Kursinformation

The aim of the seminar is the study of democratic transitions in Southern and Southeast Europe in the 1970s (Portugal, Spain, Greece), in Latin America during the 1980s (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) and in post-communist Eastern Europe after 1989 (Romania, Bulgaria, Poland) focusing especially on the topic of transitional justice in combination with collective memory and master narratives of national history. In particular, the seminar will address in a comparative perspective and through a transregional approach the factors causing the end of authoritarian rule and shaping the terms of democratic transition in the above cases by introducing key concepts related to culture of remembrance, politics of history and transitional justice.

The mode of transition, associated with different processes of remembrance and forgetting, is decisive for criminal prosecution of crimes committed during dictatorship. For instance, in Spain, Uruguay and Chile, the political elites in charge of transition adopted an “Amnesia Modell” to tackle the legacies of dictatorial past. In these cases, societies witnessed in the beginning phases to democracy a silencing of any discussion on the dictatorship which again led to a suspension of criminal prosecution of human rights abuses. In Greece and Argentina, by contrast, those persons of the military dictatorship with maximum responsibility for human rights violations were put on trial and sentenced either to death or to life imprisonment immediately after the collapse of their regimes (“Selective Punishment”). Decisive for this development was in both cases the fact that the end of the juntas was the direct result of a military defeat (Cyprus crisis, Falklands War). Similar, in the Portuguese case, the Angolan War had a great impact on the process of dissolution of the Salazar regime. Furthermore, the seminar will draw comparisons to Eastern European cases. For example, the Romanian President Nicolae Ceauşescu was 1989 not in position to initiate a "regulated" transition to democracy and retain control of the military and judiciary after the transfer of power according to the Chilean or Spanish model. As a consequence, Ceauşescu and his wife were sentenced to death in a show trial and executed by a firing squad. In Bulgaria, transitional justice took a different path. Todor Živkov, the General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party and Head of State for decades, was charged several times but did not face any criminal consequences ultimately. In Poland, again, the parliament decided as early as 1993 to stop the prosecution against General Wojciech Jaruzelski who had proclaimed 1981 martial law and sent the military into the streets to suppress the Solidarność uprising. More than a decade later, a new attempt was launched by the Institute of National Remembrance to prosecute the former Polish Communist party prime minister along with other high-ranking communists.

The second part of the seminar is dedicated to the question of whether the social and historical-political conditions in Southern Europe and Latin America favour the emergence of left-wing populist movements, in contrast to Eastern Europe, where predominantly right-wing populists are successful.