Abstract
This chapter draws largely from research on the judicial purges of former East German officials in unified Germany after 1990, which highlight particularly well how inappropriate and misleading the concept of “transitional justice” can be. Based on a questionable conception of time and causality, “transitional justice” prevents scholars from analyzing the German post-communist purges in their own legal, political, and social logics as well as in their own temporalities. I propose to trace a history of “transitional justice” as a phrase or “concept” as well as a professional international practice. As a phrase, “transitional justice” was born in the beginning of the 1990s at the crossroads of international law, academic political science, and human rights activism. From the beginning, however, transitional justice was not only conceived as an analytical concept, but also and foremost as a political practice. The emergence of the concept thus coincides with the gradual constitution of a particular sector of activity within the international sphere (an emergent internationalized social field). In this double process, some German human rights activists and scholars played an important role and contributed to making “transitional justice” a legitimate qualification of the post-communist purges in unified Germany; conversely, they attempted to make the German public policies regarding the communist past into an exportable model.
Readers should know that while they are using these books, people in many other countries are studying them too. We hope these volumes raise the profile of scholarship on transitional justice; it is extraordinarily important for the success of democracy and a world with greater freedom (Smith 1995, Introduction).
Guilluame Mouralis is a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Institut des sciences sociales du politique, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre.
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Notes
- 1.
On these and other often implicit postulates, see Mouralis 2008, pp. 19–29.
- 2.
- 3.
Teitel 2003, p. 69.
- 4.
Elster 2004.
- 5.
A reminiscence of an old conception of history, challenged in eighteenth century by the passage from plural to singular, that is from the historiae (conceived as exempla) to the Historia (which is worth being described and analyzed). See Koselleck 1990.
- 6.
On this point, let me refer to my review: Mouralis 2006, pp. 209–212.
- 7.
This is indeed an uncritical practice of anachronism, far from the controlled use of it which could be heuristic. See Rancière 1996 (since anachronism is inevitable, better to lucidly take advantage of it).
- 8.
- 9.
This is one of the aims of so-called conceptual history. See Koselleck 1990.
- 10.
One can observe in the post-Cold War context a “shift from a ‘denunciation’ model to that of a silent, scientific, organizational model of non-profit relying on practical expertise.” Dezalay 2011, p. 185.
- 11.
The following inquiry is partly congruent with that of Paige Arthur, which is only sketched out in a few interesting footnotes in Arthur 2009, pp. 329–330.
- 12.
Poldervaart 1948.
- 13.
Johansson 1988.
- 14.
Fisk 1989, p. 305.
- 15.
On this evolution, see Honneth 1994.
- 16.
Arthur 2009, p. 338. See also Guilhot 2002, pp. 219–242. This historical analysis could be completed by the quite different hypothesis formulated by Michel Dobry about the formation of the “transitology” (he underlines the role played by economic theory and neo-institutionalism) in Dobry 2000, pp. 585–614.
- 17.
Corradi 1992, pp. 267–292. “The trial by fiat of a previous regime” is precisely the title of chapter eight of Otto Kirchheimer’s famous book Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends.
- 18.
Ibid., 308 (“The obstacles [faced by] a successor’s justice.” More explicitly in the German edition, p. 452: “Die Justiz des Nachfolgeregimes”). Both surprising extracts of Kirchheimer’s book are reproduced in Kritz 1995, p. 350 et seq., although his reflection on the political boundaries of such a successor’s justice seem to be totally rubbed out in the rest of Kritz’s compendium.
- 19.
For Corradi, the power holders are seeking a “moral and political regeneration,” which is “a constitutive act of the new regime,” ibid., p. 286.
- 20.
Palumbo 1992, p. 16.
- 21.
“Project on Justice in Times of Transition. Inaugural Meeting,” Salzburg, Austria, 7–10 March 1992, 1. http://www.pjtt.org/.
- 22.
On this hesitation see Arthur 2009, p. 329.
- 23.
- 24.
Teitel 1994, pp. 241–242. Interestingly, the Fuller-Hart debate was provoked by the judicial treatment of Nazi crimes in Germany and the Allies’ retroactive application of criminal law until 1949. However, the philosophical orientations of the jurists (positivist vs. natural law doctrine) had in fact no effect on their concrete political and legal practices; for instance, each doctrine could justify either leniency or severity of a successor justice. See Mouralis and Israël 2005.
- 25.
Huyse 1995, p. 53, note 7.
- 26.
For an illustration of this mechanism, McAdams 1996, pp. 74–75 and Teitel 1997, 2009–2080 (10 occurrences). McAdams cites Kirchheimer, but in a way that does not correctly render the latter’s argumentation. For example, he fails to specify that Kirchheimer wrote about the “tu quoque” argument made by the defense in the main Nuremberg Trial: “4.Tu Quoque: Successor justice is both retrospective and prospective. In laying bare the roots of iniquity in the previous regime’s conduct, it simultaneously seizes the opportunity to convert the trial into a cornerstone of the new order. Against the inherent assertion of moral superiority, of the radical difference between the contemptible doings of those in the dock and the visions, intentions, and record of the new master, the defendants will resort to tu quoque tactics.” McAdams fails to cite the sentence in italics. Cf. Kirchheimer 1961, p. 336. Taken out of its argumentative context, the citation seems congruent with the new “transitional justice.”
