Property Restitution and Privatisation in the Baltic Restorations of Capitalism

Abstract

AbstractThe Baltic restorations certainly deserve the status of paradigmatic modern restoration cases not only because they happened at the time when the share of survivors socialised under the original system was already approaching the critical threshold, separating token or ‘true’ restorations from reversals of a different kind. Only in Lithuania (if we accept the partisan underground state thesis) was the situation less dramatic. The determined affirmation in the legislation of contemporary Baltic states of their identity with states de facto extinct 50 years ago but still internationally recognised de jure is another reason. The most important reason to consider them as paradigms of modern restorations however is the following: the post-communist development of the Baltic countries was even more decidedly restorational than that of the French Bourbons in 1815–1830. Therefore, they may be much more instructive for the theorisation of modern restorations.