Karolis Dambrauskas1; 1 Vilnius University, Lithuania
Discussion
The post-Cold War transformations in the former Soviet Union and socialist countries did not, from the outset, show a smooth transition to Western-style market democracies. The restoration of property rights to existing assets, including land, in the first decades resulted in the creation of “fuzzy property”. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, land restitution in some former Soviet/socialist countries is either still incomplete or involves unfinished property restitution cases. This paper discusses such cases in ethnically mixed regions of Lithuania, Slovakia and Romania. In the context of protracted restitution and cases of resulting “fuzzy property”, the ethnicity-property nexus raises the question of how property restitution in each of these countries has affected the relationship between the ethnic majority and the ethnic minorities. Secondly, it raises the question of what impact post-socialist land restitution has had on the parallel processes of nation-building in each country?
