Abstract
From South Africa to Eastern Europe, in diverse contexts of democratization, societies have sought answers to the dilemmas of justice in regime transitions, analyzing their options in light of liberal democratic norms. Thus, it is worth attempting a systematic answer to the question: Is there a liberal democratic model for coming to terms with past injustices? This chapter constructs an “ideal-type” of a liberal democratic approach to transitional justice. Laying bare the central elements of this model will help us to achieve two goals. First, it will enable us to make sense of the current debates and policy decisions, exposing the assumptions that shape the debates and highlighting the common themes. Second, better theoretical explication will help us to make a principled, reasoned prescription for how countries might come to terms with the past in a way that best promotes a liberal democratic future.
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Notes
J.M. Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 13.
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See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1983).
See Noel Calhoun, “The Statute of Limitations and the Prosecution of Human Rights Violations,” in 1989–1999 Transformations: Triumph or Tragedy? (New York: Harriman Institute, 2000).
Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40– 44.
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Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace And World, 1966), 385.
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1993).
David A. Welch, Justice and the Genesis of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19.
Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 107.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, with an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Penguin, 1988), 141.
Diane Orentlicher, “Settling Accounts: The Duty to Punish Human Rights Violations of a Prior Regime” in Transitional Justice, v. I, ed. Neil Kritz (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin, 1994), 298.
Marina Thode, “Towards Democracy: Criminal Law, Criminal Justice and the Reunification of Germany,” in Democracy, Market Economy, and the Law: Legal, Economic, and Political Problems of Transition to Democracy, ed. Werner F. Ebke and Detlev F. Vagts (Heidelberg: Verlag Recht und Wirtschaft GmbH, 1995). In German the quotation reads: “Wir wollten Gerechtigkeit und haben den Rechtsstaat bekommen.”
Michael Rosenfeld, “Restitution, Retribution, Political Justice and the Rule of Law,” Constellations, 2, 3 (January 1996): 309. Walzer writes (in Regicide and Revolution, 248) that the problem of political justice is “how to vindicate the rule of law in spite of, or even against, the rules of pure procedural justice.”
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© 2004 Noel Calhoun
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Calhoun, N. (2004). Liberal Democratic Ideology and Transitional Justice. In: Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe’s Democratic Transitions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07453-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07453-9_3
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