Paradoxes of Postcommunist Lustration

Review by Lavinia Stan

St. Francis Xavier University, Canada

Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe. By Monika Nalepa. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 300 pp. $25.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-73550-6).

Postcommunist Eastern Europe has provided the best set of cases for quasi-experimental designs that explain why countries engage differently in the pro-cess of coming to terms with a repressive past. Countries in this region not onlysuffered under the same type of communist regime until 1989, but they experi-enced regime change in a relatively short time period (1989–1991) and engagedin similar reconsiderations of the past during the 1990s. The possibility of con-trolling for so many variables has proven attractive to scholars seeking to identifythe determinants of transitional justice. Most of them have identified the natureof the communist past (Moran 1994), the type of transition (Huntington 1991),or the ‘‘politics of the present’’ (Welsh 1996) as explanations for why countrieshave pursued lustration (the banning of former communist officials and secretagents from public office) and court trials. My own work (2009) has pointed tothe legitimacy of the communist and postcommunist regimes as a main predic-tor, based on examinations of lustration, file access, and court trials conductedin all postcommunist countries until 2007.

In the first study that applies game theory to transitional justice, Nalepainvestigates three puzzles: Why did communists renounce power peacefully ifthey knew they could be held accountable for their past repression? Whendid the opposition refrain from punishing communists? And why did com-munist-controlled parliamentary majorities endorse lustration policies? Com-bined, these three questions seek to identify the conditions in whichretribution occurs and as such the book positions itself in the literature onthe determinants of transitional justice. The book examines the countrieswhere the transition to democracy took the form of pacted negotiations (theCzech Republic, Poland, and Hungary), the 1990–2004 period (ending withthe countries’ acceptance into the European Union), and one transitional jus-tice method—lustration. The analysis draws on elite interviews, archival evi-dence, and opinion polls.

Chapter 1 reviews theoretical frameworks that predict the timing of lustra-tion in postcommunist Eastern Europe. While these theories are found want-ing, either because they examined only a subset of countries or only the early1990s, Nalepa’s country selection controls for the type of transition, theurgency of coming to terms with the past, and the impact of internationalnon-governmental organizations. Relying on game theory, Chapter 2 detailsthe way in which pacted negotiations allowed former communists to relin-quish power peacefully, in exchange for tacit or explicit commitments toamnesty, while Chapter 3 presents the ‘‘kidnapper’s dilemma,’’ which explainsthat the dissident opposition may refrain from transitional justice for fear ofrevealing ‘‘the skeletons in its own closet,’’ that is, the secret agents infiltrated

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2010.01012.x� 2011 International Studies Association

International Studies Review (2011) 13, 186–188

in its midst to supply information on dissident activities. Chapter 4 presentsdata collected from elite interviews conducted in 2004 in the Czech Republic,Poland, and Hungary. In Czechoslovakia, where ‘‘infiltration [by secret agents]was too low to induce communists to step down’’ and ‘‘transition withamnesty was not an attractive option for the [anticommunist] opposition’’(p. 62), radical lustration programs banning a large number of perpetratorsfrom a wide range of public offices were adopted. By contrast, Poland andHungary refrained from transitional justice because ‘‘the existence of collabo-rators among the Polish and Hungarian dissidents—their skeletons—providedthe communists with insurance that promises of amnesty from lustrationwould be kept’’ (p. 70).

The book’s second section asks: Why did Poland and Hungary adopt lustra-tion in 1997, not earlier? And why was lustration adopted when successors tothe Communist Parties were in power? Chapter 5 explores the explanationthat, by adopting lustration laws, parties wishing to win and maintain officerespond to the demands of the voters, but the chapter finds the evidence oftransitional justice driven by voter demands to be inconclusive. Chapters 6and 7 turn to elite-driven hypotheses, presenting the origins of the pro-lustration political parties, the anticommunist opposition, clandestine conspir-acy, the level of parties’ support for lustration, and the younger legislators’preference for pro-lustration parties. A ‘‘Transitional Justice Bill’’ game definesconditions under which it is rational for former communists to engage in lus-tration. When former communists anticipated losing power to anticommunistforces, as was the case in Hungary in 1994 and Poland in 1997, they tried toappease a pivotal median party to prevent harsher legislation favored by hard-line anticommunists. Former communists’ support for lustration was not theresult of the desire for an honest reexamination of the communist past, but apreemptive strategy designed to protect their political careers from moreradical policies. The volume ends with applications of the ‘‘skeleton model’’to Columbia and Northern Ireland.

The book’s strength is represented by its discussion of the Czech, Polish,and Hungarian cases, which Nalepa examined in her PhD thesis, defended atColumbia University in 2005. Contrary to Welsh (1996), who believed thattransitional justice is implemented only by anticommunist forces, Nalepacorrectly observes that, in some postcommunist countries, former communistssupported the reckoning with the past. This puzzling behavior is rational andexplains why those programs were limited in scope. But the volume’s remarkson other Eastern European countries are less accurate and precise. Central tothe book’s argument is Table 1.1 (p. 3), which does not capture all lustrationprograms in the region. Further, the country selection ignored the factthat not all pacted negotiations are alike, while the link between lustrationand ‘‘declassification’’ of secret files is more complicated than the bookcontends.

By linking dissident activity prior to regime change with deals struck duringthe roundtable agreements, this book is the first to underscore the impact of thecommunist-era infiltration of opposition on pacted revolutions and early post-communist transitional justice. The wealth of data provides for a rich narrative,while the compelling analysis would satisfy the most rigorous comparative politicsscholars. Its game theory models make the volume palatable to an Americanpolitical science audience that has ignored the field of transitional justice. Thevolume will be of interest for political scientists, transitional justice scholars, andstudents of Eastern Europe alike.

187Lavinia Stan

References

Huntington, Samuel. (1991) The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. London:University of Oklahoma Press.

Moran, John P. (1994) The Communist Torturers of Eastern Europe: Prosecute and Punish orForgive and Forget? Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27: 95–109.

Stan, Lavinia, ed. (2009) Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Reckoningwith the Communist Past. London: Routledge.

Welsh, Helga. (1996) Dealing with the Communist Past: Central and East European Experiencesafter 1990. Europe-Asia Studies 48: 419–428.

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