Dealing with a Tainted Past: Understanding Lustration as Democratic Exclusion

• In Event: Politics of Suffering and Resistance: Understanding and Responding to Trauma

Abstract

Dealing with a history of oppression and atrocities, lustration law (the vetting system that removes tainted officials who have been complicit with the past state-sponsored oppression from public institutions) has been widely adopted by Eastern European countries. While designed as a step towards transitional justice and taking the oppressors’ sufferings seriously, lustration poses a significant challenge to liberal democratic principles, as it seems to restrict one’s occupational freedom, and affected individuals seem to bear disproportionate penalties for their choice under coercion. In response to these critiques, I argue that lustration can be regarded as “democratic” for two reasons: first, democratic institutions ought to ensure the representativeness of their public servants, and second, lustration makes an important step toward political equality, both in symbolic and substantive aspects. Symbolically, if the wrongdoers are not held accountable, then the wronged communities cannot be regarded as political equals in the new regime. Meanwhile, positions in public institutions are nonetheless a form of political capital. Lustration helps to reduce undeserved capital and make the electoral competition fairer. By conceptualizing lustration as fulfilling democratic purposes, this article also explains how vetting, when proportionally used, not only has retributive but democratic implications.

Author

• Yi-Hsuan Huang, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill