlights the fact that readdressing past wrongs is part of the political and social environment of even established democracies.
Rather than challenge the transitional justice approach, David's book attempts to provide greater clarity and specificity to lustration as a transitional justice mechanism, as well as to provide operationalizations and tests for the concepts of trust and reconciliation. Lustration and Traditional Justice begins with a layout of the classification system of lustration and then contextualizes the meaning ascribed to the various forms it can take. This classification system is offered to examine why countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, which on many measures were so similar, adopted such different models to deal with Communist Party members and informers (those he later refers to as in the “gray zone”).
David's classification scheme is well defined and exhaustive, but his analysis is not legalistic in describing the nature of the lustration laws. While he documents the parliamentary debates on the laws, he specifically avoids viewing lustration as a legal activity, instead focusing his analysis on the social and psychological meaning of lustration in its various forms. David situates personnel systems within the broader transitional justice literature and classifies lustration systems as exclusive (in which individuals from the previous regime are barred from holding office), inclusive (individuals are confronted with their past and can either step down or face public exposure) or reconciliatory (individuals may remain in office if they publicly reveal their past collaboration).
Chapter 4 identifies the central puzzle of the cases: All three countries had noncommunist majorities when the respective lustration laws were passed, but only Czechoslovakia adopted an exclusive system. Given that these central European countries, on many measures, were similar, what accounts for this variation? David finds that the origins of lustration variation comes from the perception of the former Communist Party as transformed, and to a lesser extent from support from the gray zone of former Communist Party members who switched allegiances during the regime change. On the basis of survey results, he argues that the demand for the dismissal of party members in Czechoslovakia favored an exclusive system because the former Communist Party was viewed as unreformed and gray zone membership was still significant, whereas in Hungary and Poland, the former Communist Parties rehabilitated themselves and gray zone membership was unimportant. This leads to the adoption of an inclusive and a reconciliatory system, respectively. While the analysis is instructive, it would have been beneficial had David more fully addressed the issue of temporal difference in lustration adoption as a possible intervening variable, noting how the time horizon influenced perceptions of the former Communist Party as well as membership in the gray zone. As he discusses in Chapter 3, by the time that Polish politicians adopted its law in 1997, they had learned from the experiences of Hungary (1994) and, in particular, from the international criticism regarding the Czechoslovak system adopted in 1991.
David's analysis, however, goes beyond explaining institutional variation. The third part of this book provides a novel experiment designed to test the effects of the personnel systems on trust in government, as well as the social effects of these systems on reconciliation and collective memory. The experimental method used is a factorial design to test the various combinations of “dismissal,” “exposure,” and “confession” as treatment manipulations of the three lustration systems. Subjects were exposed to a two-part experimental vignette in which the first part described the wrongdoing of the individual and the second part offered various solutions to the wrongdoing. David finds that dismissal, which creates “a line in the sand,” is most consistently the strongest predictor of trust in government (not surprisingly especially in the Czech Republic). Exposure is not statistically significant, and confession, while significant, is far less predictive of trust than is dismissal. The irony is that while the Czechoslovakian model was criticized when initially adopted, it yields the largest positive effect on government trust of any of the three systems.
In terms of the indirect effects of these systems on social reconciliation, David, perhaps not surprisingly, finds that the Polish system of confession is the only significant predictor of social reconciliation. This indicates that there are differences in the benefits of these lustration systems and that the benefits are somewhat bound by their environment. These findings are theoretically rich and have significant policymaking implications. The author is to be commended for combining a well-constructed, most similar case study design with a field experiment. As he notes, only through the use of the experimental method could the effects of these lustration systems be uncovered.
These two books make important contributions to our understanding of transitional justice. Collins's work requires us to rethink the temporal nature of transitional justice and to begin the process of creating a new framework that addresses justice beyond transition. David's work highlights the importance of unpacking concepts and applying novel empirical methods to assist us in understanding the effects of transitional justice.
