Romania has undergone a radical, yet troubled transition to democracy in the last 20 years. Successive post-1989 governments have drawn on a notion of collective memory that reflected both progressive arguments for change and facing the past and conservative arguments of putting the past to rest.

Romanian politics since the 1989 revolution has been an ‘ongoing struggle for political power between the surviving forces of the old regime and those who believe in a complete break with the pre-1989 nationalist-communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu’ (Ciobanu 2009, p. 313). It is this struggle that almost 30 years later still sets the tone for political reflection and political action around the creation of ‘public spheres of “real” memory that will counter the politics of forgetting’ (Huyssen 2003, p. 15) or denial (Cohen 2001).

Academic experts (predominantly historians or political scientists) have been authorized (by politicians or civil society) or, in some cases, have taken upon themselves the role of opinion makers. The key part of that role was that of setting the moral agenda of the present, shaping a moral discourse and sensitizing present generations of its responsibilities to the past (Cesereanu 2008; Poole 2008).

Struggles around the communist legacy and its public representation have been one of the central elements of the process of coming to terms with the past in Eastern Europe (Tismăneanu 1998). One of the most important aspects of this process has been linked to how nation-states reckon with former regimes, how nation-states turn themselves into some sort of ‘socially organized biographical objects’ (Plummer 2001) when ‘confronting’ the past. This chapter is generally concerned with the social organization of collective memory in the public arena.

In the Romanian context, the role of historians and political scientists was to ensure that emerging elite representations of the communist period challenged alternative ways of organizing and approving knowledge in the public sphere coming from right-wing and ex-communist political attempts of downplaying or even denying the atrocities perpetrated by the communist regime (Tismăneanu 2007a, 2008 ). The focus of this chapter is one such challenge—the ‘Tismăneanu Report’ (henceforth ‘the Report’) condemning communism in Romania. The focus of this chapter is on the textual accomplishment of representations of communist history in this official document of the Romanian state. The chapter explores how the Report displays and shapes the ideological contours of coming to terms with the past around a particular representation of communist past as a moral problem. Several constitutive features of the Report that facilitate bringing off a particular representation of history are discussed: (a) the construction of a practical framework for the inquiry as a matter of public concern and attention; (b) the production of ‘communism’ as a political category with uniquely bound features; and (c) the (textual) structuring of time by joining a political agenda (of condemnation) and a nationalistic repertoire around national identity.

This chapter considers representations of history as something in need of constitution rather than simply relied on. It is suggested that a conception of coming to terms with the past as a textual accomplishment may lead to a fuller appreciation of the structure, function, and salience of representations of history as integral part of moral/political/legal courses of action in contexts of transitional justice.

Representations of History in Theory

The relationship between history and psychology has been a focus of constant concern in social psychology. There have been several attempts to offer a social, psychological underpinning to interpreting this relationship (see Tileagă and Byford 2014 for a more recent, interdisciplinary take on the relationship between history and psychology). Authors (see, for instance, Bruner 2005; Gergen 2005; Straub 2005) have been concerned with what is generally referred to as the ‘active construction of historical realities’ (Straub 2005, p. 45). According to Bruner, the fact that ‘“history making” has not been studied more as a psychological phenomenon is probably less an oversight than a blind spot created by the archaic conviction that history is just “there” and in no need of being constructed’ (2005, p. 37). Gergen documents how ‘historical narratives serve as a foreground for achieving moral identity within relevant communities’ (p. 116) and sustain visions ‘of the moral society’ (p. 118).

Social representations of the past, nation, and history have also been studied with regard to the construction of national entitativity (Condor 2006), social identity politics, and the perception of history and cultural/historical representations of nation-states (Liu and Hilton 2005) or social inequality (Sibley et al. 2008). Some researchers have chosen to detail the influence of representations of history on ‘identity dynamics’ (Liu and Hilton 2005) and political attitudes (Hilton et al. 1996). Condor (2006) has focused, among other issues, on the temporal aspect of societal representations and discusses the social psychological aspects of national representation: temporality and entitativity. As she argues, ‘national representation may vary as a function of the deployment of particular temporal frames of reference’ (p. 673), as historical narratives may take both ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ forms.

When social psychologists approach history, its construction and maintenance is conceived as a dynamic socio-psychological process (Pennebaker and Banasik 1997). The socio-cultural approach in psychology (see Valsiner and Rosa 2007 for an overview) has been closely engaging with issues of how history gets reconstructed as social memory. Memory as a topic for socio-cultural psychology involves ‘approaching remembering and forgetting as public, social activities where individual experience is necessarily mediated by collective experience’ (Middleton and Brown 2007, p. 661; see also Murakami 2007). The thrust of this position relates to understanding how history and historical representations can be said to acquire a social character as a result of a variety of activities, forms of interpretation, and recounting over time (cf. Middleton and Brown 2005). Socio-cultural psychologists distinguish between a ‘strong version’ of collective memory, one that is seen as ‘slipping into questionable assumptions about memory of the group’ (Wertsch 2007, p. 646), and a ‘distributed version’ of collective memory, where memory is viewed as being distributed ‘socially’, in small group interaction and ‘instrumentally’, involving ‘active agents … and cultural tools such as calendars, written records, computers, and narratives’ (p. 646).

