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

Justice or Politics? Criminal, Civil and Political Adjudication in the Newly Independent Baltic States

“…In looking at the outcome within the Czech Republic and Slovakia (two countries with similar backgrounds), Nadya Nedelsky examines 'the role the previous regime's level of legitimacy plays in shaping approaches to transitional justice'. 12 She provides evidence for the different levels of legitimacy in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and comes to the conclusion that the lower levels of political legitimacy of communist leaders in Czech lands resulted in the tendency to 'prosecute and punish', while their Slovak counterparts decided to 'forgive and forget' as a result of the higher level of the communists' legitimacy in Slovakia. 13 488 JOURNAL OF COMMUNIST STUDIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS Nedelsky, however, does suggest the psychological explanation as an important contribution, writing that it 'points in a promising direction'.…”

The Democratic Transition of Post-Communist Europe

“…Prucha, 1995;Turnock, 1989). Due to the strong impacts of this factor, combined with the abovenoted lack of strong anti-Russianism and relative satisfaction of many Slovaks with the Husak regime's "success" in officially federalising the country in 1969 and in further improving leaving standards in the 1970s (Marusiak, 2008;Nedelsky, 2004), Slovakia had also experienced some earlier-discussed similar difficulties as did the Balkan states in defining the direction and pace of post-communist transition after becoming independent in 1993 (see Section 2.2, Chapter 2). Nevertheless, thanks to the fact that the other two distinctive communist legacies -the character of communist rule and the role of the church -were shared by Slovakia with their ECE neighbours and not with the Balkan states, and more importantly that it went through the first few years of post-communist transition together with the Czech part of the state, which elected a strongly pro-reformist first post-communist government, the Slovaks had much less trouble than any of their Balkan counterparts in getting rid of the non-reformist (Mečiar) government and getting back on the pro-reformist and correspondingly pro-EU post-communist track.…”

Truth Commissions in Post-Communism: The Overlooked Solution?

“…Whereas Huntington and Moran considered the past, and Welsh, Williams, Szczerbiak and Fowler considered the present as primary determinants of lustration, Nedelsky (2004) drew a link between past and more recent developments by arguing that "struggles over transitional justice issues should not be considered exclusively as 'the politics of the present' or as 'the politics of the past'." For her, "a stronger influencing factor was represented by 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 'de-communization'" (Nedelsky, 2004, 65).…”