Divergent responses to a common past: Transitional justice in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

NADYA NEDELSKY Macalester College

Abstract. This article addresses the question of why, despite having shared a commu- nist regime and a revolution against it, the Czechs and Slovaks have dealt di¡erently with that regime’s former high o⁄cials and secret police agents, ¢les, and collaborators. I argue that this divergence challenges theories of transitional justice put forward by such scholars as Samuel Huntington and John P. Moran, who respectively identify transition type and levels of regime repression as the key factors shaping a new regime’s response to its predecessor. I propose that a stronger in£uencing factor is the level of the preceding regime’s legitimacy, as indicated during the communist period by levels of societal cooptation, opposition, or internal exile, and during the post-communist period by levels of elite re-legitimization and public interest in ‘‘decommunization.’’ In drawing this link between past and more recent developments, I also argue that struggles over transitional justice issues should not be considered exclusively as the ‘‘politics of the present.’’ Finally, I examine the cases of Poland, Hungary, and Romania to assess the broader applicability and limits of my theory.

Although the Czechs and Slovaks shared a communist regime from 1948 until 1989, the two nations have responded to the darker elements of this common past in strikingly di¡erent ways. They did initially conceive a common strategy: in 1991, the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic was the ¢rst post-communist state to pass ‘‘lustration’’ legislation, which sought to exclude the previous regime’s high political o⁄cials and secret police personnel and collaborators from a range of public o⁄ces during the early years of democratization. After the law’s passage, however, the Czech and Slovak responses to the previous regime diverged. The Czech Republic continued to pursue lustration after the breakup of the common state in 1993, extending the law’s period of enforcement twice. The Czechs have also set up a frame- work for the investigation and prosecution of crimes committed under the communist regime and allowed progressively broader public access to the ¢les kept by the secret police. Slovakia’s political leadership has, by contrast, shown little interest in such ‘‘cleansing’’ of the public

Theory and Society 33: 65^115, 2004. 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 66 sphere. The lustration law was never seriously enforced in Slovakia and quietly expired in 1996. Few e¡orts have been made to prosecute former o⁄cials, and Slovakia was the last post-communist state in Central Europe to grant its citizens access to communist-era secret police ¢les.

The contrast between the two cases raises the question of why the Czechs and Slovaks have dealt so di¡erently with the former regime’s leaders and its secret police personnel, collaborators, and ¢les. This is a question that poses some challenge to the theories of post-commu- nist ‘‘transitional justice’’ that evolved alongside early developments in the region. An important work dealing with this topic appeared in 1991, less than two years after the Eastern European revolutions, when Samuel Huntington published The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. In this study, Huntington uses his observa- tions of the ‘‘third wave’’ of democratization, which he follows from its start in 1974 until 1990, to propose a theory of why leaders of new states respond to the injustices of preceding regimes in particular ways.1 This study has proved very in£uential to the subsequent liter- ature on transitional justice. During the years after its publication, however, developments in Eastern Europe prompted a number of scholars to raise questions about Huntington’s theory, including the reasons why Huntington’s analysis of the Czechoslovak case did not anticipate anything like the lustration law. Though these studies o¡er a compelling account of the reasons why the state’s leaders chose this strategy, none fully confronts another important development: the Czechs implemented (and have continued to implement) the law and the Slovaks did not. The lack of focus on early treatments of this issue appears to re£ect the tendency ^ following Huntington ^ to consider Czechoslovakia as a single case study, rather than studying its constit- uent nations comparatively. Nor has this divergence been the subject of wider scholarly interest: since the ‘‘Velvet Divorce,’’ attention has followed the progress of transitional justice in the Czech Republic to the virtual exclusion of the (admittedly largely inactive) Slovak case. Thus, the related questions of the di¡erences between Czech and Slovak policies on public access to the Czechoslovak secret police ¢les and the prosecution of former regime o⁄cials have also received little Western attention. Indeed, while the contrast has not gone entirely unnoticed, the question of why the Czechs and Slovaks have diverged so widely in their approach to the past is to this point largely unex- plored. It would nevertheless appear that a study of the reasons behind this divergence could contribute to theory-building on transitional 67 justice because the two cases shared both a preceding regime and the revolution against that regime.

In this article, then, I trace the evolution of both Czech and Slovak transitional justice and the scholarly analysis of it, moving back and forth between developments on the ground and the theories o¡ered to account for them. I begin by laying out Huntington’s theoretical framework for analyzing transitional justice in the late twentieth century. In the second and third parts, I look at the development of lustration after the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution and at how this development prompted challenges to Huntington’s analysis of Czecho- slovakia. In the fourth section, I trace the divergence of Czech and Slovak responses to their common past, and suggest an explanation of this divergence that draws on, but also moves somewhat beyond, preceding analyses, focusing on the role that the previous regime’s level of legitimacy plays in shaping approaches to transitional justice. I also explore evidence that the communist regime had di¡erent levels of legitimacy in the Czech and Slovak Republics and that this has had implications for developments in the post-communist period. Then, I examine recent debates in the Czech Republic and Slovakia over ¢le access, to show that commonalities as well as di¡erences exist between the two cases. Next, I assess my theory’s broader applicability by brie£y examining the Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian cases. In the ¢nal section, I present my conclusions.

Huntington’s ‘‘torturer problem’’

According to Huntington, three main types of transition from author- itarian rule characterized the ‘‘third wave’’ of democratization.2 The ¢rst type is ‘‘transformation,’’ in which the leaders of an authoritarian regime play the primary role in ending that regime and democratizing the state. Among the pre-1989 transitions, Spain and Brazil are the clearest examples of transformations, and in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria and Hungary most closely ¢t this type. The second transition type is ‘‘replacement,’’ which occurs when the authoritarian regime is domi- nated by staunch opponents to democracy. In such cases, the transition takes place when opposition to the regime gains strength and the government weakens to the point that ‘‘the government collapses or is overthrown.’’3 Argentina and Greece are the best pre-1989 examples, and East Germany and Romania are the East European replacements. Finally, there are ‘‘transplacements,’’ in which neither the regime nor 68 the opposition is powerful enough to enforce its vision alone and so democracy is brought about through negotiations. Huntington classi- ¢es South Korea, Uruguay, and more recently, Poland and Czechoslo- vakia as transplacements.

According to Huntington, the outcome of what he calls ‘‘the torturer problem’’ ^ i.e., whether to pursue a policy of ‘‘prosecute and punish or forgive and forget’’ with regard to the o⁄cials of the authoritarian regime who ‘‘blatantly violated human rights’’ ^ tends to be predicted by transition type. In essence, ‘‘[j]ustice was a function of political power. O⁄cials of strong authoritarian regimes that voluntarily ended themselves were not prosecuted; o⁄cials of weak authoritarian re- gimes that collapsed were punished if they were promptly prosecuted by the new democratic government.’’4 While o⁄cials of relatively strong regimes that transform themselves can declare amnesties, o⁄- cials in regimes that collapse and are replaced are not in a position to make demands. Replacements are therefore far more likely than trans- formations and transplacements to result in the prosecution and punishment of authoritarian o⁄cials. Indeed, Huntington observes that ‘‘[i]n Eastern Europe, apart from Romania and East Germany, the initial overall tendency was to forgive and forget’’ ^ a ¢nding consistent with his predictions based on transition type. He cautions, however, that favorable transition type is not in itself su⁄cient to secure justice, if that justice is not swift:

Democratic justice cannot be summary justice of the sort meted out to the Ceausescus, but it also cannot be slow justice. The popular support and indignation necessary to make justice a political reality fade; the discredited groups associated with the authoritarian regime reestablish their legitimacy and in£uence. In new democratic regimes, justice comes quickly or it does not come at all.5

Huntington also deals with the related question of ‘‘truth,’’ which in some cases may be more important than ‘‘justice.’’ ‘‘Truth’’ involves making public what the authoritarian regime did, to whom it did it, and the identities of those responsible in order ‘‘to mark them with a public stigma that is a punishment in itself.’’6 Huntington argues that in Eastern Europe truth and justice were inherently di⁄cult projects: ‘‘[t]he main constraint on both prosecution and disclosure in the former communist countries was the pervasiveness of the communist regime, the extent to which so many people accepted and collaborated with it, and the fear of what prosecutions or investigations might reveal.’’7 Particularly troubling were the voluminous ¢les of the secret 69 police, which, according to some observers, had the potential to cause explosive con£ict within the new states. Huntington concludes that ‘‘[i]n some respects, truth as well as justice was a threat to democ- racy’’8 in Eastern Europe. In summary, then, Huntington’s view of the ‘‘torturer problem’’ is that the more a regime participates willingly in the democratization process, either through transplacement or trans- formation, and the more broadly the society is implicated alongside the regime in its injustices (a particular concern for formerly Commu- nist countries), the less likely it is that its former o⁄cials will be held accountable for their previous actions in a new democracy.

Lustration in the Velvet Revolution’s aftermath

The 1989 ‘‘Velvet Revolution’’ largely took place over ten days, begin- ning with a student demonstration on November 17 and culminating in a general strike on November 27 that involved millions of Czechoslovak citizens and shook the regime to its core. Within two weeks, President Gustav Husa¤k resigned and was replaced by former political dissident Va¤clav Havel. One of Havel’s ¢rst actions as president was to appoint a non-communist Minister of Internal A¡airs, Richard Sacher, who promptly set about disbanding the State Security units, including the secret police (S tB).9 The following spring, in anticipation of the ¢rst free parliamentary elections, Havel invited all political parties to screen their candidates for S tB ties through Sacher’s ministry. While the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and a few others passed on the o¡er, most parties did ask their candidates to be vetted. The results were kept secret, however, and those found to have S tB connections were not required to withdraw their candidacies.

Problems soon arose around the S tB ¢les. Sacher was accused in the disappearance of some ¢les and of the selective publication of others. The controversy intensi¢ed when Deputy Minister of Internal A¡airs Jan Ruml went on television and accused a prominent leader of the Czechoslovak People’s Party, Josef Bartoncik, of having worked for the S tB for ¢fteen years.10 This and other lesser scandals prompted Sacher and his republican-level Czech and Slovak counterparts, Anton|¤n Hrazdira and Vladim|¤rMec› iar, to express concern about the direction screening was taking. As they left o⁄ce after the elections (and Mec› iar became Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic), the three ‘‘called on the federal government to address the sensitive problem of vetting very soon and to acknowledge its possible destabilizing e¡ects.’’11 70

In January 1991, the Federal Assembly approved a resolution requiring that all Federal Assembly deputies, employees of the Federal Assembly and O⁄ces of the Prime Minister, and federal ministers and their deputies be screened for S tB collaboration. A commission was set up to check the secret ¢les for evidence that a person knew he or she was considered an informer, had either signed an agreement or hand- written a report, and was named in more than one ¢le. If the commis- sion unanimously decided that an Assembly Deputy had been a collaborator, the person was given ¢fteen days either to resign or have his or her name disclosed to the Assembly.12 Any employee in the other targeted positions who was implicated in the ¢les would have the choice of leaving voluntarily or being dismissed.

The commission presented its report in March in a televised special session of the Federal Assembly.13 The ¢rst part of the report discussed the commission’s ¢ndings on the events of November 1989 and the second detailed its screening e¡orts. In his speech, commission spokes- man Petr Toman stated that ‘‘[t]he only way to prevent blackmail, the continued activity of the S tB collaborators, and a series of political scandals that could surface at crucial moments is to clear the govern- ment and legislative bodies of these collaborators.’’14 To this end, Toman read aloud the names of ten deputies who had refused to step down. Two months later, the commission made two more names public.

Disclosures of collaborators found throughout the federal government followed, prompting the Federal Assembly to begin work on legislation to regulate and systematize screening. After heated debate, in October the Assembly passed the law Number 451 of the year 1991, otherwise known as the ‘‘lustration law.’’ This law applied to persons who, between February 25, 1948 and November 17, 1989, were members and agents of the State Security, owners of ‘‘conspiration apartments’’ used by the S tB, knowing S tB collaborators, members of the People’s Militia, students at KGB schools for more than three months, Com- munist Party o⁄cials from the district level up, political o⁄cers in the CorpsofNationalSecurity,ormembersofcommitteesthatconducted purges in 1948 or after August 21, 1968.15 Such persons were forbid- den for ¢ve years from: employment in most elected or appointed positions in the federal and republican levels of government; rank above colonel in the army; management positions in state-owned enterprises or joint stock companies; top positions in Czechoslovak, Czech, and Slovak Radio and Television; the o⁄cial press agency; the 71 supreme court, judgeships, and prosecutorial posts; and top academic positions. Employees or applicants would have to be certi¢ed as ‘‘lustration-positive’’ by the Ministry of Internal A¡airs or face dis- missal, demotion, or the rejection of their application for employ- ment. Anyone other than those shown to be S tB agents could appeal to an Independent Commission. Citizens eighteen years and older could also have their ¢les reviewed, though they could not see the ¢les themselves. Radio and television producers, publishers, and political parties could have a sta¡ member ‘‘who takes part in the shaping of the intellectual contents of the communication media’’ screened if they obtained permission from the employee,16 and the results could not be publicized without the person’s consent. In addition, any person could prompt the investigation of a senior o⁄cial after paying a deposit of 1,000 crowns (around $35 dollars at the time), which they would lose if the person had a clean record. The vote on the law indicated partisan di¡erences: all of the deputies of then-Finance Minister Va¤clav Klaus’s right-of-center Civic Democratic Party voted for the law, and all the deputies of Mec› iar’s nationalist-populist Movement for a Democratic Slovakia voted against it.17 The law was set to expire on December 31, 1996. It was also modi¢ed somewhat by a November 1992 Constitutional Court ruling that nulli¢ed the provi- sion that applied the law to ‘‘Category C’’ collaborators, which included persons who were listed in the S tB ¢les as having been candidates for collaboration.18

Responses and alternatives to Huntington

The above developments prompted John P. Moran and Michael Kraus to challenge Huntington’s analysis of the Czechoslovak case. As both scholars point out, Huntington argues that transplacements involve a balance of power between regime and opposition that produces a negotiated transition to democracy, and therefore that they do not tend to produce new regimes that vigorously seek justice for the preceding regime’s human rights abusers. This makes it unlikely, according to Huntington’s theory, that a transplacement country like Czechoslovakia would pursue stringent lustration. Admittedly, Hun- tington does not address the question of lustration; his analysis was published before the law was passed. Still, lustration laws would seem to represent a combination of the processes of truth and justice, as Huntington de¢nes them. While such laws do not involve criminal prosecutions, exclusion from employment by the democratic state can 72 be considered a form of punishment, even if it is not de¢ned as such by the law. Moreover, the identi¢cation of agents and collaborators, as well as the right to have one’s ¢le examined, provides for disclosure. Lustration laws thus ¢t into Huntington’s model of the torturer prob- lem by straddling questions of truth and justice.