- 27.
According to a keywords search in JSTOR, limited to the period 1994–1997, 31 articles referred to “transitional justice,” most of them citing Kritz’s volumes. Twenty-one of these articles were published in the major American law periodicals (Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, Yale Law Journal, American Journal of International Law, etc.).
- 28.
Thus there are two references to Kritz’s volumes in an early article written by Osiel 1995, pp. 463–704.
- 29.
Search for the phrase “transitional justice” without time limitation in LexisNexis Academics (“Power search” in “all news (English)”) and HeinOnline (“Law Journal Library”). One should of course take into account the technical bias of such research, but the recentness of the phenomenon limits substantially their effects (the digital collections cover periods often exceeding 20 years, and the available publications are numerous and varied). Much more difficult to overcome are the bias related to the corpus itself, which does not include per se unpublished productions (such as gray literature, conference reports, internal newsletters, etc.).
- 30.
This accounting of occurrences in the three databases was made on 14 March 2011 and verified on 12 March 2012.
- 31.
http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/ Accessed 12 March 2012.
- 32.
http://home.heinonline.org/content/list-of-libraries/ Accessed 12 March 2012.
- 33.
http://www.jstor.org.gate3.inist.fr/action/showMyTitleDelimitedList Accessed 12 March 2012.
- 34.
Arthur 2009, p. 325. Among the about seventy-five speakers at these three conferences, nine attended at least two of them.
- 35.
Phillips 2008, p. 218.
- 36.
Sapiro 2006, pp. 44–59.
- 37.
Named after the movement “Charter 77” founded in 1977 by Czechoslovakian prominent dissidents including Vaclav Havel.
- 38.
Phillips 2008, p. 219.
- 39.
Kritz 1995.
- 40.
The list of participants is available at http://www.pjtt.org/. Accessed 12 March 2012.
- 41.
Boltanski 1973, pp. 3–36.
- 42.
According to the biography of Wendy W. Luers on the PJTT website: http://www.pjtt.org/bio_wluers.htm. Accessed 12 March 2012.
- 43.
Now called the “Foundation for a Civil Society.”
- 44.
According to Timothy Phillips’s biography on the PJTT website (http://www.pjtt.org/bio_tphillips.htm) and the “History of our strategic partnership with IGL,” http://www.pjtt.org/partner_history_igl.htm. Accessed 12 March 2012.
- 45.
To quote the official presentation of the initiative: http://www.usip.org/programs/centers/rule-law. Furthermore, the initiative develops “research that examines these issues in comparative perspective, publications, grant-funded work and policy advice.”
- 46.
Bassett and Edman 2008, pp. 59–60.
- 47.
The ACUS defines itself as “an independent federal agency dedicated to improving the administrative process through consensus-driven applied research” [http://www.acus.gov/about/]. Kritz was, in 1989, Senior Special Assistant to the Chairman of ACUS. See Administrative Conference of the US 1990, p. 59.
- 48.
The “rule of law” became in the 1980s and 1990s not only a slogan (Dezalay), but also an efficient symbolic mean to legitimate various form of domination at the international and national levels. On the uses of its German variant, the Rechtsstaat, see Mouralis 2008.
- 49.
Kritz 1995, p. xviii.
- 50.
He stood with C. Schmitter for the academic variant of the transitology, while the apocalyptic one was well represented in the book by Samuel Huntington with an article on the “third wave” of democratization. See the critical account of Dobry 2000, pp. 585–614.
- 51.
Dezalay 1990, pp. 70–91.
- 52.
Garcia Villegas 2009, p. 29ff.
- 53.
This success is concerning as transitional justice itself as certain related measures detailed in the book, especially the “truth (and reconciliation) commissions,” an expression N. Kritz also publicized through his work at the USIP. See the systematic publication by the USIP’s “transitional justice initiative” of public reports of various national commissions since the 1970s, also long before the expression or the practice were established. USIP website.
- 54.
Offe 1994, pp. 187–229. Two years later, Norbert Frei would give a very different sense to this word.
- 55.
The federal judge Wilhelm Heinrich Laufhütte had jurisdiction over most cases involving former East German officials such as the border guards and their superiors, who were convicted of murder.
- 56.
Among the pioneers of transitional justice in the German academic world, we can mention Klaus Marxen and Gerhard Werle, professors of criminal law at the Humboldt University in Berlin. They initiated the “project criminal justice and GDR-past” in 1996, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, and devoted to an exhaustive legal analysis of the post-unification cases involving former East German officials. The popularization of the German “model” of transitional justice went through several publications; cf. Werle 2006.
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Mouralis, G. (2014). The Invention of “Transitional Justice” in the 1990s. In: Israël, L., Mouralis, G. (eds) Dealing with Wars and Dictatorships. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-6704-930-6_6
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