In addressing the collective historical continuity of the nation and the representation of its history, nation-states create different ‘texts of history’ (cf. Wertsch 1997) that may persuade citizens of the reasonableness and importance of a nation’s aspirations and trigger or influence diverse forms of social and political action (see also Luczynski 1997). For social psychologists embracing a socio-cultural perspective, the group is not the source of memories or, for that matter, an entity endowed with the ability to transpose the past into the present. Understanding the reconstruction of the past on the basis of the present and the creation of what has been called a ‘usable past’ that can serve some identity project or form the basis of a negotiation of group identity entails understanding that ‘collective frameworks are … the instruments used by collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord … with the predominant thoughts of the society’ (Halbwachs 1952/1992, p. 40).

The need to secure legitimization for specific reconstructions of the past entails not only representations of history shared to some extent by all members of a society but also the configuration of polemical representations where competition between views/positions/representations is an essential feature. Polemical representations can create and organize/re-organize the collective frameworks through which an image of the past is conveyed.

However, what also matters in the study of collective memory and reckoning with the past is how representations of history (and the social practices in which they figure) may be displayed and conceptualized as situated and public accomplishments. Although there is much to take from all the aforementioned studies, what seems to be missing is a dimension of taking the social organization of representations of history as a topic of investigation in its own right (cf. Lynch and Bogen 1996). Arguably, one will not be able to satisfactorily comment on the construction of representations of history in the public sphere as forms of moral narratives (Gergen 2005) before one has charted the constitutive processes involved in bringing off representations of history as situated social action and social practice. In order for representations of history to become foundations for the public articulation for the past, they have to be constituted in some way or another as stories of some kind. This work of constitution is the focus of this chapter.

This position does not necessarily entail assigning a special ontological status to ‘representations of history’. Following Ibañez (1994) one could argue that ‘we neither construct representations nor do we represent constructions’ (pp. 364–365). We neither construct representations of history nor do we represent historical constructions. This may seem a radical statement, but instead of focusing on the process of ‘representation’, a more useful avenue is that of focusing on the practical production and dissemination of history, its projected and constituted public dimension.

Representations of History in Action

Discursive psychology (DP) can start to offer an alternative to theorizing the social organization of representations of history and coming to terms with the past. As ‘interpretive communities’, nation-states continually rewrite various stories, interpretations, and representations of themselves. National histories will not only be characterized by the special moments of heroism and patriotism but also by the marks of troubled, contested, and controversial pasts.

It is suggested that understanding the social organization of representations of history should be seen as a situated, occasioned, rhetorical, and action-oriented accomplishment. What also underlies an appreciation of the social organization of representations of history is taking into account the context of controversy, justification, and criticism in which representations of the past are construed, debated, challenged, and transformed.

A discursive approach tries to place collective memory, social representations of history, and coming to terms with the past as something in need of constitution. What I am referring to here is a (method of) constitution through a ‘documentary reality’ (Chua 1979a; Smith 1974), which ‘embodies a textually constructed reality, which in turn makes reference to the world external to the text’ (Chua 1979b, pp. 47–48). This is a move that entails a focus on the situated and practical-textual accomplishment (Barthélémy 2003) of the past. It is also a move that presupposes an ethnomethodological ‘analytic mentality’ that insists on ‘working on materials to see what can be discovered in and from them, rather than selecting problems and data on the basis of some theoretically specified agenda’ (Eglin and Hester 2003, p. 90). In this particular case, it involves studying official public documents of the state with an interest in whatever perspectives can be discovered to be relevant to members of society themselves (cf. Berard 2005).

Part of this undertaking is to unravel, reveal, ‘the image of “reality” which the text projects’ (Prior 1997, p. 70) by identifying its constitutive features essential to its redemption as a medium for practical/political/ideological courses of action. The relevant issue is not so much how nation-states may retroactively ‘interpret’ their past and present history based on ‘facts’, but how collective memory, the reckoning with former regimes and troubled pasts, unfolds and is being displayed and entangled in a moral universe/space of public visibility and accountability. If one takes seriously the idea that the essential thing about transitional justice practices, methods, and programs is their ‘designed visibility’ to accomplishing transitional justice goals (restitution, retribution, etc.), then one perhaps ought to study the discursive and social procedures that ensure their ‘publicly accomplished recognition’ (Edwards 1997, p. 99, emphasis in original) as practices, methods, and programs of that kind.

As I argued in the introduction, one can accomplish this task only if one accepts not only the assumption of ordering of social life from within but also a wider notion of ‘discourse’. Making sense of coming to terms with the communist past, interpreting the writing and re-writing of history in political transitions, cannot continue to ignore the publicly available, accountable means of constructing representations of history. This entails, among other things, treating documents, and texts as ‘reflecting the meanings which people … or groups attribute to their experiences, and the perspectives through which they define their social realities’ (Drew 2006, p. 79).

Case Background

Romania’s exit from communism has resulted in a quasi-democratic regime. Simply, but sketchily put, Romanian politics has been (and still is, in some respect) characterized by a continuous struggle for power between the democratic intelligentsia, nostalgic communists, and populist nationalists. When it comes to confronting the past, the ‘democratic’ Romanian politics has been usually the product of an uneasy mix of ambiguous political positions, where the line between genuine and politically motivated commitments and positions is very difficult to draw. The ‘revolution’ of 1989 seemed to have opened the way for a genuine attempt to come to terms with the legacy of the communist regime, but the fierce opposition of the nostalgic communists (such as the former president Ion Iliescu) and xenophobic nationalists (such as Corneliu Vadim Tudor) has hindered the process of reckoning with the communist past (cf. Tismăneanu 2008 for more details on Romania confronting its communist past and the wider political/ideological context preceding that).