While Moran and Kraus identify the lustration law as a problem for Huntington’s theory, they provide very di¡erent correctives. Kraus argues that it is not Huntington’s model that is £awed, but rather his classi¢cation of the Velvet Revolution as a transplacement. According to Kraus, the Czechoslovak transition ¢ts much better in the category of replacement. He argues that, ‘‘[b]ecause it resisted reforms on the Hungarian or Polish model to the bitter end, the communist leadership in Prague was in an exceptionally weak position to stem the tide of protest that swept all the East European capitals.’’19 Indeed, over the short span of the Velvet Revolution, the previously in£exible regime became so weak that ‘‘the outcome of the negotiations re£ected almost wholly the preferences of the opposition.’’ When, based on this evidence, the Czechoslovak case is reclassi¢ed as a replacement, it conforms to Huntington’s predictions. Thus, Kraus concludes, ‘‘Huntington’s frame- work helps us to understand why in postcommunist Czechoslovakia, in contrast to Poland or Hungary, the voices demanding justice and retribution grew loud and clear after November 1989.’’20

Kraus’s view of the Velvet Revolution as a ‘‘replacement’’ is in agree- ment with Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Mar- kowski, and Ga¤bor To¤ka’s classi¢cation of the Czechoslovak case as an ‘‘implosion of the old order’’21 and Claus O¡e’s as a ‘‘capitulation of the old regime.’’22 This lends further weight to Kraus’s designation, as both O¡e’s and Kitschelt’s typologies of the transitions from com- munist rule are more deeply informed by the patterns and particular- ities of Central and Eastern European states’ histories than Hunting- ton’s. Although it does not lead Kraus to reject his theory, I argue that the inaccuracy of Huntington’s classi¢cation of the Czechoslovak case ^ with important implications for subsequent analysis ^ indicates the need to explore transitional justice issues with reference to more historically grounded accounts of the East European transitions.

In some ways, the frameworks that Huntington, O¡e, and Kitschelt use to study regime change are quite similar. Each identi¢es three types of transition that correspond closely to the others’ typologies: as stated above, what Huntington calls replacement, O¡e calls capitulation, 73 and Kitschelt calls transition by implosion of the old order; Hunting- ton’s transplacement is much like O¡e’s party competition/elections and Kitschelt’s negotiation; and Huntington’s transformation resem- bles O¡e’s compromise and Kitschelt’s transition by preemptive re- form. The discrepancies in case classi¢cation point,23 however, to important di¡erences in analysis. Although Huntington uses transition type as his crux, both Kitschelt and O¡e place transition type among a large number of other factors in their studies of how the pre-commu- nist and communist pasts shaped the direction and outcome of the transitions. Among these are elements of the relationship between state and society that, I argue, may both re£ect and bear on legitimacy levels, such as the communist rulers’ use of repression, cooptation, and toleration of dissent, as well as levels of internal opposition.

Kitschelt, in particular, emphasizes the importance of such factors in de¢ning di¡erent types of communist regime, which in turn a¡ected transition type and subsequent state-building. He identi¢es three di¡erent communist regimes types, based in part on whether elites rely on a ‘‘formal-rational bureaucratic state apparatus’’or a more informal administration based on clientelism and corruption, and in part on the methods through which elites sought to ensure the population’s com- pliance.24 The ¢rst type of regime is patrimonial communism, which tends to be established in societies that were largely agrarian and lacking any substantial tradition of political pluralism.25 To enforce popular compliance, patrimonial rule uses a mixture of strong repres- sion and cooptation into vertical clientelist networks, and it tends to meet its demise through preemptive reform. There is subsequently little elite turnover in the post-communist period. The second regime type is national-accommodative communism, found where socialist/commu- nist parties were weak in the pre-communist period and bourgeois and agrarian opposition was substantial.26 In the post-Stalinist period, these regimes generally relied more on cooptation than repression. They tended to end through negotiation, and thereafter the post- Communist party had a decent chance of reconstituting itself as a viable political player. The third regime type is bureaucratic-author- itarian communism.27 These regimes are typical where signi¢cant political pluralism, including a well-established communist party, exists in the pre-communist period. Given the strong potential for opposition, they rely more on repression than cooptation. Resistant to the kind of £exibility exhibited by national-accommodative regimes, these regimes tend to end through implosion, after which the post- communist elites have little chance of reassuming an in£uential posi- 74 tion in the political system. In addition, Kitschelt recognizes that some cases involve a mix of more than one regime type.

Neither Kitschelt nor O¡e focuses his analysis on the ‘‘torturer prob- lem.’’ Nevertheless, because they look not only at how the relations between political elites and societal groups a¡ect political develop- ments within regimes or during discrete periods, but also at how relations in one regime a¡ect those in successor regimes, their con- ceptual and analytical frameworks may o¡er a stronger foundation than Huntington’s for studying the question of why post-communist societies have reacted to the crimes and injustices of previous regimes in di¡erent ways. I will, therefore, draw on them later in this case study.

Returning to speci¢c responses to Huntington, Moran ¢nds his entire framework £awed, arguing that ‘‘the link that Huntington attempts to make between the independent variable of ‘democratization process’ and the dependent variable of ‘outcome of the torturer problem’ is a specious one in the East European context.’’28 With regard to the Czechoslovak case, Moran argues that ‘‘in spite of the ‘transplacement’ nature of the transition ... calls for punishment’’ ^ represented by the lustration law ^ ‘‘have overwhelmed those for forgiveness.’’29 Arguing that the ‘‘more critical’’ factor is psychological, Moran applies a theoretical framework that he o¡ers as more suitable to Eastern Europe than Huntington’s. The ‘‘psychological variables of ‘exit’ and ‘voice,’’’ as they existed during the communist period, are far stronger predictors of how new regimes will approach the ‘‘torturer problem.’’ Moran bases these concepts on Albert O. Hirschman’s theory of ‘‘Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.’’ In Moran’s application of this theory, ‘‘voice’’ represents the option of political dissent under the previous regime and ‘‘exit’’ the option to leave the country. Moran argues that the repression of those who ‘‘felt strongly about political issues’’ produced a deep- seated animosity toward the authoritarian regime. ‘‘In this sense,’’ Moran concludes,‘‘the outcome of the ‘torturer problem’can be looked upon as a pressure cooker, where exit and voice provide for a pressure release. Where the release is not allowed, the former torturers face explosive situations in the post transition period.’’30 Applying this theory to the Czechoslovak context, Moran argues that because the communist regime allowed neither exit nor voice, those citizens who did not risk persecution through dissidence began demanding vengeance after democratization. According to Moran, ‘‘[t]he fact that they have a ‘guilty conscience’ seems applicable to those who felt strongly about political issues but did not act.... As more and more non-exiters/non- 75 voicers gain in power, the tendency towards prosecution becomes more pronounced.’’31 Guilt produced by repression and channeled into vengeance, then, is Moran’s key factor in explaining the Czecho- Slovak lustration law.

Both Moran and Kraus o¡er interesting accounts of why the post- communist Czecho-Slovak state chose a response to the preceding regime not anticipated by Huntington’s analysis. Neither of these accounts fully addresses the issue of di¡erences between the state’s two constituent nations on the question of lustration, however. Moran does state that the federation’s imminent separation was a factor in the debate over lustration, but he does not explain why ^ or even indicate that ^ one half of the federation was more inclined toward lustration than the other. Nor, given the time when these two studies were written, could the authors have taken account of the further evidence of a divergence between the Czechs and Slovaks in the ensuing years.

Subsequent accounts, however, have not focused on this divergence either, tending to leave Slovakia out of comparative studies. Moreover, newer analyses have tended to move away from both Huntington and Moran’s focus on the political past and to emphasize recent political developments such as the dynamics of party competition. For example, writing in 1996, Helga A. Welsh argues that while ‘‘the extent of political repression and penetration of society by state security forces’’ and ‘‘the impact of di¡erent modes of transition’’ are important, ‘‘increasingly ... the ‘weight of the past’ is being replaced by the ‘politics of the present.’’’32 A particularly key factor is the electoral strength of former communists, as the weaker they are, ‘‘the easier it has been to move ahead with decommunisation e¡orts.’’33 Also included in these politics is the polarization of the political landscape, institutional setup, contagion e¡ects across societal sectors, value orientations, external events, cross-national di¡usion e¡ects and inter- national law.34

Building in 2003 on Welsh’s analysis, Kieran Williams, Aleks Szczer- biak, and Brigid Fowler argue that the key variables determining the nature of lustration legislation in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary were the di¡ering access of former opposition groups to political power, and their ability to put together a legislative coalition supportive of lustration.35 They identify ¢ve factors supportive of such legislation, arguing that: 76

None of these ¢ve sources of the demand for lustration ^ speci¢c security service related incidents [scandals caused by revelations of connections of highly placed authorities to previous security services], disillusionment with broader post-Communist outcomes among some elites, the political needs of the post-Communist right, the impact of earlier lustration e¡orts, or a public demand for information ^ had much to do with the nature of the preceding Communist regime or the exit from it.36

Even more than Welsh, then, Williams emphasizes the ‘‘politics of the present.’’

In the following section, I trace the divergence in the Czech and Slovak enforcement of the lustration law, as well as the two states’ approaches to the prosecution of regime o⁄cials and the opening of secret police ¢les, with the purpose of exploring the implications for the above theories of post-communist transitional justice.

A comparison of Czech and Slovak responses to the communist past

Lustration

The Czech Republic has the longest record of continuous lustration in the post-communist world. Though the original lustration law was to last ¢ve years, the Czech Parliament has prolonged its lifespan twice, overriding President Havel’s veto both times. In 1995, it passed a ¢ve- year extension and in November of 2000 it extended it until new civil service and security laws are passed and implemented, which at this writing has not yet occurred. The extended lustration law added an exemption for persons born after December 1, 1971. Between the law’s passage in 1991 and October of 2001, the Czech Interior Ministry processed 402,270 lustration certi¢cates.37 An average of 3.2 percent of the applications processed between 1991 and 2000 did not receive con¢rmation of a clear record.38 In 2001, 2.5 percent of the applicants did not receive such con¢rmation.

Slovakia’s leaders have, by contrast, shown far less inclination toward ‘‘lustrating’’ the political sphere. Before the local elections of 1990, several parties did ask that their candidates be screened, though the Slovak National Council did not require this. The commission estab- lished for this purpose had problems gaining access to all the necessary ¢les, however, as some had been removed and others withheld from investigators. The screening results were not disclosed. A few months 77 later, in February 1991, the Slovak National Council followed its Czech counterpart (over Mec› iar’s strong objections) in setting up a commis- sion to produce regulations for screening at the republic level.39 A resolution calling for investigations of deputies and high-ranking o⁄cials followed in May, but no law regulating the process was passed and little screening was accomplished.40 The federal lustration law, as well, ‘‘had only a formal e¡ect’’ in Slovakia.41 This continued to be the case after the ‘‘Velvet Divorce.’’ In January 1994, the Mec› iar govern- ment voted to seek a Constitutional Court judgment on the lustration law’s constitutionality and its compatibility with international human rights agreements. Though the Court denied this petition, the law was allowed to expire in 1996 without having been invoked by the new state.42 Clearly, then, although passage of the 1991 lustration law was a ‘‘Czechoslovak’’ decision, lustration itself has been largely a Czech pursuit.

Criminality and criminals of the former regime

In 1993, the Czech Republic passed the Act on the Illegality of the Communist Regime and Resistance to It. In Article 2, it declares the Communist regime ‘‘criminal, illegal, and contemptible’’ and the Czechoslovak Communist Party ‘‘a criminal and contemptible organ- ization.’’43 The Act also exempts crimes committed during the regime from statutes of limitation if the perpetrator was not convicted or had charges against him or her dismissed because of ‘‘political reasons incompatible with the basic principles of the legal order of a demo- cratic state.’’44 The Czech Constitutional Court upheld the Act when 41 Parliamentary Deputies challenged it, a⁄rming in its ruling the illegitimacy of the preceding regime.45

This Act laid the groundwork for the de¢nition of certain of the previous regime authorities’ actions as crimes and, thereafter, their investigation and prosecution. In 1995, the O⁄ce for the Documenta- tion and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (UŁ DV) was established. By the end of October 2000, it had investigated 3,083 cases,46 and as of August 2001, it had prepared 160.47 Of these, nine were prosecuted and sentenced. Almost 2,000 cases were dropped because of presidential amnesties, statutes of limitation, or the death of witnesses or suspects. In December 1999, the Parliament extended the statute of limitations for serious crimes committed under the communist regime, allowing the UŁ DV to continue investigating cases. 78

Most recently, former Czechoslovak Prime Minister Lubormir Strougal was tried and acquitted for abuse of power in connection with the killing of three people by communist secret police in 1949.48 He was only the second top communist leader to be tried; the ¢rst was Miroslav Stepan, who served less than two years in prison for sup- pressing student demonstrators during the 1989 revolution.

The Slovak Parliament, as well, passed a law on the immorality and illegality of the communist regime. The 1996 law is a modi¢ed version of the original bill, having changed the designation of the Communist Party from ‘‘a criminal organization responsible for violating human rights and spreading terror’’ to ‘‘a party which did not prevent its members from committing crimes.’’49 The main support for the bill came from two staunch political rivals, Mec› iar’s HZDS and the center- right Christian Democratic Movement (KDH). Petr Brnak of the HZDS congratulated the Parliament containing ‘‘92 former commu- nists’’ for passing such a bill.50

In late 1999, the Slovak Minister of Justice and former religious dissident Ja¤nC arnogursky¤(KDH) set up a Department for the Doc- umentation of Crimes committed by the communist regime. Its pur- pose is to provide legal advice for people seeking restitution or rehabilitation for incarceration or persecution by communist author- ities. Most of the claims it receives concern compensation for job or property loss, and the o⁄ce has made rather slow progress on these.51 According to Slovak Pravda, the Minister’s original plans were more expansive: he had ‘‘tried to set up an O⁄ce for the Documentation of the Crimes of Communism, but did not ¢nd support from his coalition partners and the o⁄ce turned into just a two-member department in the Ministry of Justice.’’52 Indeed, Miroslav Kusy¤, one of the few Slovak Charter 77 signatories, observed that the Department’s found- ing was the result ‘‘not of political will, it is only the result of C arnogursky¤’s stubbornness.’’53

Although the Slovak government has shown little interest in prosecut- ing former o⁄cials for crimes committed under the previous regime, in late 2001 a Bratislava Military Court convicted the last chief of the Czechoslovak Secret Service, Alojz Lorenc, of abuse of o⁄ce. Lorenc had already been convicted in the Czech Republic in 1992 of o¡enses against 300 people, but the enforcement of his four-year sentence was complicated by the federation’s split. As Lorenc refused to leave Slovakia, Slovak authorities initiated their own investigation and 79 prosecuted him for ordering and organizing the preventive detention of 11 people during the Velvet Revolution. He received a 15-month suspended prison sentence and three years’ probation.

Both the Czech and Slovak Parliaments have, then, voted to denounce the previous regime as ‘‘illegal,’’ although the Czech Parliament did so in stronger terms. The rami¢cations of this declaration have, however, been di¡erent in the two states. The Czechs have used it as a frame- work for the prosecution of former o⁄cials, while the Slovaks ^ largely in the persons of former Minister of Justice C arnogursky¤and his successor, Maria¤n Gula ^ have concentrated on the task of o¡ering some level of justice in the form of compensation to the regime’s victims. At the same time, both the small number and actual outcome of the prosecutions in the Czech Republic indicates that the contrast between the two countries on this issue should not be overstated.

File access

In 1996, the Czech Parliament passed a law allowing citizens to examine the ¢les kept on them by the S tB, with the names of third parties deleted. Access to the ¢les was broadened in March 2002, when the Czech Parliament passed a law allowing all Czech citizens over 18 to look at their personal ¢les, ¢les containing personal data, entries recorded by means of intelligence technology or monitoring, and S tB personnel ¢les.54 Files that could endanger the state’s security inter- ests, human lives, or foreign agents remain closed.55 The ¢les are closed to foreign citizens, including Slovaks who previously held Czechoslovak citizenship. In addition, Lidove¤noviny reports that the law states that a list of all the S tB’s collaborators will be released to the public after one year.56

In Slovakia, Parliament passed a law opening the secret police ¢les in July 2002, and then overrode a veto by President Rudolf Schuster the following month. The law, which was proposed by former dissident and Czechoslovak Interior Minister (1990^92) Ja¤n Langos› , also established an Institute for National Memory where citizens can read their ¢les. The Institute is also charged with gathering documents on crimes committed during both the communist period and the Slovak state that existed under Nazi tutelage during World War II. Files that could ‘‘pose a threat to human life and public interest,’’ those kept on foreign nationals, and the personal data of persecuted individuals will remain 80 classi¢ed.57 In addition, as head of the Institute, Langos› plans to publish a list of names found in the S tB ¢les (including those characterized as ‘‘enemies of the regime’’) on the Internet in the fall of 2003.58 Having lagged somewhat behind, Slovakia has now joined its Central Euro- pean neighbors in opening the secret police ¢les to its citizenry.

Thus, the Czechs and Slovaks have taken very di¡erent approaches to lustration and the prosecution of former o⁄cials. Moreover, the Czechs passed legislation allowing ¢le access six years earlier than the Slovaks. While frustrations and controversies have accompanied the workings of transitional justice in the Czech Republic, it can never- theless be concluded that Czech political leaders have been far more interested in its pursuit than have their Slovak counterparts. The question, again, is: why?

What explains the divergence?

To approach this question, I begin by returning to the theories of transitional justice in the former Czechoslovakia o¡ered by Hunting- ton, Moran, and Kraus. As I stated in the introduction, all three of these scholars treat the former Czechoslovakia as a single case study. They therefore hold the factors that they regard as critical to producing particular approaches to transitional justice in common for the Czechs and Slovaks: for Huntington and Kraus, the transition type and broad complicity, and for Moran, the levels of exit and voice allowed by the Czechoslovak communist regime. The problem that has emerged over time, however, is the widening di¡erence in the Czech and Slovak outcomes to the ‘‘torturer problem.’’ Broadly speaking, one Czechoslo- vak successor state has pursued (in Huntington’s terms) a policy of ‘‘prosecute and punish’’ and the other, one closer to ‘‘forgive,’’ if not ‘‘forget.’’

It thus appears that if transition type and ‘‘exit and voice’’ are held in common for the two cases (as these scholars suggest), then neither can be the decisive factor shaping approaches to transitional justice. I would suggest, however, that if we question whether the ‘‘pressure’’ in the ‘‘cooker’’ was actually the same for the Czechs and Slovaks, Moran’s theory points in a promising direction. What if the level of repression was higher in one republic than the other? I will argue in the following section that this was the case during the last twenty years of the communist regime’s existence. 81

This, however, raises the further questions of why the communist regime would treat the two nations di¡erently, and whether the nature of the relations between communist political elites and other segments of society would shed any light on the question of the how subsequent regimes reacted to their predecessors. Here, one aspect of Hunting- ton’s analysis suggests a promising avenue for inquiry. While the main focus of both Huntington’s theory and those who use or challenge it tends to be on the relation between transition type and the ‘‘outcome of the torturer problem,’’ Huntington also states very ¢rmly that justice must be swift to be realized. The reasons for this are, again, that ‘‘[t]he popular support and indignation necessary to make justice a political reality fade; the discredited groups associated with the authoritarian regime reestablish their legitimacy and in£uence.’’59 Indeed,Welsh and Williams argue that the political power of post-communist parties, particularly relative to post-opposition parties, has important implica- tions for lustration. But is Huntington correct that the return of discredited elites to legitimacy and positions of in£uence is inevitable? And should the dynamics of their competition with new elites over lustration be considered as having little to do with ‘‘the nature of the preceding Communist regime,’’ as Williams argues? Or are they shaped by legacies of the relations between that regime and groups within the society?

I propose that the factor that ties all the above questions together, and that o¡ers at least partial answers to them, is the level of legitimacy of the Czechoslovak communist regime in the two republics from the end of the Prague Spring onward. By legitimacy I do not mean ‘‘politically conscious consent’’; clearly, the communist regime did not found itself upon such consent, nor did it provide its citizens a means to give it. I rather de¢ne legitimacy as the extent to which people view a regime as acting in accordance with acceptable standards and principles of governance. In the following section, I argue that the lower levels of regime repression in Slovakia both re£ected and produced a higher level of regime legitimacy than existed in the Czech lands. I further argue that the communist regime’s higher level of legitimacy in Slova- kia contributed to a lesser interest in transitional justice there than in the Czech lands. I turn now to the evidence in both the communist and post-communist period that supports this theory. 82

The communist regime’s legitimacy in the Czech and Slovak Republics

The post-Prague Spring communist regime

Although gauging the legitimacy of an authoritarian state that limits freedom of speech is not a straightforward task, one indication that at least some portion of the population ¢nds the regime illegitimate is the development of political dissidence. In the former Czechoslovakia, dissidence carried a price that many found too high and it is di⁄cult to assess the breadth of opposition to the regime. While only a small minority of Czechoslovak citizens actively opposed the regime, there were real di¡erences in both the levels and substance of Czech and Slovak dissidence. The reasons for these di¡erences may provide some insight into the two nations’ perspectives on the communist regime’s legitimacy from the post-invasion period onward.

The invasion occurred on August 21, 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and ended the period of reform known as the Prague Spring. The only major reform proposed during the Prague Spring that was carried forward after this point was the federalization of the previously centralized state along ethno-national lines. This represented a Slovak victory: while the Czech reformers (and some Slovaks) had tended to demand democratization of the state, the Slovak priority had been the realization of Slovak national sovereignty through federalization. The combination of the fact that these Slovak demands had ‘‘impeccable Soviet credentials’’60 and that the Slovak communist reformers had been less interested than their Czech coun- terparts in political liberalization allowed the post-invasion regime leaders to hold Slovakia ‘‘up to the Czechs as a loyalist region that succumbed less to the reactionary virus.’’61 During this period, many ‘‘ideologically sound’’ Slovaks ¢lled the vacancies left by purged Czechs, who were often demoted to menial jobs such as stokers, night watchmen, and street cleaners. There were purges in Slovakia as well, but they were less severe: only 17 percent of Slovak Party members were purged, compared with almost 42 percent of the Czech Party.62

From the post-invasion period onward, repression was signi¢cantly stronger in the Czech lands than in Slovakia. According to Petr Pithart, a dissident who became Czech Prime Minister after the Velvet Revolution, over 1.5 million people in the Czech lands ‘‘were directly or indirectly a¡ected in their e¡orts to earn a living, or their careers 83 progressed only up to the low ceiling set by nomenklatura rules.’’63 The children of people so a¡ected were also subject to such limitations. Moreover, books of every kind were pulled from the shelves if their authors or translators refused to declare the Soviet occupation legit- imate. Thus, ‘‘[w]ithin a few years Czech society was intellectually and culturally decimated.’’64 To make conditions worse, the Czech lands stagnated economically during the state’s last twenty years, partially as a result of the transfer of funds to promote Slovak development.65

Despite extensive harassment by the authorities and the constant threat of imprisonment, some Czech intellectuals, writers, and re- formers resisted the regime. The most pivotal event of this resistance was the founding of Charter 77 in December 1976. The initial docu- ment invoked the human rights agreements to which the Czechoslovak regime was a party, and then proceeded to enumerate both the rights to which citizens were entitled and the ways in which the regime had systematically violated them. In the ensuing years, Charter 77 pro- duced a signi¢cant dissident literature and drew critical international attention to human rights abuses in Czechoslovakia. Despite its best e¡orts, however, it never brought a substantial portion of the citizenry into its fold. It nevertheless stood as an important challenge to the regime’s legitimacy.

Although Charter 77 played an important role in the Czech Republic, its impact in Slovakia was negligible. Of the original 239 signatories, only eight were Slovak, and only a few more signed it over the years. One reason for this was that the Czechs did not consult with Slovaks in Slovakia (some of the Slovak signatories lived in Prague) before issuing the Charter.66 In addition, Slovak authorities were especially vigilant about keeping the in£uence of Prague’s dissident community out of Slovakia, and this o⁄cial interference led some Slovak intellectuals to refuse to meet with visiting Czechs.67

While the enforced distance between Czechs and Slovaks could help explain the lack of strong Slovak support for the Czech-dominated Charter 77, it does not explain why there was no parallel Slovak dissident movement. Indeed, ‘‘in contrast to Bohemia and Moravia, there was an almost total lack of oppositional activity of any kind’’ in Slovakia.68 In the late 1970s, roughly 95 percent of government suppression of dissidents occurred in the Czech lands, and over half of the remaining four to ¢ve percent of anti-dissident action that took place in Slovakia was directed at only two dissidents.69 Over time, the 84 proportion of anti-dissident action occurring in Slovakia rose slowly, but remained at fairly low levels. From September 1981 to December 1982, 9 percent of government repression was in Slovakia, and from 1984 to 1986, the ¢gure climbed to 13 percent, still well below the statewide proportion of Slovaks to Czechs.70

Much of the dissident activity that did occur in Slovakia concerned the assertion of a right to religious freedom. Even this, ‘‘among a popula- tion much more devout than the Czechs, was surprisingly rare.’’71 There was also some environmentalist activism in Slovakia. Overall, however, in Slovakia ‘‘there actually was no dissident movement, just a few dissidents.’’72 Given the extremely low levels of dissident arrests and prosecution based on secular dissidence, then, it appears that ‘‘the ethnic Slovak at judicial risk for his nonreligious views’’ was ‘‘not conspicuously active in the body politic.’’73

A crucial factor in both the isolation of the Slovak dissidents from one another and the prevention of a greater dissident movement was fear, which spread in many directions: fear of inferior employment, fear of being interrogated and followed, and fear for children and family members.74 While the Czechs su¡ered from this as well, the more massive and brutal purges left the Czech dissidents in a position where they had ‘‘almost nothing left to lose.’’75 By contrast, most Slovak intellectuals were not destitute ^ some could even publish ^ and therefore had ‘‘more to lose, and more to hope for.’’76

Indeed, while the negative factors of fear and isolation were certainly important, a more positive view of the regime among many Slovaks appears to have been a factor preventing secular dissidence. As anony- mous authors wrote in Listy, ‘‘because in 1968 the development of democratization, the stage and extent of democratic demands and e¡orts, were fundamentally lower in Slovakia than in the Czech lands, neither were the consequences of August 21 1968 as onerous and catastrophic in a political and moral sense.’’77 There was, in fact, some sense of satisfaction among Slovaks with the new federal struc- ture, despite the fact that much of the real power remained centralized. Thus, ‘‘even in its arrested state the federation constitute[d] a signi¢- cant moral and psychological victory for the Slovak nation.’’78 Slovak leaders had fought for federation for almost ¢fty years, and its achieve- ment had a positive e¡ect on national morale. Moreover, because of the sweeping purges of Czech cadres, ‘‘the possibilities for the Slovak intelligentsia to apply themselves in practice in the federal sphere 85 were ... greater and broader than would correspond to the normal realization of a federal arrangement.’’79 The powerful position of the Slovaks in the federal state helped to foster Slovak economic develop- ment during the 1970s, which in turn brought important social change. Combined with the e¡ects of economic modernization that had started in the 1950s, the continued industrialization led to rapidly increasing urbanization and the ‘‘gradual disappearance of traditional Slovak villages.’’80

While modernization produced socioeconomic change, the new political structures also reinforced certain elements of the traditional political culture. Kenneth Jowitt’s analysis of the Romanian case is instructive in this regard. Jowitt argues that in communist Romania, ‘‘[i]t is signi¢cant that the tendency to dichotomize elite and non-elite mem- bership during the dictatorship of the proletariat has reinforced the political culture in which the elite sector was distinct in character and prerogative, not simply in role.’’81 Similarly, in Slovakia, the develop- ment of power relations after federalization reinforced traditional distinctions between the elite and the broader population. According to Miroslav Kusy¤, ‘‘just after its [federalization’s] inception there was an enormous growth in corruption, the arrogance of the powerful elite, embezzlement, and so on.’’82 This did not, however, produce a con- current rise in public dissatisfaction with the government in Slovakia. As Pithart observes,

This system of nepotism and corruption became the substitute for the clear system of relations which had once been typical in the just recently defunct rural community. In Slovakia, power continued to be something tangible and human rather than an impersonal institution: people now had an absolutely positive relationship with the various Party bosses, secretaries and chairmen, just like the relationship which had once existed between the peasants and the aristocrats in the old village.83

To the extent that political-power relations conformed to traditional patterns of authority, the regime may have bolstered its legitimacy in Slovakia.

