3.   Political Society

Establishing a new political order after mass violence is a delicate and fraught process. The members of political society, the political elite, must balance a number of competing goals. They may, for example, choose to prosecute those responsible for crimes, therefore risking the dissolution of a fragile peace and the resumption of violence. Others may persecute their adversaries using the full power of the state, and thus weaken the rule of law. Leaders are also confronted with the difficult decision of how to allocate resources, that is, the choice between the particular demands for victim reparations and the general needs for economic development. In addition, elites must work within the set of constraints that were inherited from the transition. In some cases, there may be few limitations on their ability to pass preferred policies, as may happen in the aftermath of a war where one side decisively defeats the other; in other scenarios, they may be severely handicapped by concessions that were given to previous elites who still retain some power.

While the particularities of the transition are important for gauging the range of possible policies open to leaders, there are nevertheless several ways elites can promote reconciliation. First, they can endorse peaceful political contestation over violence as the main means for dealing with conflict. This entails rethinking the domain of politics in such a way that replaces violence and threats with a commitment to respect pluralism and debate within the bounds of law. Combined with respect for the rule of law, such a change in elite political behavior signals the population about the nature of post-atrocity politics.

Additionally, elites can influence interpretations of the past. They may spearhead efforts to recognize injustice and shape society's understanding of its history by focusing on the origins of the conflict and encouraging public debate about violence and responsibility. However, elites should resist ignoring prior violations or promoting social amnesia by encouraging citizens to turn away from the past, and should avoid equating reconciliation with agreement among themselves to avoid the difficult issues of guilt and justice. Because of their special place in the public realm, they have a responsibility to promote thoughtful and honest debate about the past.

Elites can further reconciliation by promoting museums, monuments, and other public art—what Pierre Nora (1996) calls memory sites—that make the violent past part of a shared historical narrative. Such sites redefine how society relates to the past, and can engender the kind of passionate (and painful) debate necessary to undermine collective amnesia or triumphalist histories that implicitly legitimate violations. An additional important and increasingly popular step elites may take is to offer a formal apology in the name of the state, or in the name of groups or institutions they represent (e.g., armed forces, former guerrilla movements), thus furthering the process of recognizing the suffering of victims and achieving victim acknowledgment. Apologies give symbolic recognition of the suffering of individuals, and in the process reaffirm their moral worth and dignity in a strong, public manner. Because of their increasing popularity, in this chapter I focus on the normative status of public apologies. Public apologies have become particularly popular in elite discourse over the past twenty years, and a detailed theoretical discussion of their strengths and weaknesses can illuminate a great deal about these attempts at promoting reconciliation and its complex relation toward establishing successor legitimacy and achieving political aims. While this chapter discusses several actions political society can take, the subsequent chapter is devoted to a consideration of certain key state institutions—truth commissions and the judiciary—that also directly engage issues of reconciliation.

Before turning to an analysis of elite actions and apologies more specifically, I provide a discussion of what I mean by political society and the general transitional constraints affecting elite action.

Political Society, Transitional Constraints, and Reconciliation

The literature on political society is large, and includes much disagreement on the precise boundaries between formal political life and informal political mobilization. Nevertheless, most political scientists differ more on their understandings of the relation between civil and political society than on the definition of political society per se. This makes it somewhat easier to arrive at a working definition than one found in civil society debates, where the very definition of civil society is open to some contestation. Scholars normally define political society to include legislators (i.e., the executive and others who occupy decision-making positions in government), as well as the political parties to which these individuals belong. This requires a formal space such as parliaments where these elites compete through legitimate means for the exercise of control over public authority and state institutions. Their “primary goal is to win control of the state or at least some position for themselves within it” (Diamond 1999, 221; Linz and Stepan 1996). Political society is distinct from civil society, which includes those actors who are self-organized and who publicly mobilize to promote their values and interests with the ultimate goal of shaping public policy and discourse, but not the seizure of formal political power. Political society is also distinct from economic society, as the latter is primarily concerned with organizations dealing with production and distribution (J. Cohen and Arato 1992).

