On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies

Mihaela Mihai, Mathias Thaler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349465828, 9781137343710
• eBook ISBN: 9781137343727
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Examining the complex nature of state apologies for past injustices, this probes the various functions they fulfil within contemporary democracies. Cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research and insightful philosophical analyses are supplemented by real-life case studies, providing a normative and balanced account of states saying 'sorry'.

Part I

Theoretical Foundations

1

Beyond the Ideal Political Apology

Alice MacLachlan

1. Introduction¹

The practice of apologising has recently become a recognisable feature of public and political life. As philosophers and theorists of apology attempt to understand and assess this practice, it is perhaps natural that we would turn to more familiar models of apology – namely, the norms and ideals that govern our practices of apologising to one another in private, interpersonal contexts. Indeed, several authors have sought to employ these norms to describe the perfect or ideal apology, as a standard for evaluating admittedly imperfect (and often very bad) practices of both personal and political apologising. I argue that this move is mistaken, for several reasons. First, it is far from clear that we can have a coherent, singular model of the ideal or best apology. Second, in modelling political apologies on interpersonal ones, we neglect the importantly political nature of the former, distorting the meaning and function of political apologies while holding them to an impossible standard.

In this chapter, I offer an alternative approach to political apologies, by turning to Hannah Arendt’s account of meaningful political speech. I argue that we ought to shift the emphasis in political apology from ‘apology’ to ‘political’, thinking of apologies first as a form of political practice, that is, a mode of doing politics. By politics, I mean that which is concerned with our common life, the health of the public sphere and relationships between citizens and government, as well as the responsible exercise of authority. This is not to suggest that moral questions are irrelevant to the practice of political apology. Far from it: the moral significance of how we address, account for and narrate past political wrongs is paramount, but this significance is best surmised when such questions are viewed through the lens of apology as political practice. My argument for this conclusion takes the following form. I begin by addressing what it means for an apology to be political, and briefly sketch the grounds for my scepticism concerning the standard approach to normative theories of apology, before turning to my Arendtian framework. I outline several reasons why Arendt is a fruitful resource for theorists of apology and sketch an Arendtian framework for evaluating political apologies, based on the features she attributes to meaningful political speech as action. I conclude by discussing the possibilities and limits of this framework.

2. Apologies and political apologies

Apologies are offered in the aftermath of violation and harm. Someone in particular offers the apology, and thereby identifies herself – and is recognisable – as the wrongdoer, an appropriately responsible party or an empowered proxy. Second, the apologiser offers the apology to someone else: the appropriate victim(s) or those affected by the wrong, on a particular occasion and in a particular context. Third, apologies tell, or at least imply, a particular kind of story: that the actions, policies or events in question were both wrong and harmful, that the recipient was affected by these actions, policies or events and that the speaker both takes responsibility for and disavows them, acknowledging the recipient as someone who deserves better. Most likely, in apologising, the speaker also makes some commitment: not to do such wrongs again, to make reparations or act of repair, or to become somehow better by living up to certain ideals in the future.² Such features will not always be explicit, but their presumed or implied presence allows us to distinguish apologies from related speech acts, such as providing a defence of one’s actions, making excuses, expressing sympathy and confessing – or gleefully and vindictively taking credit for – misdoings. We might call these features the minimal conditions of valid apology, or entry norms for participation in the practice of apologising (just as moving pieces on a board in certain ways and not others represents an entry norm for the practice of chess-playing). A speech act that did not have these features would not be an apology – but they do not, in themselves, guarantee a good or successful apology, just as valid moves in a chess game can be better or worse examples of chess-playing.

Beyond these entry norms, it seems that apologies can vary quite widely. While most theorists of apology classify apologies as speech acts, no single set of words is required for a felicitous apology. Unlike familiar examples of ritual phrases, such as ‘I do’, which is required for rituals of marriage to take place, in close intimate relationships apology may be conveyed with a single glance or gesture and without the utterance ‘I’m sorry’. Even in formal relationships, it seems, ‘apologies can be communicated in a wide range of ways, through verbal statements issued publicly, joint declarations, legislative resolutions, documents and reports, legal judgments, pardon ceremonies, apology rituals, days of observance, reconciliation walks, monuments and memorials, even names bestowed on the landscape’.³ Whether a given communication is an apology will depend in part upon how it is intended and understood by those in situ, that is, whether they both read a remorseful narrative of wrongdoing, expressions of disavowal and appropriate commitment into whatever transpires between them.