In 2006, in the context of the impending Romanian accession to the EU,Footnote 1 political opportunity arose for members of civil society to do what no one has attempted to do before in Romania: reveal the full extent of communist crimes and condemn communism officially in front of the Romanian Parliament.

A petition signed by hundreds of intellectuals was handed to the Romanian president in March 2006. The petition explicitly requested the public condemnation of the Romanian communist regime as ‘illegitimate’ and ‘criminal’ (cf. Dragusin 2007). In response to the appeals of civic society, the then president of Romania, Traian Băsescu, set up a Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, led by Prof. Vladimir Tismăneanu, internationally renowned Romanian-born American political scientist at the University of Maryland. The commission was appointed in April 2006.

The Tismăneanu commission,Footnote 2 as it was subsequently known, produced, within a year, an official report of the Romanian state (‘Final Report of the Presidential Committee for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania’) condemning communism in Romania. In December 2006, the Romanian President Traian Băsescu, officially condemned the crimes of the communist regime in front of the Romanian Parliament, declaring the communist regime in Romania as ‘illegitimate and criminal’.

According to Stan (2007), the Tismăneanu commission was the first presidential commission in Eastern Europe to investigate the crimes of communism. However, the commission was not unique in its aims; it was preceded by similar attempts at investigating the crimes of communism in Germany and several Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) (cf. Stan 2009).

The Report deals with the period 1945–1989. The Report runs over almost 700 pages and has the following structure: an introduction on the ‘nature, scope and effects of the Romanian communist totalitarian regime’ followed by separate chapters on the Romanian Communist Party (Chap. 2), the Communist Repression (Chap. 3), and Society, Economy, and Culture (Chap. 4). The conclusions of the Report come under the title: ‘the necessity of the analysis, condemnation and repudiation of the Communist regime’. The Report closes with the biographies of the communist bureaucratic elite.

Tismăneanu was given full authority to appoint the members of the commission, which included around 20 members (mostly public intellectuals that gave legitimacy and credibility to the project) and around 20 experts who were charged with writing the texts that made up the various sections of the Report. Some of them were known to the Romanian public for their academic work, others for their anti-communist activity and activism in civil society groups. The relatively short time frame in which the Report had to be produced (six months) and delivered and issues raised by unhindered access and use of archives posed a variety of problems for the members of the commission. To fulfil its mandate, the Report relied on the study of archival documents (including those to which there was newly granted access), formal academic analyses of communism and post-communism, and memoirs of former political prisoners, dissidents, or members of the former repressive apparatus. However, the commission did not interview directly victims nor include testimonies of surviving victims. The Report’s assessment of the number of communist victims and the various types of opposition to the communist regime represented in the Report were matters of intense controversy among historians, journalists, and public figures.

Băsescu’s official address in the Romanian Parliament, endorsing the Report, was fiercely opposed by the two main opposition parties at that time (the left-of-center Social Democrats and the right-wing Greater Romania Party). As Ciobanu writes, the reactions were not especially surprising, as the Report

deprived two groups (former communists and nationalists) of an honourable place in national history. While it relegated these groups to the status of oppressors, it endowed former dissidents and anti-communist opposition groups with a moral authority that conferred on them political legitimacy. (2009, p. 332)

Whose collective memory was being represented, recuperated, and re-written (and how was this done) was almost invariably the subject of controversy. For instance, several institutions, including the Romanian Academy and the Institute for Investigating the Crimes of Communism in Romania, contested the scientific value of the Report. Various anti-communist associations were unhappy that the variety of anti-communist movements before 1989 was not properly acknowledged. The Romanian Orthodox Church even ordered its own investigation irritated by the Report’s revelations of the links between clergy and the communist party and secret police.

Media reactions to the Report were mixed. The majority of the liberal-leaning media considered the Report a good and needed initiative, yet futile since former communists were still occupying public posts (cf. Hogea 2010). Liberal newspapers (e.g., Cotidianul) were more inclined to consider the Report as a ‘redressive ritual that would bring closure to a traumatic past’ (ibid., p. 26). The right-wing media (e.g., Jurnalul National) promoted an agenda of suspicion and accusations of rewriting history for political purposes and contested the objectivity of the Report. This was accomplished through vicious personal attacks and questioning the authority and honesty of Vladimir Tismăneanu. The right-wing media went as far to suggest that some of the methods used by the Romanian president and his commission resembled those of the pre-1989 communists.

Although the main focus in this chapter is on the Report itself, President Bǎsescu’s address to the Romanian Parliament and Vladimir Tismăneanu’s own texts (newspaper articles and commentaries) collected in Refuzul de a uita [The refusal to forget] (Tismăneanu 2007b) will also be drawn upon. This stems from an analytic and methodological suggestion of investigation/analysis of texts ‘as they … “occur” in actuality, namely in some sequence of action in relation to each other’ (Smith 2004 , p. 199). The texts concerned authorize the same version of (historical) reality. This has relevance to exploring discourses of collective memory as ‘local practices organizing a sequential social act’ (Smith 2004, p. 195). The president’s address to the Romanian Parliament brings the Report into what might be called ‘a position of discipleship’ (Hodge and McHoul 1992, p. 191), thus being constituted as ‘an accomplice’ to the moral vision of the president’s address.

