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Abstract
A recent representation of lustration, the systematic vetting of civil servants for ties to the communist-era secret police, sees this as a process of confession and redemption essential to the restoration of capitalism in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Against this view, lustration can be interpreted as the ‘securitization’ of democracy, an attempt to render the consolidation of the new political system into terms of threat and danger and create a concomitant anxiety. Lustration is a centrist policy, designed to remove the discussion of collaboration from the public domain and make it a discreet, bureaucratic procedure, which a sufficiently large plurality of Czech and Slovak legislators could endorse in 1991.