It is worth returning here to Kitschelt’s typology of communist regimes, which classi¢es the Czech republic as an example of a bureau- cratic-authoritarianism, characterized by high levels of repression, lower levels of cooptation, and ideological rigidity. Under such rule, ‘‘countries developed like pressure cookers with a muted and clandes- tine but potentially powerful opposition building up steam that could 86 blow the lid o¡ the communist regime whenever the party’s contain- ment of opposition through repression showed signs of weakness.’’84 Thus, hostility to the regime is more widespread than a super¢cial survey would suggest. Indeed, Gil Eyal ¢nds that in the Czech repub- lic, not only were there more dissidents than in Slovakia ^ largely made up of historians, philosophers, jurists, journalists, and social scientists, and also including artists and some priests85 ^ the techno- crats were alienated from the regime as well. These technocrats, who were based mainly in the state bank and the economics institutes of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, were not dissidents, but they were also neither co-opted, nor reform communists. They were demoted after 1968 and, with careers stalled, found common interest in mone- tarist economics. Eyal describes them as being in internal exile, ‘‘[n]either rejecting power, nor contesting it, nor quite serving it.... Internal exile meant a retreat into the private sphere, and rejection of ideological and political involvement.’’86

Slovakia, by contrast, was a combination of national-accommodative and patrimonial regimes. At the republic level, societal compliance was pursued through cooptation into clientelist networks and other positions of in£uence rather than repression. This strategy was, in fact, quite successful, particularly with regard to Slovakia’s technocrats, nationalist intellectuals, and managers. According to Eyal, each of these groups saw its relation to the regime as supportive of national progress.87 The dominant orientation among technocrats was reform communism, with the central goals of more rational economic plan- ning and authentic national autonomy. Slovakia’s nationalist intellec- tual elites were co-opted into the project of developing and enhancing Slovak national identity, primarily through historical interpretation. Finally, managers of state enterprises, enterprise lawyers, and deputy ministers were coopted as well, as their jobs had loyalty to the regime as a prerequisite.88 According to Eyal, none of these groups could be considered as internally exiled.

Overall, then, the ¢nal twenty years of the communist regime were less oppressive in the Slovak half of the federation. As Pithart observes, ‘‘in Slovakia everything functioned noticeably better than in the Czech Lands; there was less fear and less hate in Slovakia.’’89 The greater harmony between the regime and its Slovak citizens was re£ected in public opinion polls taken in the 1970s and 1980s, which ‘‘show that the population of Slovakia judged postwar economic and social develop- ments much more favourably than the Czechs, and that until the end of 87

1989 the Slovaks were more optimistic about the future prospects of the country.’’90

Clearly, then, the reason that the level of Slovak political dissidence was lower than in the Czech lands was not that the regime was more ruthless in repressing it. Rather, the levels of dissidence and repression were mutually reinforcing in each republic. This intertwining relation between repression and dissidence appears to have been initiated by the regime leaders’ appraisal of their legitimacy in the citizens’ eyes after the invasion: where they expected hostility or challenge ^ in the Czech lands ^ there was more repression, and where they expected a higher level of acceptance ^ in Slovakia ^ there was less. This lesser repression in Slovakia, in turn, helped buttress the regime’s legitimacy, which was further strengthened by the realization of federalization, socioeconomic development, and the consonance of patterns of author- ity with long-standing elements of Slovak political culture. Largely the reverse occurred in the Czech lands on all these counts. This is by no means to argue that the regime was highly legitimate in Slovakia; it is rather to establish that, in relative terms, during the last twenty years of the communist state the regime was considered more legitimate in Slovakia than in the Czech lands.

This leads me back to Moran’s theory, which centers not on general levels of repression during the communist regime, but more speci¢- cally on exit and voice. Moran’s model presupposes a substantial number of people who ‘‘feel strongly about political issues,’’ who wish to voice these feelings, and who are either given or denied the options of emigration and political dissent. It therefore assumes the existence of a pressure cooker-like situation, with voice and exit as ‘‘release valves.’’91 This raises the question: did the di¡erence in the relationship between regime and citizenry in the two republics re£ect the existence of one of these two release valves in Slovakia, but not the Czech lands? The answer is no: neither emigration nor political dissent was an option o¡ered by the regime in either republic. The fact that the ‘‘pressure’’ was nevertheless lower in one republic indicates the need to look to other factors for its explanation. Again, I would suggest that higher legitimacy would help account for lower pressure, and vice versa. This is not to discount the usefulness of Moran’s theory for Czechoslovakia, as the Czech Republic does seem to have been a real ‘‘pressure cooker.’’ The Slovak case suggests, however, that this theory’s applicability may not be universal in the post-communist context. To gauge the model’s applicability to a particular situation, one should 88 assess the level of the regime’s legitimacy, as it appears to be a key factor giving ‘‘voice’’ and ‘‘exit’’ their relevance.

The post-communist period

The question now arises: how might the di¡erences in the levels of the regime’s legitimacy in its two constituent republics a¡ect the progress of transitional justice in the post-communist period? Here, I return to Huntington, whose explanation of the impediments to transitional justice over the longer term provides a useful starting point for exploring this question. These are the re-legitimization of the previous regime’s elites and the erosion of public interest in pursuing justice for them. While Huntington suggests that these developments are inevitable in a democratizing society, I argue that their extent and progress is at least partially shaped by the levels of the previous regime’s legitimacy. It seems reasonable to expect that the desire for justice will, at least to some extent, correspond to the sense of the injustice that it is address- ing. Thus, the higher a society’s view of the previous regime’s legiti- macy, the lower its motivation to pursue justice for its authorities and the higher the likelihood, in a democratic context, that it will allow elites associated with the former regime to return to the political stage. These elites, in turn, would not be particularly likely to support vigorous transitional justice. Therefore, the more quickly they regain power, the less likely a legal framework will be established to screen such elites out of the political sphere over time. Conversely, the lower the society’s view of the previous regime’s legitimacy, the more likely it is both to have an anti-communist counter-elite to o¡er an alternative to communist successor parties and to o¡er electoral support to this counter-elite. In turn, these elites would certainly be more likely than the communist successor elites to pursue ‘‘decommunization.’’ In the following section, then, I examine whether these expectations are borne out in the Czech and Slovak cases by comparing levels of public interest in decommunization and the extent to which elites strongly associated with the communist regime were able to return to power, beginning with the latter.

Elite re-legitimization The Velvet Revolution produced a transfer of power from the Commu- nist Party to two dissident-led umbrella parties: the Civic Forum (OF) in the Czech lands and the Public Against Violence (VPN) in Slovakia. Both won popular sanction in the 1990 elections. As Eyal points out, 89 however, these two parties did not parallel one another, but rather re£ected key di¡erences between each republic’s normalization-era elites. In the Czech Republic, the OF elite was composed of dissidents and monetarist technocrats.92 Although Slovakia’s VPN also included dissidents, it was largely made up of reform communist technocrats, nationalist intellectuals, and former managers. Moreover, as time went on, the dissidents who had leant the OF and the VPN their legitimacy during the revolution began to lose support in both republics, and the balance of power shifted to other elites. On the Czech side, monetarist technocrat Va¤clav Klaus, an admirer of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher who never actively opposed the Communist regime, emerged as the strongest leader. Breaking away from the OF, he founded the center-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS). In Slovakia, Vladim|¤r Mec› iar, who had been purged after the Prague Spring but allowed to work as a lawyer, began to overtake former dissident Ja¤nC arnogursky¤ as the dominant personality in Slovak politics. Both Klaus and Mec› iar were controversial ¢gures, though for very di¡erent reasons: while Klaus’s rigid espousal of free market economics and contentious political style made him very unpopular in some circles, Mec› iar was the subject of more serious allegations. During his time as Slovak Minister of the Interior following the Velvet Revolution, reports began to circulate that Mec› iar was seen frequently with S tB agents and, worse, was destroying ¢les that could incriminate himself and his allies. After he became Slovak Prime Minister in June 1990, a few press reports alleged both that he was using ¢les to intimidate political rivals and that he had been a collaborator himself. In April 1991, VPN leaders sacked Mec› iar, in part because of the serious nature of the allegations against him.

After Mec› iar’s dismissal from the post of Prime Minister (which prompted widespread protests in Slovakia), the Parliamentary Com- mittee on Defense and Security conducted an investigation of these allegations. The Committee’s report, presented in March 1992 to the Slovak National Council and accepted by it, provided witness testi- mony that Mec› iar had indeed taken full advantage of his post as Minister of Internal A¡airs and presided over the disappearance of ¢les he considered threatening. Included in the missing documents were pages of a registration book that ‘‘happened to contain the serial numbers of Mec› iar himself and a number of former police operatives whom the internal a¡airs minister had elevated to important positions in his ministry.’’93 Despite the resulting omissions in the documenta- tion, investigators were able to ¢nd some evidence that Mec› iar had 90 been an S tB collaborator since 1976. Evidence was also produced to show that he had employed a number of S tB agents and placed some in the personnel department.94 Together, Mec› iar and his sta¡ had used the ¢les ‘‘to manipulate Slovak politics to their advantage.’’95 In addition, during his time as Slovak Prime Minister, Mec› iar was shown to have unjustly promoted and demoted employees and to have forced the resignation of the new Minister of Internal A¡airs because he was dismissing former S tB agents appointed by Mec› iar. Interestingly, the Slovak media ‘‘remained fairly quiet’’ on the issue.96 Although the report was delivered shortly before the elections, Mec› iar and his new Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) ^ a party founded after his split from the VPN and dominated by former managers and communist party cadres97 ^ won the election ‘‘handily.’’98 He won another term in 1994, and though he was defeated in 1998, he consis- tently rates as one of the most popular political personalities in Slovakia (though he is also loathed by many).

Mec› iar’s is not the only party dominated by former communists in Slovakia. Purged of its most notorious members, the Slovak Commu- nist Party was able to remake itself as the Party of the Democratic Left (SDL). It has developed a more urbane and liberal image under the leadership of lawyer Peter Weiss, who drew credibility from his past defense of dissidents during communist-era trials.99 While not as popular as Mec› iar’s HZDS, it has enjoyed fairly consistent electoral success and has been included in more than one government.

The Czech Communists have had rather di¡erent fortunes. Mec› iar’s clear win in 1992 occurred alongside a very strong victory in the Czech Republic for Va¤clav Klaus and the ODS, composed of monetarist technocrats and conservative intellectuals100 and in many ways the HDZS’s ideological opposite. The center-right continued to dominate Czech politics until the Klaus coalition’s dramatic collapse in late 1997. Since then, power has been distributed more evenly between the center-right and the center-left, represented most prominently by the Social Democratic Party (C SSD). While it does count a fair number of former communists in its ranks, the C SSD is not a communist succes- sor-party. As Le¡ argues, ‘‘the Social Democrats are unique in the postcommunist political landscape. In almost every other postcom- munist state, a strong ex-communist party has persisted or remained as the dominant force on the left.’’101 The Czech Republic also stands out because it joins only Croatia and Bosnia in never having had a communist-successor party in a post-communist government. The 91 state does have a communist successor-party: the Communist Party (KSC M), which, tellingly, is the only party in East-Central Europe to continue to call itself ‘‘Communist.’’ It opposes democratic and market reforms and has continued to espouse hard-line communism. Although it consistently gains representation, it is a political untouchable.

A full analysis of the reasons for these parties’ electoral fortunes would be complex and is beyond the scope of this article. Still, the Czech and Slovak electoral choices surveyed above reveal real di¡erences between the two nations’ relationships to the parties with the closest ties to the previous regime. In the Czech Republic, the former and current Communist Party continues to be ideologically rigid and anti-demo- cratic and has little appeal to the constituency it once claimed the exclusive right to represent. In Slovakia, the former communists have been more £exible and have adapted themselves to the new political conditions of a democratic Slovakia. Moreover, Mec› iar’s substantial support base has not seemed particularly concerned about his appa- rent complicity with the S tB and his abuse of power relating to the ¢les. It is true that a number of factors underlay the HZDS’s appeal, including its demands for national sovereignty and promises for a ‘‘third way’’ for the £oundering Slovak economy. Nevertheless, it is signi¢cant that the voters were willing to overlook the fact that a party dominated by ex-communists had a leader with strong links to the previous regime’s dark side. This would suggest that already in 1992, Slovak priorities did not include the exclusion from political life of those tied to the S tB or the former regime more broadly. The re- legitimization of former elites has, then, clearly progressed more rapidly and extensively in Slovakia than in the Czech Republic ^ an outcome consistent with Kitschelt’s expectations for the two regime types.