Many examples of apology are drawn from private life, such as those between friends and family members for daily mishaps or drastic mis-doings (‘I’m so sorry, but I broke your vase’ or ‘I regret that I betrayed you – I only wish I’d been a better friend’). Other apologies take place in the public eye. Yet not all apologies uttered publicly are political; the celebrity who apologises for his adolescent behaviour does not thereby commit an act of political significance. At the same time, an apology need not be spoken by a politician to be political; apologies by corporate, church or NGO leaders can take on tremendous political significance, insofar as they affect and implicate core institutions and relationships in a democratic political society, as can an apology by or to representatives of a particular group whose identity has become politically salient (e.g. an ethnic minority in a pluralistic society). Political apology is not synonymous with historical apology, though many examples of political apology have been offered for actions in the distant past.⁴ Similarly, political apology is not necessarily synonymous with collective apology.⁵ A publicly issued apology from one head of state to another will certainly take on political significance, and, on the other hand, we can picture an apolitical collective apology that takes place following a disastrous family reunion or departmental retreat.

What, then, are the criteria for a political apology? Here, Arendt is useful. Instead of restricting her understanding of politics to the machinations of state power or the business of legislation, Arendt understands the political to encompass the public sphere – what she calls the inter-subjective ‘in-between’ that arises among citizens of a society, as well as all efforts directed towards the health and maintenance of that sphere. Politics expresses ‘the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking’,⁶ rather than violence. Political interactions are concerned with more than the bare necessities of life and labour, and are different from work and production. For Arendt, politics and the political are composed of both institutions and relationships (individual and collective) that together constitute the public sphere. The political health of a society is affected by the structure, legitimacy, inclusiveness and power dynamics of these institutions and relationships. Actions ranging from discriminatory policies or widespread corruption to civil war, violence and colonialism can affect the health of the public sphere, via the institutions and relationships that constitute it. If wrongs require apology, then those who enter the public sphere to participate in politics may find themselves called upon to make and receive apologies. But who offers an apology to whom for such political wrongs, and under what circumstances, will vary widely. Thus, political apologies include the following:

(1) Official apologies offered and received by collectivities that are clearly recognisable as politically constituted or organised, via their mandated representatives: for example, states, political organisations, ethnic groups and other national minorities, or between groups of marginalised and disadvantaged individuals and the larger political society. The Canadian 2008 government apology for the policies and atrocities of the Indian residential school system is an example of this form of apology.

(2) Apologies between individuals or groups where the primary relationship, or the relationship in question (i.e. that relationship implicated in the wrongdoing), is political, for example, apologies for politically motivated or politically charged wrongdoings: hate crimes, for instance, or the torture of political prisoners and hostages, as well as individual acts that are part of – and made possible by – wider systemic state policy (see, for example, apologies for individual atrocities by state police committed under apartheid policies in South Africa).

(3) Apologies enacted as part of – or in service to – the ongoing process of making the conditions for political society possible. This category includes a broader political effort to establish lasting peace, build democratic institutions and take responsibility for past political wrongdoing (take, for example, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 2005 apology for the wrongful jailing of 11 Irish men following the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombing of pubs in Guildford and Woolwich). Also in this category are apologies aimed at admitting previously excluded or subjugated citizens into political society, or apologies aimed at acknowledging previous exclusion or subjugation. The 2013 public apology to the LGBT community by Alan Chambers, leader of Exodus International (an American ‘ex-gay’ ministry with homophobic policies), is an example of the latter.⁷

The categories are not exclusive. Many instances of political apology will qualify under more than one of these conditions: politically motivated acts are committed by members of politically constituted groups, and apologising for them is often an important part of political reconciliation and peace-building following major conflict. In each case, the apology is political because either the wrongdoing or the relationships in question are themselves political, concerning a broader public. Thus, the apology – insofar as it concerns the wrongdoing and affects the relationship – itself takes on a social-political significance beyond its importance to speaker and recipient. Furthermore, such apologies are also often uttered in public, political contexts: in parliaments or through national and international media.

