The question ‘what does coming to terms with the past mean?’ is one of the most puzzling questions in the social sciences. For some, like Theodor W. Adorno, the matter of coming to terms with the past is ‘essentially … a matter of the way in which the past is called up and made present: whether one stops at sheer reproach, or whether one endures the horror through a certain strength that comprehends even the incomprehensible’ (1986, p. 126, emphasis in original). For others, it is a matter of justice (Teitel 2000), a process of ‘overcoming the past’ at the heart of political transition (Habermas and Michnik 1994), or accountability based on historical ‘truth’ that paves the way for democratic consolidatio n (Tismăneanu 2008).
What all these orientations, and others, have in common is that they are about how one might start to think about what Habermas (1988) called the ‘political morality of a community’ faced with the ‘ghosts’ of its own troubled past.
When that past is the communist past, like is the case with this book, then one might start thinking about political morality by exploring perspectives, methods, and practices, that are, typically, grouped under the umbrella term ‘post-communist transitional justice’. This book is an invitation to identify the means by which we can treat, research, and respond to the challenges of post-communist transitional justice as social and cultural products. This makes sense for at least one fundamental reason—we experience, participate in, or judge transitional justice (its influence, effects, controversy, etc.), as a pervasive cultural dimension. The moral vocabulary of transition around guilt, shame, responsibility, justice, remembering, and so on is a culturally and societally derived vocabulary. Our desire to tackle head-on the social injustices of transition, hold torturers accountable, or come up with moral lessons for future generations, indeed, our ambivalence, avoidance, or suppression of associated ethical issues, is itself a cultural product of societies in which controversies around how to take communism into public consciousness abound.
Transitional Justice as Situated Practice
In this book, I approach transitional justice from the perspective of discursive social psychology. I explore a canonical set of practices that are usually categorized and/or described as transitional justice practices (e.g., public disclosures of wrongdoing, truth and reconciliation commissions) through the lens of a social science perspective, that of discursive social psychology, a perspective that focuses on situated practice in discourse (Edwards 1997). This book explores the contribution of discursive social psychology to understanding transitional justice as situated practice.
In addressing transitional justice as situated practice, I argue, the discursive social psychologist and transitional justice scholar can learn from each other. The first step is made by the discursive social psychologist, like myself, that turns to the transitional justice scholar in order to glean the overall, comparative picture of the vagaries of transitional justice in eastern Europe:
Equally, as I argue here, the discursive social psychologist can become an invaluable resource for the transitional justice scholar or practitioner.Most of the post-communist states, including Poland, Hungary and Lithuania, experienced politicized, delayed, and/or narrowed or truncated measures over the course of their transitional justice efforts. Romania’s late public disclosure program was temporally and structurally similar to Bulgaria’s, and a significant improvement on Albania’s … Romania’s missed opportunities were post-communist missed opportunities, with all of the countries in the region struggling to implement measures that could authentically and fairly engage with the past. Romania is neither the regional laggard nor the regional vanguard, but finds itself at an uncomfortable spot in the middle. (Horne 2017, p. 74)
The crux of the argument expounded in this book is that in order to understand the different forms and consequences of transitional justice practices (both formal and informal), transitional justice studies need to incorporate a reflexive metatheory of ‘communication’ in their theorizing and empirical approaches. By reflexive metatheory of communication, I mean a theoretical and analytic orientation to discourse produced in and by socio-communicative events, one that goes beyond an individualistic standpoint.