Further, the makeup of the new political elites has had important implications for lustration in each republic. The Czech monetarists, dominating the ODS, were strongly in favor of lustration. As Eyal argues, ‘‘the idea of lustration expressed what the dissidents had in common with the monetarists, even if they di¡ered on questions of method and authority ^ the rejection and condemnation of the past.’’102 Indeed, among these elites, communism was seen as utterly bankrupt, and reform communists as no di¡erent from communists ‘‘without adjectives.’’103 By contrast, in Slovakia, the communist past, and in particular the post-federalization reform communist project of authentic national autonomy and rational planning, was not looked 92 on as something to be ‘‘erased or puri¢ed; on the contrary, its remem- brance was part of the work of imagining the nation.’’104 Slovak elites saw their current project as having signi¢cant lines of continuity with the best elements of reform communism. Thus, ‘‘[l]ustration was the direct symbolic antithesis of the ideological package of the left in Slovakia, and threatened it with symbolic annihilation.’’105 According to Eyal, after the polarizing 1992 elections, when the Czech right and Slovak left met in their ¢nal showdown, the HZDS placed the ‘‘non- negotiable’’ demand that the lustration law be revoked ^ alongside rejection of Havel as president ^ at the center of its strategy of ‘‘brinksmanship.’’106 The Czechs were unwilling to engage in serious negotiations over the Slovak roster of demands, and the agreement to split the state came not long thereafter. Moreover, the Slovak elite con¢guration continued to have implications for transitional justice in Slovakia after the ‘‘Velvet Divorce’’: according to both Langos› and C arnogursky¤, a crucial reason why Slovakia did not pursue lustration and took so long to open the secret police ¢les to the public was the electoral strength of the HZDS and the SDL, the majority of whose members were opposed to both.107

Clearly, then, the orientation of the new elites in both federal repub- lics/countries was a critical factor shaping approaches to transitional justice. This supports both Welsh’s emphasis on the importance of the electoral success of post-communist parties and Williams et al.’s stress on the relative strength of former opposition forces. At the same time, the continuities in the various elites’ views of communism from the communist to post-communist periods indicates that the lustration debates and struggles should not be considered as primarily the ‘‘politics of the present,’’ but rather as a policy issue whose develop- ment depends on a number of factors ^ some of which are to be found in the past.

Public interest in decommunization A number of polls taken during the 1990s indicate that there are di¡erences between Czech and Slovak popular attitudes toward both the former regime and decommunization. A January 1992 study con- ducted by the Institute for Central European Studies at Comenius University in Bratislava showed that only 41 percent of Slovaks felt that ‘‘the new government o¡ered greater advantages than the commu- nist government,’’ compared to 63 percent of Czechs. Thirty-seven percent of Slovaks said they were supporters of the Communist regime, compared with only 15 percent of Czechs.108 Two-thirds of 93

Slovaks also said that the increase in unemployment was the fault of the post-communist federal government, while the same proportion of Czechs ‘‘saw it as a consequence of the communists’ policies.’’109

National di¡erences emerged as well in a public opinion survey conducted by Central European University seven times between 1992 and 1996. It included a question that asked respondents to rate their agreement, on a scale of 1 to 9, with the policy goal of ‘‘removing former communists from positions of in£uence.’’A score of 9 indicated that the respondent was ‘‘very strongly in favour of (absolutely agree),’’ 6 was ‘‘rather in favour of,’’ 5 was ‘‘neither in favour, nor against,’’ and so on. The Czech and Slovak responses were statistically di¡erent in each year, with the Czechs expressing substantially greater agree- ment with the statement than respondents in Slovakia (see Appendix A and B).

Finally, a 1995 survey conducted by the Institute of Sociology at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic indicated large di¡erences in the relevance of a number of political issues to political party competition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. According to Kevin Deegan Krause, most of the issues, such as the ¢rm use of power and the rights of political minorities, were more relevant to the competition between Slovak than Czech parties. Interestingly, ‘‘[o]nly one issue ^ the question of decommunization ^ is signi¢cantly less relevant to Slovak than to Czech party competition.’’110

These polling data thus indicate that, in comparison with Slovaks, Czechs took a dimmer view of the previous regime, were more suppor- tive of decommunization, and that their views on decommunization were more relevant to their electoral choices. Broadly speaking, then, Czechs and Slovaks chose their new political elites against the back- drop of di¡erent appraisals of the communist regime. Moreover, their choices are consistent with what one might expect from these apprais- als, particularly in the 1992 elections: the Czechs moved far away from the communists, to the center-right, while the Slovaks embraced parties dominated by former communists.111 Decisions on decommu- nization made by elites should be viewed in this context, which, though undoubtedly involving an (potentially signi¢cant) element of self- interest, cannot be seen as unexpected given the composition and stated views of elected o⁄cials in each state. Moreover, while it could be argued that the Slovaks were too busy dealing with a struggling economy and political uncertainties to have much time to deal with 94 transitional justice, it cannot be deduced that they would have other- wise done so: a population that elects a high proportion of former communists is not likely to have a strong concurrent desire for decom- munization ^ nor did they indicate such in opinion polls. Based on this evidence, then, I conclude that a previous regime’s legitimacy is indeed an important factor shaping both the level of public interest in seeking justice against members of that regime and the speed and likelihood of previous elites’ (re)legitimization ^ factors that have strong implica- tions for transitional justice.

Recent debates over ¢le access

To this point, I have focused on the contrasts between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Neither political community, however, found dealing with the previous regime straightforward or uncontroversial. In this section, I attempt to provide some sense of the diversity of opinion within the two states by looking brie£y at the recent debates over the laws on ¢le access.

Broadening access to the Czech ¢les

On March 14, 2002, President Havel signed into law a bill broadening public access to the former regime’s secret police ¢les. According to the bill’s initiator, ODS Senator Dagmar Lastovecka¤, its intention was to make it possible for ‘‘Czechs to know their history.’’112 The Chamber of Deputies approved the bill in February by a vote of 102 to 53, and the Senate followed in March, with a vote of 42 to 11. The Communist Party was the only one to o¡er a uni¢ed vote against the bill,113 arguing that it would provoke hatred in Czech society.114 The bill also prompted criticism from members of both the C SSD (a majority of whom voted against the law) and the former dissident community. One key stated reason for the Social Democratic opposi- tion was that the law contradicted a number of other laws, including that on the protection of personal information.115 Another was ex- pressed by Vice-premier Pavel Rychetsky¤(C SSD), who said he feared that the ¢les would reveal more about those that were victimized by the S tB than about its collaborators.116 Social Democratic Deputy Zdenek Jic› insky¤, the author of the Czechoslovak and Czech constitutions from 1960 onward, voiced a third concern, arguing that the law will prolong the S tB’s in£uence over society.117 95

These views overlapped with those of some former dissidents. Petr Uhl, a Charter 77 signatory and the Czech Government Commis- sioner for Human Rights from 1999 to 2001, wrote in Pravo that the bill’s ‘‘most problematic’’ aspect concerned the

protection of personal information. It is not clear what information about persecuted individuals will be blacked out ^ after all, the agents’ reports were composed of information about their activities, contacts with other of the regime’s opponents, and intimacies, the bedroom not excepted. If we blacken out the majority, what will remain in the ¢le will be the sums paid to agents and re£ections on their e¡ectiveness and reliability. I am not sure whether such re£ections about people who were often acting under pressure can be made public. Even former secret collaborators enjoy the protection of the law.118

Uhl’s fellow Chartist, ex-Foreign Minister Jir› |¤Dienstbier, also warned that the ¢les are full of lies, accusations made by neighbors, and fabrications.119 Former dissident Petr Cibulka, an activist for the publication of all the information contained in the ¢les who has over- seen the non-o⁄cial publication of over 200,000 names of allegedly implicated persons, criticized the law from a di¡erent angle, arguing that it is ‘‘deceptive’’ because the volumes containing the names of those who performed or perform high functions in the Czech state would not be made public.120

President Havel, as well, expressed some trepidation about the law, stating that it hides ‘‘a great danger.’’ Havel had long voiced reserva- tions about revealing the contents of the ¢les, arguing in 1993 that ‘‘[c]hildren will be ashamed of their parents, families will break up, people will treat those who they ¢nd were informers as they would treat poison.’’ Such disclosures, he argued, would be ‘‘one of the S tB’s biggest successes.’’ He nevertheless decided to sign the 2002 legislation after concluding that, ‘‘the importance of truth is higher, that it surpasses all the rest.’’121 He also stated that, ‘‘his signature was one step toward the puri¢cation of the nation.’’122

This brief overview of the arguments for and against the 2002 law indicates, then, that a fair number of Czech leaders fear the implica- tions of public access to the ¢les, and further that their fears cannot in all cases be assumed to mask political self-interest. Moreover, the Slovak journal Na¤rodna¤obroda reports that only one-third of the Czech population was in favor of broadening public access to the ¢les.123 Nor have millions of Czechs expressed interest in exploring the ¢les: only 3,000 citizens accessed the ¢les during the ¢rst six years 96 afterthelaw’spassagein1996.Itistruethatthisislessthan10percent of those who applied to read them; 90 percent were turned away because the ¢les no longer exist, never existed, or the applicants did not qualify.124 Nevertheless, given that most ¢les have been open to the individuals on whom they were kept for ¢ve years preceding the new law, an expert contacted by Mlada¤fronta dnes stated that he ‘‘does not expect that the volumes will bring surprising revelations, nor does he count on an avalanche of applicants for entry to the communist archives.’’125 Thus, the Czech Republic’s legal framework supporting access to the ¢les exists within a society with an ambivalent view of such openness.

Opening the Slovak ¢les

Slovakia, as well, has seen a debate over ¢le access, which began to gather momentum in the latter part of 2001. That fall, the journal Kritika & Kontext published a special issue focusing on the ‘‘Phenom- enon of the S tB in Slovakia.’’ In particular, the contributing authors grappled with the reasons for the ‘‘silence’’ in the country with regard to issues surrounding the former secret police. This silence appears to have been pervasive; not only was the general public uninterested, Kusy¤observed, but there was also ‘‘insu⁄cient interest of the expert community, historians, political scientists, opinion makers.’’126 In exploring the roots of this situation, many of the authors point to the lack of Slovak opposition to the regime during the normalization period. For example, Juraj Podoba writes: ‘‘As is known, in Slovakia there did not exist a political opposition, as there did not exist strong parallel social structures, which would make it possible to establish an alternative way of life.’’127 Imrich Vas› ec› ka, as well, argues that any accounting of the ‘‘S tB problem’’ must use as its starting point the low levels of opposition to both the S tB and the regime.128 Pointing to a 2001 poll that showed 59 percent of Slovaks felt that they had lived better under the pre-November 1989 regime than its successor, Olga Gya¤rfas› ova¤questions whether there was much impetus for Slovaks to either oppose that regime or explore the S tB past in the post-commu- nist period.129 Given the increases in standards of living in Slovakia from the 1950s onward, the smoothness of normalization, and the small numbers of dissidents, about whom many people knew little, she asks, ‘‘for which Slovaks was the S tB phenomenon actually some- thing real?’’130 Finally, Kusy¤observes that many people reserved their hostility not for the regime, but for the dissidents themselves, writing: 97

It is not possible to understand the S tB phenomenon as an isolated problem. It is a component of the whole communist regime with us. If voices resound that communism with us was better, the S tB is also accepted as a part of that ‘‘better’’ life. You would be amazed at who all reproached me, that ‘‘you dissidents are in essence exhibitionists. You needlessly provoked, and so contributed to the situation becoming needlessly critical. You forced the S tB to self-defense.’’131

These authors appear to agree, then, that there is a relationship between the Slovaks’ lack of opposition to the preceding regime and their lack of interest in the ‘‘S tB problem.’’

