This paper addresses the thorny issue of complicity with wrongdoing under conditions of systemic political repression, such as those characterising authoritarianism, totalitarianism or military occupation. The issue of dealing with collaborators – those who colluded with the apparatus of repression or who benefitted from its existence – is central to processes of “transitional justice”, i.e. subsequent processes of justice and memory-making by successor regimes. France’s highly gendered legal purges of Vichy supporters and the lustration laws unmasking secret police informers in Eastern Europe after 1989 are just two examples of limited official attempts to illuminate the ‘grey zone’ that escapes the victim-perpetrator binary.
This paper aims to offer an account of the ‘grey zone’ that acknowledges its importance for processes of political reconciliation. It argues that only a conception of complicity that takes temporality, hope and the limits of the imagination seriously can inform productive processes of reconciliation and refounding in the wake of political repression. The first part of the paper critically reviews existing theories of complicity, ranging from the individualistic, moral philosophical account at one end of the spectrum, to structuralist views of violence, at the other. The second part proposes a middle position that shies away from the intransigent moralism of legal and moral philosophers, without, however, falling prey to the responsibility-diluting tendencies of strong structuralists. This is accomplished by a calibration of our assessments of acts and practices of complicity in light of the temporal horizon of hope that citizens of these societies could realistically delineate for themselves, as well as of the limits of their political imagination. The third part substantiates these claims by drawing attention to both testimonial and fictional accounts of the lived reality of complicity in totalitarian Romania and Vichy France. The conclusion addresses some potential criticisms.