I am interested in how these texts, as sites for the constitution, organization, and transmission of public memory, collaboratively negotiate and advance a specific elite social representation of communism. It is true that the Report and Tismăneanu’s texts represented one position among many at the time, yet an (exemplary) position whose aim was to establish, and promote, itself as national narrative, a representative and normative framework around national reckoning with the recent communist past. I do not minimize the role of the broader argumentative context in which the Report and debate around it took shape. I have purposely omitted other texts and especially those that have called into question the credibility and genuineness of the Report as an elite representation of the recent communist past. Those texts (and their ‘dialogue’ or ‘quarrel’ with the Report) require separate analysis that is beyond the scope of this book. It is nonetheless a task that must be fulfilled to get a sense of the overall pattern of organization and transmission of elite political memory in Romania, which then may translate to other contexts as well.

When applied to texts, an ethnomethodologically inspired analysis looks at texts in actual social occurrence and in term of ‘what can be discovered in and from them’ (Eglin and Hester 2003, p. 90). Texts are treated as ‘phenomenal’ fields (Watson 2009) whose discursive, socio-cultural, and political details are socially occasioned, rhetorical, and textual accomplishments. Within this framework, I am interested in a critical analysis of texts that focuses on the discursive processes involved in the constitution of realities those texts are ostensibly about (Lynch and Bogen 1996; Watson 2009; Smith 1974).

As a particular type of public document, inquiry reports are ‘politically salient exercises in reality construction’ (Green 1983, p. 10). They are also ‘doubly charged with sociological interest’ (ibid, p. 10), by virtue of the ‘substantive topic … they refer to’.

The aim of analysis is to describe how documents and texts, such as the Tismăneanu Report , constitute an authoritative and particular representation of communism and mediate and organize the official political memory of communism. How is the condemnation of communism accomplished as an authentic mix of scientific and political enterprise? How is that mix reflected in the argumentative structure and organization of the Report? What are the textual means used in the Report to bring off a particular representation of communism? What are the means through which the character, the essence, of the past is constituted? How is a sense of the nature of state of affairs accomplished and displayed in the commissioned Report in order for it to be consequential to a process of coming to terms with the past?

Official documents and texts (especially those that appraise historical and political events) are often analyzed as a window onto a historical reality or directly reflecting the (politically motivated) wishes, desires, interests of their producers. What these positions do not take into account is that language is not merely a kind of (transparent) window ‘onto the world’ and written texts themselves can ‘predispose our “access” to and conception of’ (Watson 2009, p. 8) historical events/phenomena/reality. In the case of the Tismăneanu Report the task of the analysis is to untangle the image of (historical) ‘reality’ which the text projects (cf. Prior 1997, p. 70), to reveal how the Report (in conjunction with the president’s address) ‘actively makes sense’ (Watson 1997, p. 85) of the phenomenon of which they speak about.

The implicit question that the Report is seemingly trying to answer is: how is the communist period to be processed in public consciousness? This is a matter concerning, among other things, the ‘public use of history’ (Habermas 1988). Taking account of the social and political context of coming to terms with the past in Eastern Europe (and Romania), one might argue that the main task of the Report was ‘fixing an enduring historical account of an evil past’ (cf. Teitel 2000, p. 105). It is relevant, in this context, that the narrative of the Report wasn’t based on a dominant and widely shared representation of communist history in the Romanian public sphere.Footnote 3 A case in point was the way Băsescu’s parliamentary address and the ‘conclusions’ of the Report were ‘received’ in the Romanian Parliament. Băsescu was heckled throughout his address. The ‘charge’ was led by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the then notorious leader of the extreme right-wing Greater Romania Party, whose name, alongside that of former President Iliescu and others, has been mentioned in the Report as ‘pillars of communism’. The analysis addresses the issue of how the presidential address actively resists alternative categorizations of the condemnation of communism as a politically motivated move rather than a genuine attempt at reconciliation.

Constructing a Practical Framework for the Inquiry as a Matter of Public Concern

The Report seems to be inviting the reader to treat it as a resource to gain information on a specific period in national history. In order to construct a practical framework and concern for the inquiry, the Report is faced with having to provide both ‘for the availability … or observability-reportability’ (Eglin and Hester 2003, p. 52) of the reporting and the meaning of the reporting. This is done by incorporating a framework of political reconciliation and transitional justice. The Report contends that the ‘recuperation of memory, but also the identification of responsibilities are indispensable to the functioning of a democratic political community’ (p. 10). The Report sets out to document the ‘dimensions and methods of repression from Communist Romania’ (p. 16) in order ‘not to forget, to condemn, to not repeat’ (p. 635). The practical framework that calls for the investigation is justified by making reference to a public concern around the lack of responsibility-taking in relation to the past:

(1) ‘None of the parties from post-December Romania has assumed the responsibility for the four decades and a half of obsessive following in the construction of an impossible utopia’. (R, p. 10)

(2) ‘There is not yet an official document of the Romanian state in which one apologizes to the victims of the communist terror for their immense and totally undeserved suffering’. (R, p. 10)

Note the use of extreme case formulations (Pomerantz 1986) which point to the relevance of this particular type of inquiry. What is seen as missing is, on one hand, political responsibility-taking in relation to the past and on the other hand, a political and moral dimension of reconciliation. A moral order is constituted by making relevant the absence of moral courses of action. The moral significance of the inquiry in itself does not need to be directly justified. Arguably, the historical (and practical) significance of ‘studying’ communism need not be justified. ‘Communism’ is already a ‘reality’ constituted beyond the text and associated with particular descriptions, features, and characteristics in political, everyday, and mass-media imagination. One could argue that this assumption does ‘provide a generic warrant for the attribution of historical significance’ (Lynch and Bogen 1996, p. 60). Nevertheless, although the choice of communism as a topic of inquiry does not seem to require a justification, what needs to be justified, as I will be showing later in this chapter and Chap. 5, is the social representation of communism.