The issue nevertheless appeared on the political agenda that autumn, when both Langos› and C arnogursky¤submitted proposals for laws opening the ¢les to the public. Not surprisingly, the two proposals met a particularly skeptical reception from the HZDS and SDL. Chairman of the Constitutional Committee and SDL representative Ladislav Orosz dismissed the Langos› proposal as legally confused. According to Orosz, it contradicted Slovak criminal law, the law on public order, the law on archives, and several others.132 C arnogursky¤’s proposal prompted several lines of criticism as well, including arguments: that it contradicted both ‘‘domestic rules and international agreements’’;133 that the S tB materials were far from complete;134 that the materials had been outside of Slovak control (in Prague) for a period and may have been manipulated or tampered with by foreign (Czech) author- ities;135 that it was too broad, allowing non-victims access alongside victims;136 that it could endanger the workings of the current secret service by disclosing its methods;137 and that insu⁄cient time had elapsed since the events under scrutiny.138 An ‘‘unnamed expert’’ also warned Pravda that modi¢cation of ¢les is a real concern, suggesting however that it might not have been done by Czechs. ‘‘Disclosing the materials is only a political gesture and will not have any use,’’ he said. ‘‘The big ¢sh escaped and the little ones are unimportant.’’139

C arnogursky¤’s proposal also received some positive reactions. In a survey of several deputies, Na¤rodna¤odbora found support for it from Ja¤n Budaj, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Union (LDUŁ ), Pavol Hamz› |¤k, leader of the Party of Civic Understanding (SOP), Ja¤n Rusna¤k of Prime Minister Mikula¤s› Dzurinda’s Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKUŁ ), and Gyula Ba¤rdis of the Hungarian Coalition (SMK)140 ^ all members of the governing coalition. In addition, Jaroslav Pas› ka of the right-wing nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS) expressed support for it. Some argued that it was overdue, 98 and both Hamz› |¤k and Pas› ka pointed out that all of Slovakia’s neigh- bors had already passed such legislation, and that it was therefore ‘‘high time’’ for the country to do the same.141 Budaj also told Pravda that ‘‘real ‘decommunization’ had not yet occurred in Slovakia,’’ and that opening the archives would be a step in that direction.142 In another article, Na¤rodna¤odbora interviewed deputies who were sup- portive, but more wary. KDH representative Frantis› ek Miklos› ko stated that he would prefer a proposal that only allowed people to view their own ¢les, and SDKUŁ representative Toma¤s› Galbavy¤stated that the proposal was coming too late, and would be largely symbolic, as ‘‘it solves little after twelve years.’’143

A number of editorials took a stronger supportive stance, re£ecting both a view that ¢le access is a moral imperative and frustration with the apparent lack of ‘‘political will’’ among leaders and the broader population ‘‘for this step.’’144 For example, Marek Vagovic› writes that despite the bill’s shortcomings, ‘‘the principle is indisputable: every nation has the right to know its own past.’’145 Observing that the SDL had begun to ‘‘concoct the most manifold excuses,’’ he argues that their claims that international agreements and security concerns place barriers to opening the ¢les are untenable, given that all of the state’s neighbors had opened their ¢les without encountering such problems. Milan Stanislav, as well, writes that the proposed law has an important informative e¡ect, allowing people to know both what had happened to them and who had harmed them. This would create a situation where the ‘‘people who made life hell for others, and it doesn’t matter the size of the ¢sh, would not live among us anonymously and would not pretend that they are innocents.’’146 Writing in Na¤rodna obroda, Peter Vavro observes that Slovakia is a country where lustration ‘‘is considered a witch-hunt, and the opening of the S tB volumes to public access as the opening of old wounds.’’147 Vavro argues that this re£ects a deep-seated disinterest in Slovak society with regard to these issues, even though the ‘‘witches’’ continue to ful¢ll ‘‘high public functions.’’ Finally, Ivan Bac› a writes that, ‘‘even in the underworld, which has its own moral understanding, stoolpigeons, narks, [etc.] ... belong to the most despised. Nevertheless, the leaders of the mature socialist society relied on their services.’’ After 1989, hope arose ‘‘that we would learn who belonged to the moral dregs of society.’’ Such hopes had been repeatedly dashed and appeared soon to be dashed again, Bac› a observes, given that on the same day that the Czechs passed their law on ¢le access, the Slovak government swept C arno- gursky¤’s proposal ‘‘under the rug.’’ Likewise, Langos› ’s e¡orts initially 99

‘‘did not engender much enthusiasm.’’148 It nevertheless passed, with some support even from members of the HZDS. According to C arno- gursky¤, the success was made possible in part by the SDL’s pre-election weakness, as well as ^ somewhat ironically ^ the broader ¢le access o¡ered by Langos› ’s bill.149

Interestingly, although both Langos› and C arnogursky¤expect that opening the ¢les will allow citizens to understand the truth about the past better, they envision some of its purposes di¡erently. Although the law does not mandate any sort of repercussions for those found to have been involved with the S tB, Langos› expects that when the Institute for National Memory noti¢es state authorities that they have implicated persons highly placed within their ministries or organs, it will prompt them to ‘‘purify’’ their ranks voluntarily by demoting them. He calls this ‘‘lustration without legal consequences.’’150 C arnogursky¤,bycon- trast, ¢nds that ‘‘now lustration as such has no sense,’’ particularly because uno⁄cial lists of collaborators are accessible on the Internet. Moreover, ‘‘if even somebody who was listed as collaborator would be nominated by a political party to some position, if this political party is strong enough to appoint the man, that means that he has to be appointed.’’ For his part, C arnogursky¤hopesthataccesstothein- formation contained within the ¢les will provide needed context for the lists of collaborators, as it will allow some individuals to prove that they cooperated under duress and with the intention of only supplying information that would not harm other people.151

Clearly, then, although the political will for opening the S tB ¢les to the public was lower in Slovakia than the Czech Republic, the contrast should not be portrayed as overly stark. Both political communities have struggled with the moral ambiguities inherent in making public the records of an organization built upon deceit, blackmail and treachery. Arguments for and against disclosure of the ¢les have been made forcefully in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and it would be unfair to o¡er a generalized picture suggesting that the two societies are polar opposites on the issue.

Does the theory work for other cases? Poland, Hungary, and Romania

To this point, I have attempted to o¡er evidence that the level of the previous regime’s legitimacy helps explain the di¡erences between the 100

Czech and Slovak approaches to transitional justice. The questions then arise: is it useful in analyzing other cases? What are the theory’s limits? To address these, I turn now to a brief exploration of Poland, Hungary, and Romania. These are instructive comparative cases, as at ¢rst they all appear to contradict the patterns I identify in this study. Hungary and Poland, whose Communist regimes were more legitimate than the Czech ^ and in the Hungarian case, even more legitimate than the Slovak ^ have in the post-communist period had intense debates over transitional justice, resulting in lustration legislation. On the other hand, Ceausescu’s Romania, which was highly illegitimate, has been replaced by a regime that does not engage in lustration.

In this section, then, I examine these three states with regard to the dynamics of the relationship between state and society during the Communist regime and the implications of this relationship for post- communist responses to that regime. Drawing on Kitschelt’s typology, I look both at the Communist regimes’ methods of ensuring compli- ance during its last twenty or so years (repression or cooptation) and the orientations of the broader population (cooptation, internal exile, opposition/dissidence) toward the regime. This allows me to o¡er an assessment of how these societies appraised the regimes’ legitimacy, keeping in mind that such conclusions must be quali¢ed by the constraints placed upon people’s abilities to challenge these regimes openly. I then look at the makeup of the new political elites in the post- communist period, exploring the possibility that negative orientations among these elites toward the preceding regime’s legitimacy may be a factor supportive of the type (or lack) of lustration legislation found in each case.

Poland

Kitschelt classi¢es the Polish regime as a mix of national-accommoda- tive and bureaucratic authoritarian Communism.152 The regime thus employed a strategy of intense cooptation, on the one hand, and on the other, repression that was lower than in the Czech Republic, but higher than in Hungary. O¡e describes the repression as low (com- pared to Czechoslovakia, which he calls intermediate153). The regime’s strategy was, of course, in£uenced by the Polish societal orientation towards it, which became increasingly hostile from the 1970s until the establishment of Solidarity in 1981. This was a watershed in regime- society relations, bringing intellectuals, workers, and much of the 101 intelligentsia together in opposition to the state. Thus, ‘‘[i]nstitutional- ization of mass anticommunist dissent became a fact.’’154 According to Jacek Wasilweski and Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, Solidarity ‘‘was a mass movement of the Poles who were separated from the authorities by an impassable distance,’’ a distance that was not economic, but political, and also cultural, as ‘‘the values, the Weltanschauung, the moral stand- ards, the faith, and even the language of those who joined Solidarity were depreciated and devalued’’ by the regime.155 The lack of support for the regime was captured in clandestine polls in 1981, which showed that if elections had been held, the Party would have received about 3 percent of the vote.156 Adam Przeworski thus argues that ‘‘Communist rule became militarized because only in this form could it survive the revolt of the society.’’157 Given the existence and popularity of this ‘‘alternative political class,’’158 cooptation into the state apparatus became a less attractive option.159 In the context of what O¡e calls ‘‘strong and continuously increasing’’ internal resistance to the regime at the mass level,160 the more liberal wing of the Communist Party gained ground against the hardliners. This wing was far less ideologi- cally rigid; indeed, from the late 1970s onward, most people who joined the party did so from ‘‘careerist or opportunist’’ motives.161 It was this faction that brought the Party to the Round Table negotiations in 1989.

Given its leaders’ £exibility and willingness to reform during certain periods, the Polish regime may not have engendered the depth of antipathy that the more rigid and repressive Czech regime did. At the same time, the societal breadth and depth of the organized opposition went far beyond that in the Czech Republic, or anywhere else in Eastern Europe. Taking all this into account, it is possible to comfort- ably conclude that the Polish Communist regime was not highly legitimate.

Although it was negotiated, the transition to democracy was largely a transition of power to anti-regime forces. As Eva Fodor, Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, and Natasha Yershova argue, the ‘‘new political elite in Poland and Hungary, especially in those elected to positions of power, re£ect the composition and strength of the opposition move- ments in the two countries.’’162 The elections that installed this new elite made breaking with the past a key issue. This break was, in fact, substantial: in 1993, 77.8 percent of the political elite had not been a member of the Communist Party in 1988.163 In addition, the new elite drew strongly from the working classes of Solidarity descent.164 Of 102 course, that same year, the former Communists made a comeback, o¡ering themselves as a mitigating force for the rigors of shock therapy. They were subsequently displaced by the post-Solidarity center-right in 1997.

While calls for lustration legislation from some post-Solidarity forces emerged in 1990^1991, it was this return to o⁄ce in 1997 that produced the lustration law. It came in the wake of a scandal surrounding the Prime Minister Jo¤sef Oleksy, of the post-Communist party, who was forced to resign in 1996 after being accused of having been a Soviet and Russian spy. The legislation requires public o⁄cials ^ including candi- dates for o⁄ce ^ to submit an a⁄davit stating whether they were knowing employees of or collaborators with the security services. A Public Interest Spokesman then checks the statement, and if doubts arise about its veracity, it is referred to a lustration court. If the court ¢nds that the o⁄cial’s statement is false, that person may not hold public o⁄ce for ten years. Appeal is possible.

What implications does the Polish case hold for the theory that the Communist regime’s legitimacy plays a role in its successor’s lustration policy? I argue that it tends to support it. A very substantial anti- communist counter-elite existed in the country, and after the transition, it dominated positions of political in£uence for the ¢rst years of the post-communist period. At the same time, the post-communist party was able to reestablish its legitimacy fairly quickly (without calling for a return to the old regime) and to win elections, though it was subsequently defeated again by the members of the former opposition. Thus,Williams notes a ‘‘bipolar tendency’’ with regard to ‘‘Communist- purging’’ and ‘‘Communist-forgiving’’ orientations (though some of the latter’s proponents were former members of the opposition).165 This appears to re£ect continuities with the political cleavage during the communist regime between the anti-communist opposition and the more liberal reformist wing of the Communist Party. While various factors certainly in£uence the outcome of power struggles, controver- sies over lustration re£ect the legacy of regime-society con£icts of the communist past.

Hungary

Kitschelt categorizes Communist Hungary as a good example of a national-accommodative regime.166 It relied strongly on cooptation, 103 and only secondarily on repression (which O¡e describes as ‘‘low’’167 ). This cooptation was quite successful, particularly with regard to the intelligentsia, and political dissent remained low until the second half of the 1980s. At this point, however, opposition gained strength rapidly, prompting O¡e to characterize it as ‘‘strong and continuously increasing’’ at the elite and party levels.168 This re£ected both the growing strength of reform communists in relation to the hardliners during the waning years of the 1980s and the construction of opposi- tion parties from 1987 onward. In addition, it appears that a substan- tial portion of those who might at ¢rst glance be considered co-opted within the Hungarian workforce were in fact internal exiles. As Szonja Szele¤nyi, Iva¤nSzele¤nyi, and Imre Kova¤ch argue, while the Polish workers chose to exercise ‘‘voice,’’ the Hungarian workers ‘‘opted for ‘exit’ over loyalty,’’ ignoring the state economy as long as they could do well in the uno⁄cial second economy.169 More importantly, the regi- me’s relationship with the technocratic intelligentsia ‘‘may have unin- tentionally played a role in weakening the legitimacy of the socialist system. The new technocracy that moved into positions of power did not believe (nor was it required to believe) in socialism.’’ Its members began to push for a legalization of property rights and ‘‘made a concerted e¡ort to ‘exit’ socialism.’’170 In 1989, a negotiated transition made this possible.

As in the Polish case, success in the ¢rst Hungarian post-communist elections and entry into the political elite depended on an anti-com- munist stance.171 This o¡ered the internal exiles a chance for upward mobility in the ‘‘name of anti-communism’’ ^ a strategy also known as the ‘‘revolution of the deputy department heads,’’172 who moved to take over their ex-communist bosses’ positions. There was, in fact, a fairly high turnover of political elites: in 1993, 70.2 percent of the new political elite consisted of people who were not members of the Communist Party in 1988.173 Moreover, Szele¤nyi notes that ‘‘a spectac- ular 78 percent of all communist political leaders experienced down- ward mobility. Thus, it is clear that the transition to post-communism has produced a remarkable transformation in the composition of the Hungarian political elite.’’174 As in Poland, however, the former Com- munist Party was able to re-legitimize itself, re-entering o⁄ce in 1994. Also as in Poland, there has been alternation between post-commu- nists and post-opposition parties ever since, with the center-right using ‘‘anti-(post)-communism’’ as a central part of its successful campaign strategy in 1998.175 104

Lustration has also taken a meandering path. Although legislative proposals arose as early as 1990, the ¢rst lustration law was passed in 1994. This law requires that public o⁄cials occupying 10,000 to 12,000 positions be vetted for previous involvement with the domestic secret police, the World War II-era fascist Arrow Cross, and the squads that suppressed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The law relies on the assumption that behind-the-scenes pressure will be put on those implicated, because if they do not resign, their names are published in the o⁄cial gazette. (This has not, however, necessarily been e¡ective; for example, Socialist Prime Minister Gyula Horn shrugged o¡ his own exposure in 1997 as having been in more than one relevant category.176) This law’s reach was restricted by the ex-Communist party government in 1996 to cover only 500 to 1,000 posts, but then broadened again by its post-opposition successor to cover 7,000 to 8,000 posts.177

With its reliance on ‘‘shaming’’ rather than on mandatory exclusion of persons from problematic categories, lustration in Hungary is much laxer than in the Czech Republic, somewhat laxer than in Poland, and more stringent than in Slovakia, where lustration is not carried out. This in fact conforms to expectations regarding the relationship between societal/elite orientations toward the Communist regime and subsequent strength of lustration. It appears that Hungarian society was divided as to the regime’s legitimacy, or at least ambivalent toward it. As in Poland and Slovakia, the Communist Party included a fair number of reformers. As in Slovakia, some portion of the intelligentsia was coopted. These groups likely saw the regime as fairly legitimate, or at least salvageable. It is worth noting that I depart here from O¡e, who classi¢es Hungarian reform communism as ‘‘opposition,’’ even if the reformers do not reject the ultimate legitimacy of communism. On the other side, Hungary had dissident intellectuals as in the Czech Republic and Poland, though the scope of dissent was closer to the Czech than the Polish. Moreover, as in the Czech Republic, a substan- tial portion of the technocrats were internally exiled, and likely a higher percentage of workers were as well. The high levels of internal exile may help explain the di¡erence between Hungary and Slovakia with regard to lustration, as overall more segments of Hungarian society abandoned the regime’s central project of building socialism by moving into the private or semi-private ‘‘second economy,’’ even if they did not go into open opposition. Thus, though the Hungarian regime is commonly considered the most legitimate in Eastern Europe, a substantial number of people appear to have rejected the regime’s 105 claim to legitimacy. The spectrum of orientations that the late commu- nist period produced thus set the stage for battles over lustration in the post-communist period.

