Post-communist Property Transformations and Transitional Justice. Some Historical, Legal and Philosophical Issues

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of the difficulties of conceptualising measures transforming property adopted by the post-communist Central East European governments, accordingly to a transitional justice framework. The study of the brutal terror accompanying the communist takeover and the Stalinist period in the region indicates that relatively strong retributive measures would be in order, post 1989, to obtain reckoning with the communist past and some sort of closure with this past. Yet, as I argue in this chapter, the Central and Eastern European post-communist ‘transitional’ responses to the wrongs of the communist era mostly appear as unrelated to the historical record of communism in the region. This particularity could be understood in the wider historical context of the communist era in Central Eastern Europe, where great human rights abuses characterised an earlier (Stalinist) phase of communist regimes in CEE, and the brutality characteristic of this early phase was greatly relaxed afterwards. The historical background shows that during its existence, the Real Existing Socialism in Eastern Europe allowed for great social advancement, most evident for citizens from previously marginalised or under-privileged social backgrounds, on a scale not encountered in the recent histories of the CEE countries. This mixed historical record allows us to arrive at an understanding of why the transitional post-communist CEE political agenda was not centered on retributive justice. It also allows us to see why the post-communist CEE political parties preferred the adoption of distributive justice measures, such as those transforming the communist property into private property. However, if closure is an important goal for transitional justice the analysis provided in this chapter shows that little ‘closure’ was obtained in post-communist CEE after the application of measures aiming to change property regimes. Thus, even if the dominance of such measures in post-communist CEE ‘transitions’ could be understood in the light of the historical record, the measures applied in CEE defy an easy explanation under the transitional justice framework and do not accomplish one of the important goals of transitional justice. Therefore, the theorisation of such measures could not be sought in the transitional justice framework usually provided in the scholarship.