ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way the judicialisation of communism through transitional justice measures, including lustration and memory institutions, contributed to the expanding force of nationalist populist movements and governments in Central and Eastern Europe. The judicial approach to communism took different forms and worked through multiple areas. Liberal legal ideology and constitutional order, especially with its anti-communist security mechanism articulated within the historical doctrine of militant democracy, has been complicit with the judicialisation of communism as a dead and criminal past and ideology. This security drive, in turn, helped nationalist populist and far-right groups gain political ground and wage a counter-hegemonic struggle against liberal and left-wing groups. Thus, one could better understand the dynamics of nationalist populism not simply as an “anomaly” or “pathology” of actually existing liberal-democracy, but the radicalisation and expansion of its certain features including anti-democratic and anti-communist security drives ingrained in it.