The current investigative concerns are constituted as plausibly tied to public criteria and moral worlds. The investigative concerns are moral because they are public concerns.

(3) ‘The burden of not condemning communism in the period 1990–2006 has, in many respects, hindered democratic consolidation and has created sentiments of profound frustration, exasperation, and disappointment among large social groupings’. (R, p. 10)

(4) ‘The Presidential Commission was established … in response to society’s demands that the totalitarian past should be assumed and condemned. We considered it necessary to constitute the Commission precisely in order to substantiate intellectually and morally the act of condemnation’. (B)

The ‘intellectual and moral act of condemnation’ is to be understood as a public act responding to a public concern. The practical framework of inquiry is established through the constitution of a practical-public concern as something publicly observable. Condemning communism and fulfilling the transitional justice goal of reconciliation is presented as an issue for the members of society rather than solely for the investigators themselves. This is, nevertheless, not considered enough to substantiate the analytic focus of the Report. The Report also needs to construct the necessity of condemning communism. It achieves that by drawing upon a repertoire of an ethic and rhetoric of responsibility. This repertoire is manifested in two textual orientations: an orientation to pragmatic political action, on one hand, and an orientation to accountability based on positive knowledge of the ‘truth’, on the other hand:

(5) ‘Condemning communism is today, more than ever, a moral, intellectual, politic, and social duty/obligation. The democratic and pluralist Romanian state can and ought to do it. Also, knowing these dark and saddening pages of 20th century Romanian history is indispensable for the younger generations who have the right to know the world their parents lived in’. (R, p. 19)

(6) ‘The names of the victims, as well as those of the executioners, must be known in order to say, like those who have survived the Nazi Holocaust: “So it shall not be repeated”’. (R, p. 18)

(7) ‘The names of the institutions that have committed the crimes against humanity must be identified. In the same manner, the names of the main culprits, so those of the potentate communists and of the Securitate executioners must also be known’. (R, p. 18)

(8) ‘The names of Regional (later District) Committee Secretaries must be known. The evil spread initially from the top, and then from bottom-up, becoming a cancer of the whole society’. (R, p. 630)

It is implied that political responsibility-taking in relation to the past cannot be achieved outside a framework of accountability based on truth and righting the wrongs of the past. This is a dimension of public accountability where political (and institutional) accountability is intertwined with personal accountability (one must ‘know’ the names of specific individuals: victims, executioners, and those having various roles in the communist system).

The nature of the condemnation of communism is also something in need of constitution.

(9) ‘We must … honour the memory of those who sacrificed their lives resisting the system, from those dying in jails to those dying because of illegal abortions, from those jailed and beaten up (miners, workers, peasants who protested against merging the lands and collectivization) during the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej years to the victims of the 1980s under Nicolae Ceausescu’. (R, p. 9)

(10) ‘All these snapshots are accusations of this criminal regime that removed us for half a century from Europe and tried to make us forget who we were … not all the victims were martyrs, but all of them ask us, from their own heavens, to not forget them’. (R, p. 216)

In (9) and (10), the condemnation of communism is not directly construed as a political act. A dimension of national reconciliation and remembrance is explicitly framed instead. In (9), there is an explicit, comprehensive call for remembering those who have resisted the communist system. This call makes reference to all the categories of victims of the system in a temporal perspective encompassing the whole communist period. In (10), remembering the victims of communism is, again, framed as a moral duty. It’s interesting to see though how communism is portrayed as far removed from the essence of Romanian national culture as possible; communism is objectified (Leeuwen 1995) as an external ideological agent that has robbed the country of its essential European identity. In this context, the political act of condemnation that the Report is championing is seen as one that would re-establish the dignity of a nation taken out of History by a criminal regime.

The president’s address, on the other hand, is very explicit in tackling a potential alternative reading.

(11) ‘I do not want to become “the President who condemned communism”. I want only to be the head of a state which considers that this condemnation relates to normality, that, without this condemnation, we shall move forward with difficulty, we shall move forward while continuing to carry on our back the corpse of our own past. All that I want is for us to build the future of democracy in Romania and the national identity upon clean ground’. (B)

(12) ‘We did not wish for a merely formal repudiation of the communist past, at the level of declarations of complaisance. Such a condemnation would have been unconvincing’. (B)

(13) ‘My gesture today is the natural consequence of the fact that we have assumed, as a nation, democratic values. In the name of these values, we have the obligation to identify in our history those things which we do or do not want to define our identity as Romanians and future citizens of the European Union’. (B)

(14) ‘We must not display historical arrogance. My purpose is aimed at authentic national reconciliation, and all the more so since numerous legacies of the past continue to scar our lives’. (B)

One can notice how the president is trying to construct the sense and authenticity of the act of condemnation. He is ‘managing credibility’ (cf. Edwards 1997) with regard to possible alternative descriptions of the act. In discursive terms, this can be seen as a move of inoculating against stake and interest. The sense of the act is construed with regard to the actor and the visibility of the act, such that the act will be taken for what it appears to be (cf. Edwards 1997). One of the actors involved is the president himself, who does not want to be seen as supporting anything else than a ‘true’ condemnation and reconciliation. He works against the potential ascription of a political vested interest with regard to the act of condemnation: ‘I don’t want to become the “President who condemned communism”’ (11). The president wants everyone to see that ‘condemnation relates to normality’, the future and identity of the nation. This is the voice of the ‘reasonable politician’ serving the interests of the country (Edelman 2001). In (12)–(14), he further works to establish the reasonableness of taking such a position in appraising the national past. Condemning communism is seen as a ‘natural consequence’ of post-communist democratic values and self-definition. Establishing the authenticity of the act is a paramount move against a potential reading of political willfulness. This is a way to publicly display the recognizability of condemnation and reconciliation as ‘essentially’ about coming to terms with the past.

