Remembrance, History, and Justice. Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies

The relation between memory and justice is a popular and expanding academic research field. On 11 and 12 November 2010, the conference ‘Remembrance, History, and Justice. Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies’ took place in Washington, D.C. The conference was organized by the Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies at the University of Maryland (College Park) in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute. The resulting publication shares this title, which hints at the focus that is not on individuals coping with trauma but on collective memory at a political or juridical level. The editors, the political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu and the historian Bogdan C. Iacob, reflect the interesting interdisciplinary character of the volume. However, that both editors are Romanian has resulted in an overrepresentation of Romanian cases.

The theme of Remembrance, History, and Justice is the burden of authoritarian pasts. The volume investigates the interplay between memory, history, and justice. Despite their different methods and disciplines, all authors depart from the perspective of present, post-1989, democracies. This connects to the editors’ objectives: the volume does not put forward a unitary argument; instead, it provides multiple, complementary readings and nuances. It thus strives for both diversity and comprehensiveness. Indeed, most authors present relatively unknown histories—for instance, those of Moldova and Lithuania.

After the editors’ introduction the volume comprises four parts which are thematically clustered. The first and most general part is about the relation between the politics of memory and democratization. The second part gives attention to histories and their publics. The emphasis of the volume is on the third part, which deals with trials and truth, and expert commissions. In the last part, competing narratives of troubled pasts in Eastern Europe are discussed. Despite this thematic variety, the articles are very much orientated towards politics and political institutions.

This political approach becomes clear, for example, in the second part, ‘Histories and Their Publics’. In discussing Russian textbooks in the period 2000-14, historian David Brandenberger emphasizes the involvement of politicians such as Putin and Medvedev in their search for the promotion of a ‘usable past’. He leaves aside how the new textbooks have been received. The longest article in this part is written by Vladimir Tismaneanu, one of the editors. He discusses the context, character, and difficulties of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania from his own experiences as chairman and coordinator of this commission. The commission was constituted in 2006 by Romanian president Traian Băsescu. One of Tismaneanu’s interesting assessments, which resonates in other articles, is that real reconciliation has not been possible, because the post-1989 period in Romania has not known a mourning process for the traumatic experiences of communism. Instead, Tismaneanu considers the president’s condemnation of the communist regime a moment of civic mobilization, a start for new ways of dealing with a traumatic past. Altogether, the second part thus deals more with the political processes behind public memories than with their content.

The third and main part of the volume, ‘Searching for Closure in Democratizing Societies’, focuses on justice. It shows different approaches and a variety of examples. The Polish historian Andrzej Paczkowski demonstrates, for instance, how internal conflicts in Poland give insight into the difficult functioning of juridical measures trying to deal with the communist past. The chapter by the theologian Charles Villa-Vicencio forms an interesting counterpart. The author played a central role in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). He explains how a realistic approach of ‘dealing with the possible’ (327) led to a successful political transition from apartheid to a democratically elected government. The TRC legislation, offering amnesty in return for truth about South Africa’s past, forms an example of this strategy. The TRC’s work remains unfinished and faces new challenges, but it brings a positive note in the difficult processes described in this part of the volume.

Investigating those transitions critically, some authors also denounce the role model of West European liberal democracy. Interesting examples can be found in the first part of the volume. Well-known historian Timothy Snyder and sociologist Daniel Chirot both look critically at practices of remembering World War Two, Snyder at West European practices, Chirot at German practices. Snyder states that Eastern Europe does not fit in West European memory narratives which, for instance, focus too much on the liberation of the west and narrate differently about the Holocaust. Therefore, they ignore the fourteen million people deliberately killed in what Snyder calls the ‘Bloodlands’: modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the Baltic states.

The fourth part geographically joins the focus of Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands’ because it focuses on Eastern Europe. Its chapters form an interesting collection. Thematically, the first chapter, about Catholic–Jewish relations in Poland, is the odd man out: it focuses on religious ideologies of the Polish Catholic Church instead of political ideologies. In addition, the other chapters about Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria fit more in the arguments put forward in the rest of the book. In his chapter, Bogdan Iacob’s focus is again on the Romanian Commission, but by taking a different perspective, in which he analyzes the content of the report that was produced by the commission and its rejection in different ways, Iacob adds important insights about why Romania has failed to deal with its communist past.

Overall, the volume has a strong international and comparative approach, which makes it a diverse and interesting read. In their introduction, the editors claim to be innovative because of their scope going beyond Europe. The last part’s focus on Eastern Europe might call this claim into question. It is true that chapters about, for example, South Africa and Cuba are included, but such chapters are few. It is also true that some chapters, such as Chirot’s article about Germany and Japan, have a comparative perspective, but because they prioritize the European side of the story, comparisons with non-European countries principally serve to understand European memory practices.

Notwithstanding this Europe-oriented perspective, Remembrance, History, and Justice completely fulfils the promises of thematic and methodological innovativeness. The volume has an impressive thematic and methodological variety and a strong interdisciplinary character. It is refreshing that many authors not only write from an academic point of view but also integrate their own experiences—for instance, in truth and reconciliation commissions—in their contributions. On a methodological level, one might question the strive for objectivity of some of those contributions. Nonetheless, they give interesting insights into and reflections on the practices of dealing with authoritarian pasts in democratic societies.