Their status means that political elites enjoy significant influence on social and political debates over a nation's treatment of its past. Elites help determine whether ignorance or meaningful reflection becomes the accepted way of looking at the past, though they do not, by themselves, determine whether reconciliation occurs, as this includes a larger set of social actors and institutions. Elites can, however, frame public perceptions of victims and generally set the parameters for realistic and unrealistic expectations of reconciliation. Through public speeches and actions, they establish the terms in which victims and others will be perceived, having a powerful effect on whether the targets of state violence will be considered full members of a new society or fall short of satisfactory moral and legal recognition. Thus, political society remains crucial for reconciliation.

Elite maneuverability to address the past is shaped by the particular nature of the transition. In some circumstances, particularly those following a war or revolution where one side is the clear winner, successor elites enjoy more political space to institute new policies for reconciliation if they so choose, though they may be materially constrained due to war damage or general economic underdevelopment. Nevertheless, they are likely to encounter little if any elite political opposition (e.g., as in the case of Rwanda). Many transitions, however, have not occurred in the aftermath of a complete overthrow but rather were achieved through negotiation among different incoming and outgoing elite factions. Political scientists have called the agreements developing from these negotiations “pacts,” or explicit agreements by leaders of opposing sides to shape the rules of governance and power in ways that protect their particular interests (O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986, 4:37). Pacted transitions occur where outgoing leaders still maintain sufficient power to partially shape future political arrangements and protect themselves from certain threats. The consequences of such transitions are most obvious on the issue of accountability. Often, powerful outgoing elites guilty of crimes demand some form of legal protection, such as an amnesty. This is a function, of course, of the exiting leaders’ relative power, and where they are weak their chances of securing protection are reduced (Huntington 1993).

Consequently, successor elites faced with powerful opponents enjoy limited options for securing accountability. The range of these options depends on the specifics of the transition. In Spain, Francoist groups negotiated from a position of power and secured an amnesty and commitment not to delve into the past, a situation that has only begun to change relatively recently; Uruguayan military leaders successfully resisted civilian demands for justice, and an amnesty was reaffirmed through a popular vote driven by fear of a coup. In Argentina the military lost much of its political capital after its defeat in the Falklands War, and thus negotiated from a somewhat weaker position during the 1983 transition. Nevertheless, subsequent threats to launch a coup proved that the military still maintained significant power, a view reinforced by the amnesty laws that followed (and were not overturned until 2005). Chile represents perhaps the most remarkable case of a pacted transition, with a military securing amnesty and an independent budget. For many Chileans, these were necessary concessions for reinstating civilian rule and keeping a second coup at bay. Only within the last ten years, following Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998, have human rights trials even been considered possible. Government leaders in Sierra Leone offered an amnesty and cabinet position to Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in the Lome Peace Accords as a way of stabilizing the country, but even this gesture was unable to secure peace, and the country fell back into war until military intervention led by the British largely defeated the insurgents (Barahona de Brito, González-Enríquez, Aguilar 2001; McAdams 2001; Mason and Meernik 2006).

These examples illustrate how particular empirical constraints can shape the options open to transitional societies. Successor elites are often unable—or, given the constraints, unwilling—to seek robust accountability or broad truth telling for fear that peace will collapse. Nevertheless, constraints are not impossibilities; they provide a limited domain of action, but action is still possible. There are options, even moral ones, which elites can use to promote reconciliation in some way, even under difficult conditions. In the following sections, I discuss several of these options, with a focus on the use of public apologies.

Political Elites and the Normative Dimension of the Rule of Law

Political elites play an important role in reframing appropriate forms of political behavior, including emphasizing the importance of debate and deliberation over violence and respect for the rule of law. We should not dismiss the importance of such reframing. Where one side dominates the new state of affairs (e.g., as in Rwanda or Cambodia), rejecting authoritarian rule in favor of inclusive politics is less likely, especially where leaders see political affiliation in absolutist terms and there are few restraints on imposing single-party rule. Successors may consider power a legitimate spoil of victory to be used on enemies, as consistently shown by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. Conversely, pacted transitions may result in an ossified political culture where continued mistrust and hatred prevent the emergence of the reciprocal norms of respect and openness to political compromise. The violence of the previous era is displaced into politics, and authoritarian apologists continue to equate political success with resisting democratic politics and power sharing. The possibility of securing a sustainable political order in these conditions is low, since significant tensions remain. Of course, even if leaders adopt nonviolent political negotiation, the broader population may remain unmoved. Elite cooperation is important, undoubtedly, but even this may result in a democratic deficit if leaders are perceived to work together for their own benefit and the broader population enjoys little ability to influence them (a common perception, for example, in Nicaragua).

