Post-communist Restitution and Corrections for ‘Historical Injustice’

Abstract

In the previous chapter I analysed the transitional justice literature on post-communist restitution and privatisation and I have shown that contrary to this literature’s assertions, restitution is ‘normatively’ superior to privatisation. A post-communist transformation of regimes of property based on restitution would have, therefore, experienced fewer justification problems and be more ‘just’ than a transformation of such regimes relying foremost on privatisation, as it was dominantly the case in Central Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. However, taken individually, restitution does not come without a string of normative problems, mainly addressed in the historical justice scholarship. I argue in this chapter that the normative problems of restitution, as well as the arguments against restitution in this literature, mainly concern restitution for the descendants of slaves or the descendants of colonial subjects, therefore, these arguments cannot be forcefully applied against having restitution in post-communist nations. Consequently, even when analysed individually, restitution remains the ‘better’ normative legal instrument for transforming state property into private property in post-communist transitional settings.