But let me first say what I mean by ‘communication’ in this context. I follow Edwards (1997, pp. 16–17) in treating communication as a metaphor. As Edwards put it,
As Edwards, I want to start with, and focus on, discourse as a form of social action, and not as means of communication between people and minds. By discourse I primarily mean ‘all forms of spoken interaction, formal and informal, and written texts of all kinds’ (Potter and Wetherell 1987, p. 7). Yet, following Smith (1987), and more recently Middleton and Brown (2005), I engage with a broader definition of discourse asit may appear strange to think of communication as a metaphor—is it not a phenomenon, indeed the phenomenon, the very thing we need to study? In fact, I want to turn away from the notion of discourse as communication, and it is largely because of the unwanted metaphorical baggage it carries. The notion that discourse is a form of social action should not be equated with language as ‘communication’… the notion of communication … invokes an image that is itself stubbornly individualistic. It stems from starting not with discourse as a phenomenon, but from psychology, where two (imagined) individuals, possessing thoughts, intentions, and so on, have the problem of having to get these thoughts and intentions across the airwaves via a communication channel.
The discursive psychological approach I take in this book treats discourse as reflexive product of cultural orders—discursive, material, legal, ethnic, economic, and political, that intersect, relate, network, and feed into each other. Those who are already familiar with discursive psychology can read on; other readers are advised to start with Chap. 9, for a full description of the particular background of discursive social psychology.a conversation mediated by texts that is not a matter of statements alone but of actual ongoing practices and sites of practices, the material forms of texts … the methods of producing texts, the reputational and status structures, the organization of powers intersecting with other relations of ruling in state agencies, universities, professional organizations, and the like . (Smith 1987, p. 214)
In this book I explore, and illustrate, several ways in which the transitional justice scholar or practitioner might engage with this broader notion of discourse. There are three significant avenues that the transitional justice scholar or practitioner might use to engage with this broader notion of discourse. The points sketched below are developed in Chaps. 2 and 3, and, more generally, across the book as a whole.
Firstly, by taking seriously the idea that what we broadly call transitional justice forms and practices can be studied as (societal) social (by)products of the social organization of collective memory in the public arena. This involves an appreciation of the notion that everyday and elite transitional justice practices are inherent social and cultural creations, aspects of collective life. These are practices that are accomplished in discourse through words, images, symbols, and intertwined, and in relation, with other social and material practices. Secondly, by exploring, in situ, in actual practices of ‘confronting’ the communist past, how individuals, communities, and collectives, like nation-states, turn themselves into ‘socially organized biographical objects’ (Plummer 2001). And, finally, by analyzing the different types, and nature, of relations that get established between various cultural repertoires, texts, genres, their producers and their audiences. Here I follow the dictum, aptly formulated by Blumer: ‘respect the nature of the empirical world and organize a methodological stance to reflect that respect’ ([1969] 1998, p. 60).1
A discursive social psychology based on an extended definition of discourse can complement transitional justice approaches in history and political science by, firstly, providing a robust analytic approach and tool kit, as well as a different vocabulary of (social) science; and secondly, by identifying meaningful gaps, absences, ambiguities, and so on in extant theorizing and empirical approaches. A transitional justice approach to the intricacies of everyday and elite practices of coming to terms with the communist past needs a stronger intellectual commitment to researching the phenomenon of ‘transitional justice’ as a cultural product and situated practice. This might lead to a better appreciation of the idea that researching transitional justice practices ought not be limited to, exclusively, conceiving as, or reducing them to, either psychological or socio-political-ideological problems. Researching transitional justice practices as cultural products is, I argue, an enterprise geared toward finding the empirical means of resolving a much older, and deeper, problem/tension highlighted by Hannah Arendt: ‘the modes of thought and communication that deal with truth … are necessarily domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s opinions’ (Arendt 1977, p. 241).
One of my goals in writing this book was to try to offer an account of how transitional justice studies might engage with the paradigmatic tension identified by Arendt. I argue that that is not achieved solely through a dialogue with discursive psychology (transitional justice studies are already in conversation with other scholarly fields in the social sciences), but that discursive psychology can, nonetheless, prove to be a key component, vantage point, in this broader intellectual dialogue around the nature, reach, influence, and effect of transitional justice practices that is already underway within and across the social sciences. One cannot understand the nature of justice (reparatory justice or otherwise) in post-communist contexts if one simply starts with an operational definition of these processes. One also needs to be able to describe these practices in situ, that is, in and through the ways they matter to people, organizatio...