3. Resisting regulative ideals

It is hardly controversial to note that examples of startlingly poor apologies (even ‘quasi-’ or ‘non-’apologies) abound in public and private life. How might we distinguish better apologies from worse ones? Philosophical theorists of apology have typically begun with the observation that the practice requires some normative constraint, and then concluded that this normative constraint should come in the form of a regulative ideal: that is, a set of criteria determining the ideal or best apology, one that gives its recipient(s) decisive reason to accept it. Such an ideal, they argue, even if never realised in practice, would provide an appropriate measuring stick with which to assess actual apologies.⁸

I see significant reasons for concern with this approach. First and foremost, the practice of apologising has multiple functions: narrating a particular story of wrongdoing; disavowing those wrongs; acknowledging the addressee as someone impacted by those wrongs; making some appropriate commitment, amends or reform; initiating a process of reconciliation; or, on the other hand, enacting appropriate closure of the relationship. The relevance and relative importance of each function varies from case to case. I am thus suspicious of any attempt to provide a definitive ranking or lexical ordering of these functions in the abstract and apply it to all or most cases, rather than in situ. The significance of these functions will vary, based on the nature of the harm and the relationship in question: in some cases, a commitment to reform or reparation will be irrelevant, and in others it will be the most salient issue at hand. Here, context is crucial; just as we experience injuries differently from one another, so too one injured party may have decisive reason to accept an apology that another injured party would never allow without additional commitments to repair. Attempting to create a comprehensive list of all possible contingencies and reasons will not only leave us with a highly unworkable ideal; it also implies that more is always better.

Furthermore, apologising is a practice, and as with many practices, it admits of local variation and diversity; there is no universally authoritative account of what it is to apologise, and the grounds for claiming one are dubious at best. Alison Dundes Renteln’s work illustrates how apologies may look like – and mean – very different things in different parts of the world.⁹ Even within a given society, our understanding of how to apologise and when to accept apologies will vary, depending on our initiation into the practice: put simply, how and what we were taught matters most in making amends.¹⁰ Finally, there is a sui generis quality to an outstanding apology, which may be related to the fact that apologies are performed. It is as difficult to itemise what made a particular apology powerful as it is to quantify and itemise what made the performance of a Bach oratorio or Shakespearian tragedy outstanding. As Mihaela Mihai puts it, ‘a check-list model of apology fails to capture faithfully the kind of imaginative act that an apology must be’.¹¹

The ‘check-list model’ is particularly unhelpful when it comes to political apology. Indeed, the short shrift given to the political nature of official apologies in most normative, philosophical accounts is telling. Philosophers of apology have tended either to use examples of political apology without acknowledging their status as political or to treat the category as synonymous with collective or historical apologies, thus implying that the relevant issues can be captured by discussions of historical and collective responsibility.¹²

Why is the category of political apology particularly resistant to the regulative ideal approach? First, there is even more variation in practices of political apologies; these are more likely than personal apologies to cross inter- and intra-societal cultural divides. When we offer or receive apologies to or from friends and family members, the likelihood that we will have been inculcated into the practice in similar ways (emphasising remorseful sincerity through eye contact or a bowed head, or making concrete amends by offering a gift) is significantly greater than when a state official apologises to a national minority, or when representatives from feuding ethnic groups offer and receive apologies. Indeed, it is worth noting that successful examples of political apology in modern history have little in common with one another. We need only contrast two successful cases: the German Chancellor Willy Brandt silently falling to his knees before the monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1970, with the scripted apology offered by Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (and accompanied by compensation) to Japanese Canadians in 1988, for their forced internment during the Second World War.

Second, models of apology invoke norms and standards that may not be appropriate in political cases. For example, a focus on the personal sincerity and depth of emotion expressed by the speaker seems to be central to all variations of the regulative ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Theoretical Foundations
• Part II: Rites and Rituals of Regret
• Part III: Challenging Cases
• Part IV: Obstacles and Limitations
• Bibliography
• Index