Communism as a Category with Uniquely Bound Characteristics

In the Report, accounting for the legacy of communism is conterminous with constituting the nature of communism. Although the condemnation of communism is secured as an object of inquiry, as an accountable, public phenomenon, the ‘identity’, the nature of communism itself, is still something in need of constitution. Throughout the Report, communism is described in different ways. In general (historical and social formation) terms, it is described as a ‘regime’ and ‘ideology’. It is also described as an ‘utopian conception’ (p. 9), ‘an enemy of the human race’ (p. 19), as being reproduced through ‘terror, violence, and crime’ (p. 197), having instituted ‘the physical and moral assassinate’ (p. 197), and having survived ‘through repression’ (p. 197). These are features that are seen to apply to communism in general, not only to Romanian communism. In ‘national’ terms, communism is described as ‘antinational’ (p. 17), a ‘(foreign) occupation regime’ (p. 267), ‘profoundly disregarding the notion of human rights’ (p. 373), and ‘criminal towards its own people’ (p. 405).

Constituting the nature of communism involves more than simply attaching a series of characteristics, but also pointing to people, institutions, social relations, and so on. As a social and ideological formation, as a category of the ‘macro-social’ (Coulter 2001), communism can be said to have already entered ‘document time’. It is to be found in the state archives, the nationalization and collectivization orders, the files of the Securitate, the information notes of Securitate informers, and so on. Communism is already constituted in ‘documentary form’ (Smith 1974). As work in DP and ethnomethodology has shown, categories are deployable for various purposes: ‘In practical contexts, there are routinely more than one set of characterizations (or categorizations/descriptions) that are relevantly available to members’ (Jayyusi 1991a, p. 248). The Report can be seen as sketching a ‘map of the social and moral terrain’ (Baker 2000, p. 108) around the relevance of two categories, descriptions of, communism, ‘illegitimate’ and ‘criminal’:

(15) ‘Against the facts presented in this report, it is certain that genocide acts have been committed during 1945–1989, thus the communist regime can be qualified as criminal against its own people’. (R, p. 405)

(16) ‘The communist regime was an antimodern one (simulating modernity), which, once it took over — as foreign occupation regime — began destroying the Romanian elites and democratic institutions, the market economy and private property’. (R, p. 624)

(17) ‘The communist regime has had a criminal nature, in that it generated (initiated, ordered, committed) crimes against humanity. It established itself through violence after 1945. Its nature has been a violent one: it produced hundreds of thousands deaths in jails and labour camps. It destroyed millions of people through various ways of repression, inhuman treatment, criminal attitudes or through decisions with devastating effects on the environment, the economy and the human life in general. It was a regime aiming to turn its people into slaves, mercilessly exploiting them under the pretence of constructing a utopian society, of equality and freedom. The regime was throughout its duration an illegitimate one, and in its essence, criminal, ending as it began: through violence’. (R, p. 624)

Communism is thus being assigned ‘descriptive categories and a conceptual structure’ (Smith 1974, p. 258). Constituting the relevance of the labels ‘illegitimate’ and ‘criminal’ is an integral part of a moral discourse in which ‘description and appraisal are … deeply intertwined’ (Jayyusi 1991a, p. 233): ‘genocide deeds’; ‘the liquidation of Romanian elites and democratic institutions, market economy and private property’; and ‘generated (initiated, ordered, committed) crimes against humanity’. The historical record does not simply stand ‘as a morally untextured, neutral collection of facts’ (Lynch and Bogen 1996, p. 60), but rather ‘a set of factual circumstances’ are seen to be ‘generative of specifically moral judgments’ (Jayyusi 1991a, p . 232).

In (17), descriptions in terms of ‘criminality’ and ‘violence’ are intertwined. Predicates such as ‘violent’, ‘illegitimate’, and ‘criminal’ can be seen to be reciprocally sustaining each other, each providing reflexively for the other (cf. Jayyusi 1991b). They are also providing reflexively for the kinds of moral inferences with regard to the category communism. The collectability of communism and descriptions such as ‘illegitimate’, ‘criminal’, and ‘violent’ orient to and reproduce a purportedly known in common social reality with non-controversial objective properties (cf. Jayyusi 1991b). The notion of ‘violence’ mediates the constitution of ‘illegitimacy’ and ‘criminality’ of communism as uniquely bound features of the category Romanian communism.

