Content area
Full Text
The newfound inclination of states to issue apologies to both individuals and other states attests to the growing power of victim groups, evinces a novel willingness of states or state representatives to admit wrong, and reveals an emergent global public that is eager to hear such admissions. Such symbolic actions can play an important role in diffusing conflict and preparing the groundwork for a new political order.
Apologies and Democratic Agency
From the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the beginning of the War on Terrorism in 2002, representatives of states increasingly succumbed to pressure to issue public apologies for wrongs committed in the past. The trend attests to the growing power of victim groups, evinces a novel willingness of states or state representatives to admit wrong, and reveals an emergent global public that is eager to hear such admissions. A wide range of countries issued apologies, including France for World War II collaboration with the Germans in the persecution of Jews, South Africa for a century of apartheid crimes against blacks, and the United States for a history of slavery and for the persecution of native Indians. Not only did citizens (or ex-citizens, or descendants of citizens) demand, and receive, apologies from their own states, but states also issued apologies to each other, such as Japan to Korea, Israel to the Palestinian Authority and vice-versa, England to Northern Ireland, and Syria to the United States.
This wave of apologies is an integral part of the widespread democratization processes that accompanied the end of the Cold War. Democratic states require the reiteration of principles of accountability to establish themselves as moral authorities that can claim to represent entire communities, as shown in Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe.1 These principles are at the core of the concept of rule of law, and they are enacted in periodic political purification. Political purification entails governments assuming responsibility for societal criminality rather than displacing it to peripheral actors. In other words, democratic governments that do not periodically cleanse themselves of their own criminal behaviors will tend to displace criminality to non-central groups (for example, immigrants in France, poor blacks in the United States, asylum seekers...