Romania

Kitschelt classi¢es Romania as a patrimonial regime. Consistent with the patterns he identi¢es, the Romanian regime used high levels of both repression and cooptation to ensure societal compliance. It was fairly successful; cooptation was high, and opposition was, in O¡e’s terms, ‘‘very weak.’’ O¡e attributes this to the strong repression, while Kitschelt points to the weakness of pre-communist political pluralism and, more importantly, the absence of political mobilization in urban areas during the communist period. Because of the weakness of political opposition, when revolutions began toppling communist re- gimes throughout Eastern Europe, Romanian leaders were able to engage in a preemptive strike. Lavinia Stan observes that ‘‘[w]hile in neighboring countries political power was transferred to opposition groups, in Romania it changed hands from a closed sycophantic coterie surrounding the Ceausescu family to second-echelon commu- nist o⁄cials disgruntled not with the o⁄cial ideology but with the president’s betrayal of core Marxist-Leninist principles.’’178 Not sur- prisingly, then, elite turnover was low.

Given this situation, it is also not surprising that Romania has no lustration law. Its Parliament did, however, pass a law on ¢le access in 1999, during the ¢rst non-communist-successor government of Emil Constantinescu. Known as the ‘‘Ticu Law’’ after the former political prisoner who drafted it, it allows people access to their own ¢les and to request the investigation of prominent o⁄cials. It also sets up a Na- tional Council for the Study of Securitate Archives, which had as its ¢rst job the investigation of candidates for the June 2000 local elec- tions. Candidates for certain o⁄ces had to submit ‘‘declarations of honor’’ concerning their Securitate involvement. If the ¢les indicated that they were long-time Securitate collaborators, this would be dis- closed to the public. The guiding hope was that such people would lose electoral support. According to Stan, however, the ¢rst round of investigations was little short of a ¢asco.179

Kitschelt’s analysis of patterns of post-communist politics of patrimo- nial regimes is useful for understanding these developments. What 106 one ¢nds in the wake of such a regime is ‘‘a deeply corrupt, unprofes- sional state apparatus penetrated by personal clientelist networks’’ and ‘‘a weak, disorganized anti-communist opposition without practical political experience, ideological re¢nement, or the memory of a non- socialist project of societal development to look back upon.’’180 The populations also tend to be wary of liberal reform. This balance of power between former communists and their opposition is clearly not conducive to the passage of lustration or other transitional justice legislation. Indeed, Stan attributes the delay in ¢le access legislation to the fact that, aside from the Ceausescus’ execution, the regime did not substantially change hands in the aftermath of the Romanian revolution.’’181

The Romanian case thus indicates that high communist regime ille- gitimacy, in itself, is insu⁄cient to produce lustration in the post- communist period. Also necessary are anti-communist elites capable of sophisticated political organization and a platform that draws su⁄cient electoral support to allow them to in£uence government policy. In the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, such elites were made up largely of former dissidents, communist-era opposition move- ment members, and internally exiled technocrats ^ elites that did not exist in substantial numbers in either Romania or Slovakia, though for di¡erent sets of reasons. Given the enormous constraints on the formation of such elites under patrimonial communism, then, it appears that legitimacy level may not be a factor signi¢cantly in£uenc- ing lustration in successor regimes. The applicability of my theory, then, appears to be limited to formerly bureaucratic-authoritarian and national-accommodative regimes.

Conclusion

The Czech and Slovak cases provide evidence that the two states’ approaches to post-communist transitional justice have not been solely determined by transition type or level of exit and voice. I do not wish to argue that transition type and repression are irrelevant: indeed, if we were only looking at the Czech case, and if we grant that Kraus is correct in reassigning it to the category of ‘‘replacement,’’ then both Huntington and Moran’s theories would appear to have been borne out. The Slovak case, however, acts as a sort of spoiler for their universal applicability in the post-communist context, thereby prompt- ing a closer examination of certain assumptions underlying each 107 theory: for Moran, that a ‘‘pressure cooker’’ environment existed in all communist countries, and for Huntington, (1) that the balance of power between regime and opposition during the discrete period of the revolution plays a critical role in the outcome of the ‘‘torturer problem’’ and (2) the blanket proposition that justice must be swift because re-legitimization of the previous regime’s elites is inevitable. Slovakia under communism shows that lower levels of pressure may exist even without the existence of the release valves that Moran envisions, and therefore that other factors ^ such as higher regime legitimacy ^ may be at play. Post-communist Slovakia shows that even if a regime is weak at the time of the revolution, its o⁄cials may be resilient enough to re-legitimize themselves quickly. The fact that this happened in Slovakia but not in the Czech lands, despite the revolution that placed power in the hands of dissident-led umbrella parties in both republics, indicates that something other than transition type is shaping the progress and extent of elite re-legitimization. It appears, then, that the snapshot of the former regime’s strength taken at the time of the revolution may not be predictive of the new regime’s stance on transitional justice, particularly in a federation where the former regime may have had stronger legitimacy in one republic than in another. Indeed, Huntington’s description of this process as ‘‘reestab- lishing’’ legitimacy presupposes previous legitimacy. Although I cer- tainly do not propose that it is the only factor in the electoral success or failure of communist successor-parties or other parties dominated by the former elite, it stands to reason that the progress of such ‘‘reestablishment’’ will be smoother the stronger its previous founda- tion, at least in formerly national-accommodative and bureaucratic- authoritarian states. Thus, elite re-legitimization should not simply be viewed as the result of the inevitable onset, after a time, of a broad sense that the regime’s injustices are ‘‘water under the bridge,’’ but rather as a re£ection of the crucial role that previous legitimacy plays in shaping the outcome of the ‘‘torturer problem.’’ This is also not to downplay the factors that Welsh and Williams identify with the politics of the present; the competition between ex-communists and ex-oppo- sition (including here former internal exiles) and the balance of power between them are clearly critically important to the shape and progress of transitional justice. Nor is it to deny that such issues may be used stategically. Rather, it is to argue that, broadly speaking, the orienta- tions of societal groups toward the preceding regime have roots in their experience of that regime, were shaped by the nature of that regime, and thereby set the context for responses to that regime. The politics of the past and the politics of the present are linked. Indeed, all other 108 factors aside, the previous regime’s legitimacy is directly relevant to societal support for transitional justice because it addresses a central question: did the people ¢nd it unjust?

Acknowledgments

I thank Kevin Deegan Krause, Jennifer Rotondo Waddell, Martin Schmutterer, Samuel AŁ braham, Zuzana Tomkova¤, and the Editors of Theory and Society for their invaluable contributions to this article.

Notes

1. See Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press), 1991. 2. Huntington ¢nds a fourth type ^ ‘‘intervention’’ ^ only in Grenada and Panama. The countries Huntington includes in the third wave are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ecuador, El Salvador, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, India, Korea, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey, and Uruguay. He also looks at Nigeria and Sudan, which reverted to authoritarianism, and at Mexico, Nepal, Panama, South Africa, Taiwan, and the USSR, which had liberalized but not democratized by 1990. 3. Ibid., 142. 4. Ibid., 228. 5. Ibid. 6. Aryeh Neier, ‘‘What Should Be Done About the Guilty?’’ New York Times Review of Books (February 1, 1990), 34, quoted in ibid., 230. 7. Huntington, The Third Wave,230. 8. Ibid., 231. 9. Jan Obrman, ‘‘New Minister Dissolves State Security,’’ Report on Eastern Europe (16 February 1990): 11. 10. Petruska Sustrova, ‘‘The Lustration Controversy,’’ Uncaptive Minds 5 (1992): 130. 11. Jan Obrman, ‘‘Laying the Ghosts of the Past,’’ Report on Eastern Europe (14 June 1991): 5. 12. Parliamentary immunity prevented MPs from being forced to resign. 13. Paulina Bren, ‘‘Lustration in the Czech and Slovak Republics,’’ RFE/RL Research Report 2 (16 July 1993): 17. 14. Text of the Parliamentary Commission’s Report in ‘‘Collaborators Revealed,’’ Uncaptive Minds 4(1991):9. 15. For an English translation of the law’s text, see Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes,Volume III: Laws, Rulings and Reports, in Neil J. Kritz, editor (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1995), 312^321. 16. Ibid., 320. 17. The ¢nal vote in the 300-person Federal Assembly was 148 to 21, with 22 109

abstentions, 29 boycotts, and 80 absences. See Jir› |¤Pehe, ‘‘Parliament Passes Controversial Law on Vetting O⁄cials,’’ Report on Eastern Europe 2 (25 October 1991): 6. 18. For an English translation of the November 26, 1992, Constitutional Court Decision on the Screening Law, see Transitional Justice, Vol. III, 346^365. 19. Michael Kraus, ‘‘Settling Accounts: Postcommunist Czechoslovakia,’’ excerpted from revised version of paper of the same name delivered at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 3^6, 1992, in Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, Vol. II: Country Studies, Neil J. Kritz, editor (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1995), 544. 20. Ibid. 21. Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Ga¤bor To¤ka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31. 22. Claus O¡e, Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 140^141. 23. For example, while Kitschelt et al. and O¡e’s categorizations conform to one another, Huntington di¡ers as to the classi¢cation of Hungary and Romania, as well as Czechoslovakia. 24. Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems, 21^22. 25. Ibid., 23^24. 26. Ibid., 24^25. 27. Ibid., 25^27. 28. John P. Moran, ‘‘The Communist Tortures of Eastern Europe: Prosecute and Punish or Forgive and Forget?’’ Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27 (March 1994): 95. 29. Ibid., 101. 30. Ibid., 101. 31. Ibid., 105. 32. Helga A. Welsh, ‘‘Dealing with the Communist Past: Central and East European Experiences after 1990,’’ Europe-Asia Studies 48 (1996): 419. 33. Ibid., 422. 34. Ibid., 419. 35. Kieran Williams, Aleks Szczerbiak, and Brigid Fowler, ‘‘Explaining Lustration in Eastern Europe: A Post-communist Politics Approach,’’ SEI Working Paper no. 62 (March 2003) http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/SEI/papers/papers.html 36. Ibid. 37. Department of State Human Rights Report for 2000: The Czech Republic, Released by the U.S. Department of State in February 2001, http://www.humanrights- usa.net/reports/czechrepublic.html 38. Ibid. 39. Obrman, ‘‘Laying the Ghosts,’’ 7. 40. See Jozef Darski, ‘‘Police Agents in the Transition Period,’’ Uncaptive Minds 4 (1991^1992): 27, and Pehe, ‘‘Parliament Passes,’’ 9. 41. Jozef Darski, ‘‘Decommunization in Eastern Europe,’’ Uncaptive Minds 6 (1993), 78. 42. U.S. Department of State, The Slovak Republic Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996, http://www.state.gov/www.global/humanrights/ 1996hrpreport/slovakre.html 110

43. Act on the Illegality of the Communist Regime and Resistance to It (Act No. 198/ 1993),inTransitional Justice,Vol. III: Laws, Rulings, and Reports,367. 44. Article 5, in ibid., 368. 45. See Constitutional Court Decision on the Act on the Illegality of the Communist Regime (December 21, 1993),inTransitional Justice: Vol. III: Laws, Rulings, and Reports, 369. 46. Department of State Human Rights Report for 2000: The Czech Republic. 47. Jeremy Bransten, ‘‘Czech Republic: Strougal Case Refocuses Attention on Com- munist Crimes,’’ (2001) http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2001/08/02082001122809.asp. 48. See ‘‘Former Czech Communist Premier Acquitted,’’ RFE/RL Newsline (21 Feb- ruary 2002) http://www.rferl.org/newsline/2002/02/210202.asp 49. Quoted in Sharon Fisher, ‘‘Slovak Parliament Approves Anti-Communist Law,’’ OMRI Daily Digest (5 February 1996) http://www.rferl.org/newsline/1996/02/ 3-cee/cee-050296.html 50. Quoted in ibid. 51. U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2001, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (4 March 2002) http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/eur/8338.htm 52. ‘‘Langos› predklada¤za¤kon o zloc› inoch nacizmu a kommunizmu,’’ Pravda (12 October 2001) http://www.pravda.sk/spravy/2001/10/12/slovensko/article.669.html 53. Kusy¤’s response to written questions from the journal’s editor, ‘‘Dedic› stvo S tB na Slovensku,’’ Kritika & Kontext 2^3 (2001): 30. 54. After the law’s passage, some Czech and Western sources erroneously reported that all ¢les would be open to the public. For the law’s details, see the Czech Ministry of Interior, ‘‘Zpr› istupne n|¤svazkufi vznikly¤ch c› innost|¤by¤vale¤S tB,’’ http:// www.mvcr.cz/agenda/labyrint/svazky.html 55. ‘‘Havel podp|¤sal za¤kon o spr|¤stupen|¤zva«zkov S tB,’’ Pravda (14 March 2002) http://www.pravda.sk/spravy/2002/03/14/svet/article.34918.html 56. Miroslav Korecky¤, ‘‘Havlufi v podpis odtajnil agenty S tB,’’ Lidove¤noviny (15 March 2002) http://www.lidovky.cz/tsk.asp?c=L063A01A&r=atitulni 57. See ‘‘Slovak Parliament Overrides Presidential Veto... ,’’ RFE/RL Newsline (21 August 2002) http://www.rferl.org/newsline/2002/08/3-CEE/cee-210802.asp 58. Author’s interview with Ja¤n Langos› (22 May 2003). 59. Huntington, The Third Wave, 228. 60. Carol Skalnik Le¡, National Con£ict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918^1987 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 243. 61. Ibid., 173. 62. Ibid., 261. 63. Petr Pithart, ‘‘Towards a Shared Freedom, 1968^1989,’’ in The End of Czechoslovakia, ed. Jir› |¤Musil (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), 211. 64. Ibid. 65. See Va¤clav Prufi cha, ‘‘Economic Development and Relations, 1918^1989,’’ in The End of Czechoslovakia, ed. Jir› |¤Musil (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), 72^75. 66. H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 54. 67. Karol Zlobina, ‘‘Slovensko: impresie a depresie,’’ Listy 8 (1978): 45. 68. Skilling, Charter 77,55. 69. Le¡, National Con£ict,264. 111

