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This chapter presents a summary of the discussions in the preceding chapters. It argues that parties are no longer central to mobilizing political participation in either established or new democracies. Parties are at their most feeble in those recently transitional democracies characterized by personalistic, candidate-centred forms of presidential politics. These countries are associated with weakly institutionalized party organizations, low levels of legislative cohesion, and undue executive encroachment on the media. Elsewhere in the recently transitional democracies, parties are showing signs of stability and institutionalization — especially, but not exclusively, in the parliamentary systems. In every case, parties make important contributions to the governance, recruitment, articulation, and aggregation functions, albeit not without challenges and constraints. To this extent, at least, it may be concluded that as in the established democracies, parties in some of the newer democracies can help facilitate a meaningful degree of popular choice and control.

This chapter examines how Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile fared with truth and justice policies after the transition from authoritarian rule, looking at the issue from an institutional and political angle, and at the social politics of memory. Efforts to deal with the past and their significance in the overall politics of transition to democracy are shaped by country-specific historical conditions and developments: the nature and legacies of repression and authoritarian rule; and the nature of the transition process and the various political, institutional and legal factors conditioning the post-transitional period, among which are the nature of repression, the presence and strength of a human rights movement, inherited legal or constitutional limitations, relations between political parties and Human Rights Organizations (HROs), the degree of executive or party commitment to policies of truth and justice, the unity of democratic parties, the ability of the military to mobilise against any policies of accountability as well as their relations with the democratic executive, the attitude of the judiciary to past violations, the presence of a strong legislative right, and the degree to which repression penetrated the social fabric. The way in which the first democratically elected authorities deal with the past, together with the relative strength of the human rights movement in the post-transitional period, sets the agenda for the subsequent evolution of the issue; more specifically, the past remains a source of open conflict if there are loopholes in official policies that preclude full closure or amnesty, and if transnational groups or regional and international human rights bodies challenge national policies favouring impunity. The past also remains a source of conflict if there are strong HROs that continue to contest official decisions on how to deal with the past, and have allies in the formal political arena or the courts. Official policies to deal with the past are not of themselves directly relevant to the process of democratisation, and what is more, during the first transitional period, truth and justice policies are unrelated to (or may even place obstacles in the way of) wider institutional reform; the reverse is also true, but whatever the case, the past becomes part of the dynamic of democratic politics. Indeed, although the continued pursuit of truth and justice and its links to wider reforms may be difficult to establish across the board, the politics of memory more widely conceived are important for a process of democratization in all four countries examined here, as it is about how a society interprets and appropriates its past, in an attempt to mould its future, and as such it is an integral part of any political process, including progress towards deeper democracy.

The main aim of this book has been to analyse what determines how new democracies face an authoritarian past (and human rights violations in particular) and, in turn, the way in which policies of truth and justice shape the process of democratization. Thus, eighteen cases are analysed in detail, covering a good part of the processes of democratization that have taken place since the beginning of the 1970s; countries experiencing a political change that did not undergo a transition to democracy have been left out, as have countries in which truth and justice policies are the result of the end of a civil conflict where there is no accompanying movement towards democratization. The key obstacle to theorizing about this topic is the enormous influence of the particular historical evolution of each country, and various factors emerging therefrom, on policies of truth and justice in transition. Thus, a general overview to categorize different experiences of transitions from dictatorial rule according to the balance of power between authoritarians and democrats is immediately useful, although the aim of the editors has been to keep sight of the peculiar nature of national experiences while providing some kind of useful guidelines for approaching the subject. It is in this spirit that the two sets of conclusions offered here provide a way of looking at the issue of transitional truth and justice: the first pertains to the probability that a new democracy will undertake policies of this kind; the second refers to the consequences that such policies may have for democratic life or democratization.

The military coup of 25 April 1974 in Portugal initiated the ‘third wave’ of democratic transitions in southern Europe. The transition and subsequent process of democratic consolidation evolved in various stages, each with a corresponding phase of ‘transitional truth and justice’ initiatives and counter-initiatives: the first stage, from 1974 to 1976, was the ‘revolutionary’ period, comprising the downfall of the regime and the crisis of state that followed; the second stage, between 1976 and 1982, was a period of ‘normalization’, constitutionalization and incipient democratic consolidation; during the third stage, from 1982 onwards, the process of democratic consolidation has proceeded apace. This chapter examines these stages in different sections: Introduction; A Portuguese Settling of Accounts; The Purge Process; The Dual Legacy Discourse and the Consolidation of Democracy; and Conclusion.

This concluding chapter considers four common claims that are made concerning the consequences of any erosion of confidence in the institutions of representative democracy and. the growth of critical citizens.

First, growing cynicism about government may deter conventional political participation, thus discouraging electoral turnout, political activism, and civic engagement; second, alienation with the regime may affect protest politics, fostering unconventional activism, support for anti‐state extremist movements, and even occasional incidents of urban terrorism; third, a deep reservoir of public trust is generally thought to encourage voluntary compliance with the law, thus enhancing the ability of governments to pass and implement effective legislation and raise revenues, without the need for coercion; and lastly, growing tensions between ideal and reality may undermine the stability of regimes, increasing the pressures for political reform in established democracies and hindering the consolidation process in newer democracies. A critical examination is made of support for and against these claims, and the implications for strengthening transitional, consolidating, and established democracies are considered.

An exploration is made of the nature and scope of de-communization and political justice in Czechoslovakia (the Czech Republic, Slovakia), Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Hungary, to each of which a section of the chapter is devoted. The term ‘political justice’ is here meant to refer to proceedings held to try crimes (generally related to political repression) committed by outgoing regimes. With the exception of Albania, transitions to democracy in these countries were initiated in 1989, and in all cases, great political tensions arose from demands for the punishment of former communist authorities and those responsible for political repression. These demands formed part of a wider political and cultural process, namely the reworking of public discourse on the nature of the communist regime, and their nature and results varied considerably from country to country; for example, only two – the former Czechoslovakia and Albania – actually carried out purges that affected large numbers of people. This chapter attempts to answer to two main questions: (1) what explains the differences in the scope and nature of the policies adopted, and (2) what impact have they had on the process of democratization. The focus is on the rationality of the political actors or the role that anti-communist campaigns had in shaping political competition, rather than the moral and legal debates surrounding the issue.

This chapter explores Russia’s attempts to come to terms with its Stalinist past in an endeavour to build a civil society based on the rule of law. It begins by examining the nature of Stalinist repression and the legacy of Soviet terror. It goes on to focus on halted official efforts at truth telling, and persistent unofficial efforts, led by the organization Memorial, at remembering and commemorating; this provides insight into the issues that daunted the quest for moral recovery. The chapter then looks at post-Soviet efforts to come to terms with the Stalinist past, and finally it assesses the impact of the discussion of past injustices, or the politics of memory, on Russia’s subsequent process of democratization. The information presented and the conclusions drawn are necessarily based on a number of scattered sources, including memoirs, interviews and official archives; Russia’s experience is unique, and difficult to compare with other post-authoritarian political systems, especially as democracy has not taken substantial hold, and, since the transition is so new, questions of accountability are only beginning to be addressed.

An examination is made of various aspects of justice and legitimacy in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in South Africa. The major part of the chapter discusses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The different sections of the chapter are: Introduction; Race, Nationalism, and Political Violence – a discussion of the causes of the massive levels of political violence in the recent history of South Africa; The Negotiations for a Transition; Negotiating an Amnesty; and the TRC as a Liminal Institution; and Concluding Remarks.