The representativeness of this particular description of communism is taken to be consubstantial with the unequivocal condemnation of communism as a relevant and consequential course of action:

(18) ‘Taking act of this Report, The president can say with his hand on the heart: the Communist regime in Romania has been illegitimate and criminal. Condemning this regime, the Romanian democratic state condemns its instruments, first and foremost, the Romanian Communist Party and the Securitate, as well as the people responsible for the illegitimacy and criminality of Communism’. (R, p. 636)

The thrust of this is not what attributes could be attached to communism, but about what attributes one ought to attach to communism. Categories and category-bound attributes ‘lock the discourse into place, and … practices that flow from them’ (Baker 2000, p. 112). One could argue that this very particular historical representation is produced and ‘secured’ through categorization work (cf. Baker 2000, p. 112). In order for the condemnation of communism to make meaningful sense, communism needs to acquire an ‘identity’; it needs to be cast into a category with uniquely category-bound predicates or characteristics. The ideological and political significance of condemning communism (and its consequentiality in and for the reporting) lies in communism being portrayed as an exceptional political category with uniquely category-bound predicates that warrant exceptional political action and commitment.

Although the act of condemnation may be considered a ‘categorically open’ activity (cf. Coulter 2001), potentially open to debate, the particular invocation of ‘criminality’ and ‘illegitimacy’ of communism places the discourse of the Report as part of a more general moral worldview, one that is beyond argument.

(19) ‘To deny the crimes of communism is as unacceptable as denying the crimes of fascism’. (R, p. 640)

The colocation of the ‘violent nature’, ‘criminality’, and ‘illegitimacy’ of communism is operative throughout the Report and is used as a sense-making device. The practical and historical significance of condemning communism becomes thus ‘visible as a practical accomplishment’ (Lynch and Bogen 1996, p. 60). Moreover, the constituted ‘criminality’ and ‘illegitimacy’ of communism can be seen as acting as a ‘regulator’ between ‘original events and public discourse’ (Smith 2004, p. 185).

Time and National Identity

The Report and the president’s address clearly mark the boundaries of the ‘event’, ‘state of affairs’, under scrutiny. There is a clear temporal delineation of the period: 1945–1989. The period is described in different ways: in the Report, it is being referred as ‘four decades and a half of obsessive following in the construction of an impossible utopia’; in the presidential address, it is ‘a grim chapter in our country’s past’. Together with the co-selection of the unique attributes ascribed to communism, it expresses a particular ‘structure of relevance’ of a specific representation of history. But the Report does not solely rely on the temporal delineation of its ‘object of inquiry’. As some authors have argued, the politics of coming to terms with the past ‘consists first and foremost in structuring time’ (Santiso 1998, p. 26). The focus on the present, the past and the future is said to frame and establish the boundaries of moral and political courses of action. In political discourse (as in ordinary talk), ‘time is a resource … to be drawn on … in order present an identity, establish a truth or defend an interest’ (Taylor and Wetherell 1999, p. 39). In this particular case, the (textual) structuring of time is achieved by joining a political agenda (of condemnation) and a nationalistic repertoire around national identity. This is a feature of both the Report and president’s address:

(20) ‘The moment has finally come for this methodically maintained state of amnesia to end. The recuperation of memory, as well as the identification of responsibilities is indispensable to the workings of a democratic political community’. (R, p. 10)

(21) ‘Thus the moment has come to identify the nature and the legacies of the communist regime’. (R, p. 626)

(22) ‘17 years after the December 1989 revolution, the moment has fully arrived for all the communist archives to be made public and accessible’. (R, p. 640)

(23) ‘The imported communism we experienced in our own lives for five decades is an open wound in the history of Romania whose time to heal has come once and for all’. (B)

(24) ‘We believed that we could forget communism, but it did not want to forget us. Therefore, the condemnation of this past arises as a priority for the present, without which we shall behave in the future too in a way which resembles the burden of an unhealed illness’. (B)

The time of condemning communism is a time for coming to terms with the past. As Billig (1998) has argued, ‘the construal of time is crucial to ideology’ (p. 209). The time for coming to terms with the past points reflexively to a political agenda that is rhetorically structured to work against the ambivalence of previous political positions, such as avoiding or refusing direct confrontation of the communist past.

‘The time has come’ to recuperate memory and identify responsibilities (20), to ‘identify the nature and legacies of the communist regime’ (21), to make public and accessible communist archives (22), to heal an ‘open wound in the history of Romania’ (23), and to lift the burden of ‘an unhealed illness’ (24). These are all actions stemming from an authoritative collective time summon (cf. van Leeuwen 2005). These are also actions that take for granted, or imply, societal consensus around these issues and the timely nature of reckoning with the past. Notice the use of metaphors in (23) and (24): ‘open wound … whose time to heal has come’ and ‘the burden of an unhealed illness’. These metaphors frame condemnation and reconciliation discourse with regard to coming to terms with the past. The move toward closing a chapter in the nation’s history becomes a ‘healing’ process (see Cameron 2007 on metaphor use in reconciliation talk). The message of both the Report and president’s address is clear: the future (of the nation) depends on coming to terms with the past. The time dimension invoked in these accounts can be seen as operating ‘as a cultural and practical resource for the members of society whose task it is to establish the scope and meaning of something that is happening within and for the society to which they reflexively refer’ (Barthélémy 2003, p. 420). It is a members’ resource to establish the intelligibility of condemnation and reconciliation as moral courses of action as an issue for the present. Together with the other features identified in the Report and president’s address, orientations to time provide the ethical grounds for warranting otherwise contested moral/political/legal courses of action.

Through temporal reference, condemnation and reconciliation are constituted as activities that embody the values and goals that the nation aspires to. They are an integral part of the political project of the nation. They are constitutive of both ‘future action and future reality’ (Dunmire 2005, p. 484):

(25) ‘The future of Romania is dependent upon assuming its past, that is upon condemning the communist regime as enemy of the human race. Not doing it, here and now, will forever burden us with the guilt of complicity, be it only through silence, with the totalitarian Evil’. (R, p. 19)

(26) ‘This symbolic moment represents the balance sheet of what we have lived through and the day in which we all ask ourselves how we want to live henceforward’. (B)

There is an ideological dimension present in these accounts. There is a clear promise of national change and transformation. It would seem that a close adherence to this political agenda would give the ‘assurance’ that, from the moment of speaking and writing, it would be ‘no longer possible … to fall back into the past’ (Habermas and Michnik 1994, p. 11). In combination with the previously identified characteristics of communism (‘illegitimate’ and ‘criminal’), the Report reflexively positions communism as a pernicious political ideology. Constituted in this way, communism cannot be anything other than ideology, and as a consequence, should be judged as such.

Conclusion

This chapter has focused on the textual accomplishment of coming to terms with the past by taking the condemnation of communism in Romania as a case in point. The analysis has identified several discursive/textual features of the ‘Tismăneanu Report’ on communism (and president’s address) consequential to bringing off a particular representation of communism as ‘illegitimate’ and ‘criminal’: constructing a practical framework for the inquiry as a matter of public, moral, concern; producing ‘communism’ as a category with uniquely bound features; and structuring time by bringing together a political agenda (of condemnation) and a nationalistic repertoire around redemptive nationalism.

What the analysis has hopefully shown is the importance of studying representations of history as situated social action and social practice, and some of procedures, means, through which the nature of the past and history are being reflexively, inter-subjectively, publicly accomplished, and displayed.

First, I showed how constructing an inquiry framework as a public concern becomes a platform for promising, and generating, appropriate knowledge, a preface and condition for appropriate political (moral) action (cf. Jayyusi 1991b) in the terms put forward by the Report. The promise is of redemptive knowledge ‘that is potentially transformative of the public sphere’ (Teitel 2000, p. 100). Then I showed how the categorization of communism as ‘illegitimate’ and ‘criminal’ reflexively provides a warrant, not only for the activity of reporting, but also for the ambiguous, and potentially contestable, category of ‘condemnation.’ Categorially tied predicates, such as ‘illegitimate’ and ‘criminal’, are constitutive of and provide for a ‘moral inferential logic’ (Jayyusi 1991a, p. 240) of a particular representation of history.

Finally, textually structuring time by bringing together temporal orientations and a repertoire of redemptive nationalism defines an ethic that gives the nation ‘something to do’ (de Certeau 1986, p. 199; see also Frow 2001). Time is an ideological resource used to establish not only the intelligibility but also the necessity of moral courses of action as an issue for the present history of the nation.

These three features are intertwined in the textual dialogue between the Report and president’s address, and they organize and at the same time, project, a conceptual, moral and practical framework for political courses of action under the aegis of an official collective memory. As an official document of the Romanian state, the Report deploys a very specific argumentative (discursive) ‘net’ over the public project of investigating the legacy of communism. Many identifications of communism in the Report take the form of categorizations that forge links between the category ‘communism’ and specific attributes (‘criminal’, ‘inhuman’, ‘illegitimate’, etc.). The discourse drawn on in the Report is a tool for promoting reasoned conclusions about the nature of the communist regime. Value-laden terms, such as ‘criminality’ and ‘inhumanity’, are used to achieve a very particular representational effect. These, seemingly unambiguous attributes of communism, serve a specific purpose for public officials: to ‘evoke beliefs in line with the ideologies of the interpreters’ (Edelman 2001, p. 53).

As I will also show in Chap. 5, the story of the Report is not merely a possible conceptualization of a chapter of national history. The Report is not ‘an invitation to engage in a post-modernist game of interpretation where any story is as good a reading as any other’ (Hester and Eglin 1997, p. 42). The Report constructs a morally constitutive reading of communism as political ideology. The ‘practice of objectivity’ of the Report is that of ‘arriving at an account capable of overriding what you think, what I think, what she thinks’ (Smith 2004, pp. 212–213) about communism. One can sense an implicit desire for ‘a final accounting—for a fully entrenched historical consensus – to be “beyond history” as it were’ (Teitel 2000, p. 117). In doing so, it is fulfilling both an educative and normative function—it is drawing attention not only to the moral lessons of the past but also to which ought to be lessons and what one ought to learn from them. The Report is at pains to establish the moral basis for a (yet-to-be) cultural memory of communism, that is, ‘memory as it relates to a collective self-image’ (Assmann 1995, p. 126). It promotes, and is based on, a store of knowledge from which, it believes, the national group ought to derive ‘an awareness of its unity and peculiarity’ (ibid., p. 130). This store of knowledge is considered to be the future public source of a progressive, redemptive nationalism grounded in a particular meaning attached to historical accountability and historical justice in transition as manifestly dependent ‘on the nature of prior legacies of injustice’ (Teitel 2000, p. 102).

Yet, it ultimately fails to do so mainly because it is distancing communism from the national self, and constitutes communism as Other, not ‘us’, as an external agent of oppression. I expound the reasons for this failure in the next chapter. To describe communism as ‘illegitimate’ and ‘criminal’ is both ‘to describe it and to ascribe a value to it or express a commitment with respect to it’ (Connolly 1993, p. 22). Yet, every historical event, social formations, and social structures transmit ‘an excess and surplus that might sabotage the historian’s carefully chosen criteria of judgment’ (Cohen 2006, p. 200).