rT ansitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation in post-communist aE stern uE rope: Romania and Albania. its power.” Thus, lustration that was not done for the purpose of a clean break with the past, holding responsible the perpetrators and achieving a catharsis that would allow the traumatized society to move ahead, but used by the political elite as a political and selective mean to get rid of political opponents while consolidating their own power. As the article neatly captures, this led to the “transitional justice process in Albania becoming highly politicized and was used by politicians for political gains, which ultimately led to loss of trust from general public failing to detach the Albanian political scene from its communist past” (Austin & Ellison 2008). Albania stands in stark contrast even with closest neighbors that shares common past, such as Yugoslavia, given the different post-communist trajectories where the Yugoslavs were involved in identity-building and ethnic conflicts wars that seem to be missing in neighboring Albania.18 Albania has historically been a country of such paradoxes. Take religion for example. A country of four official religions that has never experienced a religious conflict and went as far under communist rule as to proclaim itself constitutionally as the only atheist country in the world in 1967. Also, the fact that it had the most difficult transition to democratic consolidation although it had a mono-ethnic society and did not get involved into irredentist and secessionist ethnic conflict of neighboring Yugoslavia (Kalemaj 2014). Another paradox of today’s reality is that despite having a population under 3 million, the country has around 140 political parties, and approximately half of them participate regularly in election cycles. Regarding transitional justice, Albania is neither the best-case scenario, nor the worst. Actually, civil society, media and active citizens have been in forefront as compared to the political class, which often for petty reasons or conflict of interest has generally been the main obstacle to a fast and completed transitional justice process. Among the measures that Albania has undertaken, a striking one has been rehabilitation and financial compensation of former prisoners that has started in 1991, immediately after the fall of the communist regime but due to limitations of financial resources, continues to this day. Among some late measures, we can mention the vetting of former Sigurimi officials and collaborators that has started as we speak. These former officials and collaborators have to pass the filter of the Authority of Dossiers, before they can be elected or appointed in state positions of high power. Since vetting is the process by which lustration process takes place is important to note in full what a renowned scholar in the field mentions: The higher a society’s view of the previous regime’s legitimacy, the lower its motivation to pursue justice for its authorities and the higher the likelihood, in a democratic context, that it will allow elites associated with the former regime to return to the political stage. These elites, in turn, would not be particularly likely to support vigorous transitional justice. Therefore, the more quickly they regain power, the less likely a legal framework will be established to screen such elites out of the political sphere over time. Conversely, the lower the society’s view of the previous regime’s legitimacy, the more likely it is to have both an anti-communist counter-elite to offer an alternative to communist successor parties and to offer electoral support to this counter-elite. In turn, these elites would certainly be more likely than the communist successor elites to pursue ‘decommunization’ (Nedelsky 2004, p. 88). In the case of Albania, we can make the case that it was more the former that the latter case. The previous regime, given its absolute monopoly of power even among its former Communist Eastern European peers, and a general lack of political culture had still retained a great influence among sizeable part of populations, especially the older generation as a new study has convincingly argued (Meka and Kalemaj 2018). This was reinforced by the fact that the biggest 18. As a scholar points out: “[o]n the one hand, Albanians retain a strong national identity that is fiercely proud and patriotic, and, on the other, this identity is fragmented, marked by internal conflicts, experienced episodically, lacking an organic structure for integrating experience into sustainable narratives through which the past can be remembered or the future imagined.” (Amy 2010). 67