The Costs of Justice: How New Leaders Respond to Previous Rights Abuses

10. Reassessing How We Think about Justice

10 Reassessing How We Think about Justice In many ways, transitional justice has over the past half century proved to be a misnomer. Most obviously, increased international attention has made it an ever-more permanent fixture in the international human rights regime . The rise of the International Criminal Court is only one sign of this. Another is the fact that more than sixty years after World War II ended, the United States—an opponent of the ICC—continues to hunt down Nazi war criminals.1 A closer look at newspaper accounts indicates that even in a domestic context, the issue of justice for past violations has an amazing staying power. Japan’s leaders, for example, recently reversed the acknowledgments and apologies made by their predecessors for its World War II practice of forcing women throughout Asia to work as sex slaves.2 At about the same time, on the other side of the ocean, political elites in Chile began efforts to annul a thirty-year-old self-amnesty adopted by the Pinochet regime .3 The consequences of these moves, from riots in China prompted by the former to an onslaught of extradition demands made possible by the latter, go beyond local boundaries. Justice is thus a long-term, dynamic process with global ramifications. Purists would likely argue that the events described above are a consequence of the failure to deal adequately with the past in the first place. If Japan had institutionalized justice for more than merely a few symbolic 214 heads responsible for wartime atrocities (whether through additional criminal trials, truth commissions, or early condemnations), justice proponents might argue, its leaders would have more trouble making public denials today. If Chile’s first post-Pinochet officials had been more aggressive in their treatment of rights abusers soon after taking power, transitional justice would not be a distraction today. The Polish case also demonstrates what a long-term affair justice can be. Administrative cleansings (as well as lustration ) continued to be carried out more than a decade after communism collapsed , and criminal cases are set to continue well into the future. Each of these comments brings us back to the central question in this book: What influences the way in which leaders in post-repressive states choose to deal with the past? For almost two decades, relative power arguments have held a central position in the democratization and transitional justice literatures. These theories, primarily elite-oriented, explain justice as a function of the power of old and new elites, though the public support–based argument expands the constraints into the broader public. While such arguments are intuitively appealing, they also have shortcomings (described in my introduction), including a focus on short-term outcomes and predominantly domestic pressures . Perhaps a more essential fault is methodological: in their pursuit of parsimony, relative power advocates have left their dependent variable underspeci fied, thus making this argument difficult to test empirically. Throughout this book, I have upheld the traditional argument that new elites must maintain a high degree of vigilance as they pursue justice for past abuses. At the same time, I have pressed for a more dynamic strategic argument to explain the object of their vigilance. New elites striving to impose justice policies can view hungry voters, rather than bitter former elites, as their greatest threat. Leaders of decision-making institutions, in particular, constantly keep one eye on their public, making certain that political decisions are not perceived to impact negatively on the delivery of expected political goods. Where public opposition is low and new elites are not seen to be wasting resources on dealing with the past, justice can be relatively cheap and common. Where public opposition is high, justice costs more and may be either deferred, or provided only with the assistance of outside subsidies. The very fact that elites in each of the countries studied Reassessing How We Think about Justice | 215 here focused primarily on potential voter reactions, rather than on old elite reactions, lends legitimacy to the strategic argument and raises critical questions about the merit of relative power explanations.4 This strategic argument, of course, is not inherently in opposition to the relative power one, although it does follow a different logic. Powerful old elites can be a threat to harsh forms of justice, particularly when they have voting power in primary institutions, control the means of violence, or are capable of manipulating...