Transnational Justice in Europe

Abstract

Abstract Many transitional justice experts associate the birth and rise of their subdiscipline closely with the extreme and turbulent history of Europe in the “short” twentieth century. However, the “Europe” in question and the “European” characteristics of the field tend to remain vague in scholarly discourse of transitional justice. This chapter starts with discussing the paradox of how this understanding of Europe as advanced in transitional justice—which is above all a phenomenon of the post-1989 era—has its political-ideological roots in the Cold War era and associated conservative narratives of foundation and modernizations. The second section will then seek to unfold the evolution of transitional justice in twentieth-century Europe in a long durée perspective andby focusing on four selected conjunctures (set in the 1920s, 1940s, 1970s, and 1990s).