differDivergent Responses to a Common Past: Transitional Justice in the Czech Republic and Slovakia
Divergent Responses to a Common Past: Transitional Justice in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: This article addresses the question of why, despite having shared a single communist regime and the revolution against it, the Czechs and Slovaks have dealt differently with that regime’s former high officials and secret police agents, files, and collaborators. I argue that this divergence challenges theories that focus on transition type, levels of Communist regime repression, and post-Communist political developments, and propose that a stronger influencing factor is the level of the preceding regime’s legitimacy, which differed in the two halves of the Czechoslovak federation after 1968.

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