ABSTRACT
The following paradox, illustrated most famously by the transition from the Nazi regime to that of the Federal Republic of Germany, is central to issues of memory and justice in the aftermath episodes of massive state organized crimes. On the one hand, only a liberal democracy based on the rule of law, checks and balances of power, an independent judiciary, and the basic principle of the dignity and rights of all individuals is able and is interested in bringing perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to justice based on the rule of law. Only a liberal democracy and its stress on the principles of openness and transparency places value on examining the inconvenient truths about a nation’s past. Yet, on the other hand, liberal democracy by definition empowers the people and allows them to be citizens who choose their government in free elections. The resulting governments, or at least some part of their parliaments thus always have representatives who speak for voters who are deeply opposed to efforts to look closely at the criminal past or to bring those responsible for past crimes to justice or even to define these actions as criminal. As a result, the norm of democratic governments that follow episodes of gross human rights violations follows the dictum I expressed in Divided Memory, in 1997, according to which there is a tension between democratization, and certainly rapid democratization, and judicial reckoning. Daring more democracy quickly brought less, not more, justice precisely because some part of the now empowered people has the democratic right to oppose such reckoning.1
