Private Property Issues on Eastern Europe in Restitution and Compensation Problems

The restitution of confiscated property to former owners in the ex-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe was a policy decision with momentous consequences, as the level of assets concerned was huge and the impact of handing back to former owners residential or commercial property, four decades after nationalization, was difficult to anticipate. The solutions adopted - relatively quickly, or slowly and incoherently, in many steps spanning a long period of time – were very different from country to country. The goal of this study is to analyze the transformations that occurred in the area of private property ownership following the change of political regime in former socialist or communist countries. The six countries looked at are: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Serbia. These countries illustrate well the whole range of contentious problems in a region where the Communist regimes have varied tremendously in their approach to private property, intensity of social control, repression and overall legitimacy. This diversity of situations poses today different types of dilemmas for the property restitution process, dilemmas which are approached by each country in a different manner. The main question for the countries in this study is how an emerging democracy can “respond to public demands for redress of the legitimate grievances of some without creating new injustices for others.â€