70. Ibid. 71. Skilling, Charter 77,55. 72. Pithart, ‘‘Towards a Shared Freedom,’’ 214. 73. Le¡, National Con£ict, 265. 74. Zlobina, ‘‘Slovensko,’’ 45. 75. Pithart, ‘‘Towards a Shared Freedom,’’ 214. 76. Skilling, Charter 77,57. 77. Anonymous, ‘‘C es› i, Slova¤ci, a federace,’’ Listy 9 (1979): 24. 78. Robert W. Dean, Nationalism and Political Change in Eastern Europe: The Slovak Question and the Czechoslovak Reform Movement (Denver: University of Denver, 1973), 50. 79. Anonymous, ‘‘C es› i, Slova¤ci, a federace,’’ 24. 80. Pithart, ‘‘Towards a Shared Freedom,’’ 217. 81. Kenneth Jowitt, ‘‘An Organizational Approach to the Study of Political Change in Marxist-Leninist Systems,’’ The American Political Science Review 68 (1974): 1177. 82. Miroslav Kusy¤, ‘‘Slovensky¤fenome¤n,’’ Listy 15 (1985): 35. 83. Pithart, ‘‘Towards a Shared Freedom,’’ 218. 84. Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems,27. 85. Gil Eyal, The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003), 60. 86. Ibid., 28. 87. Ibid., 103. 88. Ibid., 100^131. 89. Pithart, ‘‘Towards a Shared Freedom,’’ 212. 90. Prufi cha, ‘‘Economic Development and Relations,’’ 75. 91. Moran, ‘‘The Communist Torturers of Eastern Europe,’’ 108. 92. Eyal, The Origins,86. 93. Ja¤n Obrman, ‘‘Slovak Politician Accused of Secret Police Ties,’’ RFE/RL Research Report 1 (10 April 1990): 14. 94. Milan Zitny,‘‘Mec› iar’s Questionable Supremacy,’’ East European Reporter (January/ February 1992): 68. 95. Obrman, ‘‘Slovak Politician,’’ 15. 96. Ibid., 14. 97. Eyal, The Origins: 143. 98. Carol Skalnik Le¡, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nations Versus State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 131. 99. Ibid., 89. 100. Eyal, The Origins, 143. 101. Le¡, The Czech and Slovak Republics,161. 102. Eyal, The Origins,161. 103. Ibid., 175. 104. Ibid., 13. 105. Ibid., 183. 106. Ibid., 195. 107. Author’s interviews with Ja¤n Langos (22 May 2003) and Ja¤n Carnogursky (2 June 2003). 108. Iveta Radicova, ‘‘The Velvet Divorce,’’ Uncaptive Minds 6 (1993): 51. 109. Ibid., 52. 110. Kevin Deegan Krause, ‘‘From Another Dimension: Public Opinion and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic,’’ paper presented at the con- 112

vention of the American Political Science Association, Boston, Massachusetts, 5 September 1998, http://www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/krause/papers/apsapart/ apsapart.htm. The statement used by the survey was ‘‘It is right to forbid certain positions to people with a Communist past.’’ 111. In the 1992 elections, the HZDS won 37% of the vote, and the SDL came in second with 15%. 112. Branislav Jan|¤k, ‘‘Havel podp|¤sal za¤kon o spr|¤sptupen|¤zva«zkov S tB,’’ Pravda (29 March 2002) http://www.pravda.sk/spravy/2002/03/14/svet/article.34918.html 113. Lude› k Navara and David Steiner, ‘‘Havlufi v podpis odmekl archivy S tB,’’ Mlada¤ fronta dnes/idnes (14 March 2002) http://zpravy.idnes.cz/domaci.asp?r=domaci- &c=A020208213018domacipol&t=A020208213018domacipol&r2=domaci 114. Jan|¤k, ‘‘Havel podp|¤sal za¤kon.’’ 115. Navara and Steiner, ‘‘Havlufi v podpis odmekl.’’ 116. Ibid. 117. Jan|¤k, ‘‘Otvorenie Pandorej skrinky.’’ 118. Petr Uhl, ‘‘Ne› kolik argementufi pro Havla,’’ Pra¤vo (11 March 2002): 7, and http:// www.pravo.newtonit.cz/tisk.asp?cache=797095 119. Jan|¤k, ‘‘Otvorenie Pandorej skrinky.’’ 120. Ibid. An expert on the ¢les and KDU-C SL representative Josef Janec› ek similarly observed that ‘‘fond Z’’ has been concealed since shortly after 1989. 121. Quoted in Korecky¤,‘‘Havlufi v podpis odtajnil.’’ 122. Jan|¤k, ‘‘Otvorenie Pandorinej skrinky.’’ 123. Ibid. 124. Jolyon Naegele,‘‘Czech Republic: Bill Would Open Communist Secret Police Files to General Public,’’ RFE/RL, http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2002/02/13022002085655.asp 125. Navara and Steiner, ‘‘Havlufi v podpis odmekl.’’ 126. Kusy¤’s response to written questions from the journal’s editor, ‘‘Dedic› stvo S tB na Slovensku,’’ 30. Kusy¤contrasts the lack of Slovak interest to that of the Czechs: ‘‘In the Czech lands the young generation of historians has pounced on the topic of recent history, write professional essays and popular articles on this, publish books. With us it is still only a couple of people who are professionally engaged with this.’’ 127. Juraj Podoba,‘‘V Strachu Sme si Boli Vs› etci Rovn|¤,’’ Kritika & Kontext 2^3 (2001): 37. 128. Imrich Vas› ec› ka, ‘‘Slovensky¤Proble¤mS tB,’’ Kritika & Kontext 2^3 (2001): 27. 129. Olga Gya¤rfas› ova¤, ‘‘Fenome¤nS tB v s› irs› om Kontexte,’’ Kritika & Kontext 2^3 (2001): 32. 130. Ibid., 33. 131. Kusy¤’s response to written questions from the journal’s editor, ‘‘Dedic› stvo S tB na Slovensku,’’ 30. 132. ‘‘Orosz oznac› il Langos› ov za¤kon o pama«ti na¤roda za pra¤vny galimatias› ,’’ Pravda (17 October 2001) http://www.pravda.sk/spravy/2001/10/17/slovensko/article.900.html 133. SDL Representative Anton Ho¡man, quoted in Lenka Z ivnerova¤, ‘‘Podpor|¤te odtajnenie zva«zkov S tB v parlamente?’’ Na¤rodna¤odbora (30 October 2001) http://195.168.40.176/20011030/03004.html 134. HZDS-L’S Representative August|¤n Maria¤nHu¤ska, in ibid. 135. HZDS Representative Imrich Andrejc› a¤k, interviewed by Ja¤nBorc› in, ‘‘Dokedy bude s› ta¤tobc› anmi skry¤vat’ spisy S tB?’’ Na¤rodna¤obroda (21 February 2002) http://195.168.40.176/200220221/05001.html 113

136. Vice-premier and Chair of the Legislative Council of the Government L’ubomir Fogas› , SDL’, interviewed in ibid. 137. Marek Vagovic› , ‘‘Tiene minulosti,’’ Pravda (2 November 2001) http://www.pravda.sk/dennik/2001/11/02/nazory/01/article.5309.html 138. Ibid. 139. Quoted in Patricia D uris› kova¤,‘‘Es› teba¤kom hrozia proble¤my,’’ Pravda (30 October 2001). http://www.pravda.sk/dennik/2001/10/30/slovensko/01/article.5566.html 140. Ibid. 141. Ibid. 142. Marek Vagovic› , ‘‘Najvys› s› |¤c› as diskutovat’ o zloc› inoch komunisticke¤ho rez› imu,’’ Pravda (16 November 2001) http://www.pravda.sk/dennik/2001/11/16/slovensko/ 01.article.14559.html 143. Quoted in Borc› in,‘‘Dokedy bude s› ta¤tobc› anmi skry¤vat’ spisy S tB?’’ 144. Borc› in, ‘‘Dokedy bude s› ta¤tobc› anmi skry¤vat’ spisy S tB?’’. 145. Vagovic› , ‘‘Tiene minulosti.’’ 146. Milan Stanislav,‘‘Osviez› enie pama«ti,’’ Pravda (7 November 2001) http://www.pravda.sk/dennik/2001/11/07/nazory/01/article.2819.html 147. Peter Vavro, ‘‘Preveren|¤,’’ Na¤rodna obroda (22 February 2002) http://195.168.40.176/20020222/04002.html 148. Ivan Bac› a, ‘‘Udavac› i, mate zelenu¤,’’ Na¤rodna obroda (12 February 2002) http://195.168.40.176/20020212/06001.html 149. Author’s interview with Ja¤nC arnogursky¤(2 June 2003). 150. Author’s interview with Ja¤n Langos› (22 May 2003). 151. Author’s interview with Ja¤nC arnogursky¤(2 June 2003). 152. Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems, 78^79. 153. O¡e,Varieties of Transition,139. 154. Jacek Wasilweski and Edmund Wnuk-Lipin¤ski, ‘‘Poland: Winding Road from the Communist to the Post-Solidarity Elite,’’ Theory and Society 24/5 (October 1995): 674. 155. Ibid., 692. 156. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 70. 157. Ibid., 4. 158. Wasilweski et al., ‘‘Winding Road,’’ 674. 159. Eva Fodor, Edmund Wnuk-Lipin¤ski, and Natasha Yershova, ‘‘The New Political and Cultural Elite,’’ Theory and Society 24/5 (October 1995): 794. 160. O¡e,Varieties of Transition,139. 161. Wasilweski et al., ‘‘Winding Road,’’ 683. 162. Fodor et al., ‘‘The New Political and Cultural Elite,’’ 785. 163. Ibid., 788. See also Wasilweski et al., ‘‘Winding Road,’’ 688. 164. Ibid., 799. 165. Williams et al., ‘‘Explaining Lustration,’’ 12. 166. Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems, 78^79. 167. O¡e,Varieties of Transition,139. 168. Ibid. 169. Szonja Szele¤nyi, Ivan Szele¤nyi, and Imre¤Kova¤ch, ‘‘The Making of the Hungarian Postcommunist Elite: Circulation in Politics, Reproduction in the Economy,’’ Theory and Society 24/5 (October 1995), 702. See also Fodor et al., ‘‘The New Political and Cultural Elite,’’ 800. 114

170. Ibid., 703^704. 171. Ibid., 705 and 714. 172. Ibid., 706. ‘‘Revolution of the deputy department heads’’ is a phrase coined by Tamas Kolosi. 173. Fodor et al., ‘‘The New Political and Cultural Elite,’’ 788. 174. Szele¤nyi et al., ‘‘The Making of the Hungarian Postcommunist Elite,’’ 714. 175. Williams et al., ‘‘Explaining Lustration,’’ 12. 176. Ibid., 19. 177. Ibid., 7. 178. Lavinia Stan, ‘‘Access to Securitate Files: The Trials and Tribulations of a Romanian Law,’’ East European Politics and Societies 16 (2002): 146. 179. See ibid. 180. Ibid., 74. 181. Ibid., 145^146.

Appendix A

Year/survey Mean Czech Mean Slovak tdf95%CI Response Response

1992 fall 6,45 5,61 5.847* 1514 {.564, 1.133} 1993 winter 6,13 5,42 5.722* 1839,657 {.468, .957} 1993 fall 6,36 5,52 6.982* 1978 {.602, 1.071} 1994 spring 6,16 5,55 6.727* 3201,436 {.430, .784} 1994 fall 5,94 5,35 5.121* 1594,592 {.365, .817} 1995 fall 5,81 5,04 7.464* 2478,872 {.568, .972} 1996 spring 5,89 5,39 4.739* 2216,272 {.294, .710}

Note: * p 5 .001 Sources: Central European University. 1992. Party Systems and Electoral Alignments in East Central Europe [Computer ¢le] Central European University. 1993a. Party Systems and Electoral Alignments in East Central Europe [Computer File] Central European University. 1993b. Party Systems and Electoral Alignments in East Central Europe [Computer File] Central European University. 1994a. Party Systems and Electoral Alignments in East Central Europe [Computer File] Central European University. 1994b. Party Systems and Electoral Alignments in East Central Europe [Computer File] Central European University. 1995a. Party Systems and Electoral Alignments in East Central Europe [Computer File] Central European University. 1996a. Party Systems and Electoral Alignments in East Central Europe [Computer File] 115

Appendix B