Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

Treating a difficult past in post-communist Europe 275
So in the absence of an agreed, public, legal procedure, Poland has not
enjoyed Spanish-style consensus but bitter, recurrent mud-slinging and
crude political exploitation of the files. As a long-overdue antidote to all
this, the Polish parliament finally passed a carefully drafted lustration law
in 1997. It obliges people in senior positions in public life, including in
the state-owned media, to sign, at the time they stand for elected office
or are appointed to the job, a declaration as to whether they did or did
not ‘consciously collaborate’ with the security services in the period June
1944 to May 1990. At the recent parliamentary elections, I saw polling
stations plastered with long lists of the candidates, and under each name
the appropriate declaration. The admitted fact of collaboration does not
in itself disqualify you from standing for public office. Indeed, several
candidates on the post-communist list stood admitting their past collaboration.
Only if you lie, saying you did not collaborate when in fact you
did, are you disqualified for ten years. The declarations of innocence are
to be checked, in secret, by a Lustration Court, for which it has proved
rather difficult to find judges. However, since more ‘decommunisation’
was a major demand of several of the parties gathered in the Solidarity
Electoral Action coalition, now the senior partner in Poland’s new government,
we can expect these difficulties to be overcome.
Hungary passed a lustration law in 1997, which is slowly being implemented.
Here, a commission vets senior figures in public life, but exposes
them publicly only if they refuse to resign quietly. The prime minister
Gyula Horn admitted in September 1997 that he had been negatively assessed
in the terms of the law, both on account of his service in the militia
assembled to help crush the 1956 revolution and because, as foreign minister,
he had been the recipient of secret police information. However, he
declined to resign and said he now regards the matter as closed. In both
the Polish and the Hungarian cases, the circle of persons to be vetted is –
wisely in my view – drawn much more closely than in the German case.
Some analysts have taken the argument for purges a step further. Where
there was no lustration, they say, as in Poland and Hungary – and elsewhere
in eastern and south-eastern Europe – the post-communist parties
returned to power. Only where there was lustration, in Czechoslovakia
and Germany, did this not occur. To deduce causality from correlation is
an old historian’s fallacy – cum hoc, ergo propter hoc. On closer examination,
you find that in eastern Germany the post-communist party has done
very well in elections, and one reason for this is, precisely, resentment of
what are seen as West German occupation purges and victors’ justice.
In fact, the number of votes the post-communist Party of Democratic
Socialism (PDS) received in East Germany at the last Bundestag election,
in October 1994, is remarkably similar to the number of people