Transitional Justice and Memory Development in Europe

Abstract

HOW TO APPROACH TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE AND MEMORY? Henry Rousso marks the post-Nuremberg period as the era of the “judicialisation” of the past, in which the legal domain became one of the dominant “vectors of memory”. I agree, but the essential question remains how the judicial vector of memory interacted with the other vectors. This conclusive chapter considers the impact of transitional justice (TJ) policies on longer term memory development. These are oft en perceived to be separate. It is assumed that states in transition first entered a TJ phase to “turn the page” and aft erwards developed a politics of memory to consolidate the status-quo their TJ policies had created. I would like to connect TJ policies and longer term memory development by assuming that TJ policies have had a profound impact on the way societies dealt with the legacy of the dictatorial/war past on the longer intergenerational term. The nature of TJ measures – their broadness/inclusiveness, their timing, the specific nature of the measures, their long-lived effects, their political use (instrumentalisation, etc.) – had a lasting impact on subsequent memorial regimes. The historic European TJ policies are in this sense part of a larger societal settlement that continues to shape collective memories today. I will use the national chapters in order to detect, analyse and explain certain longer term patterns. This is not an easy feat for several reasons. First, because of the heterogeneity and specificity of our historic cases. There are three groups of case studies (post 1945, the 1970s and post-1989), each with different temporal contexts and lengths. Several authors stress the “uniqueness” of their case. Indeed and by definition, national specificities predominate in these national case studies. A second problem simply lies in the fact that international pattern-analysis spanning several decades involves a staggering amount of potentially relevant variables and tropes, such as the politics of memory, public history, private and public memorialisation, the role of the media and the influence of scholarly research, the role of civil society and self-organising mnemonic communities, developments in judicial contexts and changing public norms. These (and other) aspects all operate within autonomous (and therefore sometimes contradicting) dynamics. Yet they are all relevant to some degree.