Suchergebnisse

Observers have argued that the window of opportunity allowing for the adoption of transitional justice methods in Eastern Europe had closed by mid-1990s, both because by then the public had lost interest in the topic and because former communist officials and secret political police officers retained their political clout and it to block an honest reassessment of the recent past. However, it was only toward the end of the decade that Poland adopted lustration, opened secret archives and investigated a number of communist-era atrocities, proving that, if there is political will, justice delayed might not amount to justice denied. This article examines three methods post-communist Poland has employed in order to come to terms with the communist past -lustration, secret file access and court proceedings- and offers four different explanatory factors that, when taken together, can explain the country's reluctance to pursue the politics of memory more resolutely.

Since 1989, lustration has figured prominently among the methods post-communist Eastern Europe used to deal with its recent past. While to date the literature has recognized that countries like the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Albania and, more recently, Poland, have screened electoral candidates and/or members of the judiciary, the army and the police forces, in order to remove officials with a tainted past from post-communist politics, Romania has been dismissed as a country which consistently rejected lustration. However, calls for the removal of communist officials and secret political police agents were voiced soon after the Revolution of December 1989, and the measures they called for were more comprehensive both in terms of the social categories subjected to and the time period of the ban. This article is the first in-depth analysis to examine the lustration demands included in the Timişoara Declaration, explain the reasons why they received a cold shoulder from formations spanning the entire political spectrum, and map the negotiations between political parties and the civil society for the renewal of the political class. Romania missed the window of opportunity to legislate lustration because of such factors as its bloody exit from communism, the inability of the pro-democratic opposition to wrestle power from the successor of the Communist Party, and its predominantly subject political culture.

Stan and Turcescu examine the complex relationship between church and state in the new Romania, providing analysis in key areas: church collaboration with communist authorities post-communist electoral politics, nationalism and ethno-politics, and religious education, among other areas

It is a measure of the weakness of Romania's democracy that despite electoral system reforms and shifting party alliances, the only real political change in the country post-1989 has been generational-from senior to junior former communists. Adapted from the source document.