Some histories stay secret, but not entirely silent: dealing with the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe.

• Author: Radu, Roxana

"If particular representations of the past have permeated the public domain, it is because they embody an intentionality--social, political, institutional and so on--that promotes or authorizes their entry" (Wood 1999, 2)

Since the demise of communism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in 1989, transitional justice has been invoked as the most appropriate means to deal with the past injustices while strengthening the newly--adopted democratic procedures. Predominantly chosen over criminal procedures or truth commissions, lustration was initially understood as a temporary process of screening public officials for links with the Communist Secret Services, meant essentially to reconcile the need for trust-based institutions and to protect the development of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, with democratic procedures formally in place, under pursuit, a series of legislative proposals known as "the second wave of lustration" in mid-2000s advance an expansion of the scope and of the targeted groups of lustration. This calls into question the extent to which previous lustration policies were effective in reaching their goals, as well as the role that lustration can play in post-communist countries once transition has come to an end. The present paper explores these aspects a multiple case study design, by analyzing Poland and Romania after 2006 in a comparative perspective.

Starting in 2004, the interest for the implementation of lustration policies reemerged. In the year in which the Central European and the Baltic countries became full members of the European Union, a series of initiatives meant to extend the application and the scope of early lustration programs dominated the internal debates. Slovakia, Slovenia and Latvia were among the first countries to face the second wave of lustration or what has been identified as "late lustration" (Horne 2009). In 2006, the Polish and Romanian Parliament analyzed the draft proposals for extensive administrative purges, while the Czech Republic and East Germany reentered this deliberation in 2007. This cross-national phenomenon questions one of the foundational purposes of lustration, that of ensuring that the new democratic regime is not undermined. Moreover, it points to the integration of reckoning with the past in the political rhetoric beyond the first transition years.

Studies on the status of lustration in Eastern Europe are limited to attempts at dealing with the past and in-depth analyses of legal deficiencies. Despite an increased interest in the issue of transitional justice, little comparative empirical research has been conducted. Previous studies on early lustration tended to approach the topic in any of the following three ways. A first group of studies focused unilaterally on finding the causal factor for the initiation of lustration procedures (Welsh 1996, Williams et al 2005). A second group provides explanations for the timing of screening procedures, the legal and the practical implications of different lustration attempts (Offe 1992, Schwartz 1994, Nedelsky 2004), while a third group of analyses concentrates on the moral implications and the extent to which transitional justice hinders liberal democracy strengthening (Moran 1994, Rosenberg 1995).

Apart from these, the second wave of lustration has remained unexplored to the present day. The interaction between institutional change, accountability, communication advancements and civic empowerment in the post-communist context has been given little attention so far. Cynthia Horne was one of the authors to address systematically the relationship between late lustration and the strengthening of democracy in post-communist countries by breaking the cycles of distrust and restricting corruption. The present study represents an exploratory research intended to combine empirical research with conceptual analysis, while arguing against the efficiency of legislative proposals on administrative vetting twenty years after the dismantling of communism. As such, this critical examination of the post-2006 attempts to extend the purpose and scope of screening procedures would shed more light on the evolving meaning of lustration, touching on different aspects of political credibility in the aftermath of regime change.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The first part explores the definition and application of lustration procedures in CEE, while pointing out their critical aspects. The second part is dedicated to the methodological underpinnings and case study design. The substance of the early and late lustration programs is

Lustration as a "fact of life" in CEE

Lustration means "the purification of state organizations from their sins under the communist regimes" (Boed 2002: 358). This process aims at "investigating the past records of people in the public life of the new democracies" (Robertson 2006: 89) and must be distinguished from "decommunization", which refers to legally banning the communist parties, confiscating their property, and using the criminal law against former apparatchiks (Czarnota 2007: 225). More narrowly, lustration presupposes the screening and barring of former collaborators with the communist regime or members of secret services from becoming public employees or political representatives for a number of years after the regime change. In this respect, lustration laws represent "special public employment laws" (David 2006: 350), regulating access to public positions for members of the ancient regime, based on the logic of collaboration downplay.

Following Horne, I draw a distinction between "early lustration" and "late lustration" (Horne 2009). The former category refers to the initial set of lustration processes taking place as soon as possible after the regime change. Generally, a time span is set for the screening procedures and their duration varies between 5 and 10 years. The first example of early lustration being applied occurred in Czechoslovakia in 1991. On the other hand, and quite contrastingly, late lustration refers to a second wave of lustration proposals started in 2003, which aimed at expanding the scope of initial lustration, as well as the composition of the targeted groups.

In CEE, the vetting of public officials for links with the communist secret police has represented the first and the most frequently used method for settling accounts with the past. Besides, what remains common for this process as it took place in the region was the "reliance on information in the Secret Police files of the former regime to assess past regime involvement" (Horne and Levi 2003: 2). Yet, lustration practices are different from one country to the other in what regards the timing, the set of targeted positions and the associated sanctions for past injustices, as well as the set of persons entitled to access the information about the past.

The history of lustration in each of the CEE countries follows its own path: Poland was the first country where communism collapses, but not the first one to implement a lustration law. In fact, it was only in 1997 that the Sejm voted on this initiative. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia passed a law on lustration the earliest, in November 1991, but the split of the country meant following different directions in implementing that specific legislation: in Slovakia, it was...