Evolution or Revolution? Transitional Justice Culture Across Borders
In recent years, both a theory and a practice of "transitional justice" have taken hold in democratizing contexts worldwide. As an organized and systematic set of beliefs and a way of ordering individual, group and state behavior according to those beliefs and practices, it can be characterized as a “culture,” one which has diffused transnationally via a variety of vectors, such as human rights NGOs, international lawyers, international criminal tribunals, and the media. This culture has been overtly didactic: it offers templates, normative guidance and a veritable database of national experiences to bolster the contention that transition to democracy requires a public accounting of the crimes of the past authoritarian regime. An interesting wrinkle in this story of one-way diffusion is provided by the experiences of countries which have defied or contradicted this master narrative, either by managing their democratic transitions and their consolidations through amnesties and pacts (Chile and Spain), or by reversing processes of transitional justice in response to untenable instability (Argentina). But the wrinkle deepens when we consider that all three of these countries have experienced, at different moments and to varying degrees, a return to transitional justice practices and debates at a later date, often years into consolidation. Was this the result of the increased projection of transnationalized “transitional justice culture,” responsible for a “revolution” in expectations underscored by the Pinochet arrest in 1998 and the Milosevic trials a few years later? Or are there more compelling “evolutionary” domestic-level explanations? This paper explores the competing hypotheses, analyzes the precepts and ideological contradictions of “transitional justice culture,” and contends that a key dyad connecting the revolutionary and evolutionary dynamics at work in the spread of anti-impunity norms across borders is formed by victims’ groups and national courts. Both have been the targeted reception sites for trasnationalized norms, and they have served as potential nodes of transformation for their respective national legal cultures. By suggesting that universalizing revolution is channeled, tempered and ultimately transformed by particularlized evolution, this paper argues for a more nuanced, multi-dimensional approach to transitional justice politics, at once highly globalized and yet not in the least homogeneous.
VOLVER: THE RETURN OF/TO TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE POLITICS IN SPAIN
Like the body in the freezer in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2006 film Volver, Francoist repression during the decades after the civil war is hidden in plain view in contemporary Spanish society, with the question of when*and how*it will be brought to light, confronted and ultimately laid to rest causing more than simply the frisson of morbid curiosity inspired by the film. A ‘‘deep freeze’’ of this memory accompanied Spain’s much-lauded democratic transition in the 1970s, ostensibly necessitated by a ‘‘pacted’’ (negotiated) transition to democracy centred on a double amnesty symbolizing the guilt of both sides in the past civil conflict, and on a futureoriented consensus pointing Spaniards firmly towards the making of history, not the reliving of it (Aguilar Fernández). In the subsequent three decades, thanks in part to this choice to face the future, Spain has arguably moved well beyond its insecure transition to achieve a firmly consolidated European democracy. Without trials to stir up the resentment of the outgoing military, or truth commissions to reveal the role of civil society in the repressive apparatus, and only marginal efforts towards reparations, Spain’s political elites could focus on constructing fair and resilient democratic institutions, and the Spanish public on learning to trust these institutions to channel their political energies and demands. Keeping individual memory out of the public sphere and collective memory in the ‘‘deep freeze’’ was widely viewed as the formula which produced the Spanish success story: reconciliation without truth, transition without transitional justice. It is precisely because of Spain’s status as a model for pacting without transitional justice that today’s thaw in memory politics*most recently the Zapatero government’s sponsorship of the controversial ‘‘Law of Historical Memory’’*has been so politically and emotionally fraught, both for those invested in the heroic consenso narrative and those who contest it. Inside the government, on the airwaves and in newspapers there has emerged from the left a new discourse critical of the sacralized culture of consenso, drawing upon a set of globalized norms equating democratic robustness with what could be called a transitional justice culture*that is, a set of beliefs and practices grounded in rejection of impunity, confrontation of the past, prioritizing state accountability and aiming towards a broader societal inclusion of past regime victims. Diffused globally by human rights groups and their allies in governments, intergovernmental organizations and academe, this culture has, with variable intensity and not without controversy, taken root in a range of postauthoritarian societies worldwide, such as South Africa, the former Eastern Bloc and East Timor, in recent years. For countries undergoing democratic transition, the message from this set of cultural norms is that the moment of transition is the golden opportunity to forge a new, democratic social contract, and that the democratic future envisaged by that contract will be possible, and will last, only by using the law Stephanie R. Golob
China's rise in Asia : promises and perils
Chapter 1 Salient Determinants of China's Recent Approach to Asia and its Implications for the United States Chapter 2 Recent Chinese Domestic and Foreign Policies and Priorities Chapter 3 China's Relations with the United States Chapter 4 China's Relations with Russia Chapter 5 Relations with Japan Chapter 6 Relations with the Korean Peninsula Chapter 7 China-Southeast Asia Relations Chapter 8 Relations with Taiwan Chapter 9 Relations with South Asia Chapter 10 Relations with Central Asia Chapter 11 Conclusion: China's Peaceful Approach to Asia and its Implications for the United States