What then, can we expect from political elites? At the very least, leaders should show their commitment to the rule of law and renounce violence. This requires accepting the limits of contestation (i.e., violence is eschewed in favor of deliberation), and stating a commitment to the general “rules of the democratic game.” Leaders should accept basic laws that limit state power and acknowledge the right of all sides to compete for power. This requires more than merely stating these commitments; leaders must reaffirm them through practice, for only by doing democratic politics are these basic norms and values reinforced over time (Linz 1978).

Elites shape political culture, and through their actions and speech signal to the population what kinds of behavior are proper in democratic society.¹ Establishing the necessary norms of political engagement is possible only when important actors are unwilling to oppose the legitimacy of democratic and constitutional rule. Undoubtedly, there will almost always be spoilers and others who advocate violence; the key is to marginalize them sufficiently so that they do not represent a threat to the fledgling democratic state and the adoption of democratic norms. Crucially, then, major elites from across the political spectrum must act in ways that show respect for the rule of law and the new political order. Adopting a deliberative form of politics shows such a change in behavior. The deliberative approach, as is well-known, is centered on the communicative power of civil society—it both checks and gives legitimacy to political society discourse. Nevertheless, some of its theoretical claims are helpful here to understand how elite discourse should be framed. The core of the approach is its emphasis on public deliberation among a broad scope of actors to develop appropriate state policies. Obviously, deliberation is not endless nor “unfettered,” if by this we mean that there are no rules guiding discourse and decision making; elites in parliament operate in what Nancy Fraser (1997, 90) calls “strong publics, whose discourse encompasses both opinion formation and decision making.”² Thus, in addition to deliberation they are tasked with reaching binding conclusions, or laws. Furthermore, these actors deliberate within a set of rules (e.g., basic procedures for debating, making decisions on legislation). But the point here is more general. A new parliamentary body containing profound cleavages should adopt the basic norms of debate and openness to input from the public.³ Opponents develop new relations among one another to the extent that they are forced to give reasons for policies and laws and work to secure at least some degree of consensus on common challenges. Such a new relationship can be rather thin and instrumental, and not signal deep agreement or the disappearance of distrust. In fact, a small but important accomplishment is simply accepting terms on how to disagree with one another. Nevertheless, spirited debate can signal to the population what constitutes proper political behavior. In a parliamentary setting, elites are forced to interact with one another in the search for mutually acceptable ends, and over time and through rounds of negotiation and argument they may come to see that political success need not always be measured in zero-sum terms. Rather, the legitimacy of particular policy outcomes should be seen as a product of the durability and legitimacy of the rules or practices of debate, so that disagreement and contention occupy a prominent but not necessarily destructive role in political life. In this regard, the turn toward deliberative politics represents a major shift from a politics based on violence and coercion, that is, where rightness is equated with power.

Elites must also endeavor to reestablish, or establish for the first time, public trust in the state. At the very least, the state should have clear limitations on its power and show respect for the rights of its citizens, as well as ensure citizen access to politics through voting and holding office. Rebuilding public trust takes a great deal of time, and its success is not amenable to easy measurement. Furthermore, trust can be damaged by other events that are not directly related to human rights, such as severe corruption (Philip 2008; Reno 2008). Some of this probably is unavoidable and should be expected. Western consolidated democracies rarely enjoy deep and sustained public trust in state institutions, and it is naive to expect more from fragile, transitional societies. Rather, what we should aim for is the generation of basic social trust in the main state institutions associated with past violence, such as the police, armed forces, and the judiciary. The judiciary must be autonomous and function transparently according to basic rules of due process and security forces must remain under the control and authority of civilian leadership. Political society more generally also must show itself responsive to public will. Indeed, the rule of law aims to “lessen the risk of conferring trust, by lending assurances to expectations about how others will behave. Creating trust is thus a longstanding purpose of legal rule and institutions” (Osiel 1997, 38), which can be promoted only if elites are committed to enforcing the rule of law.

Securing the rule of law and showing a commitment to debate and democratic practice are undoubtedly important—achieving these goals constitutes a significant step away from the threat of violence. A society emerging from war or severe authoritarian rule can take some measure of confidence that these are important accomplishments, particularly when considering the alternatives. But elites can do more and should be expected to do so. More substantively, leaders should be tasked with bringing to public attention past wrongs that have remained hidden and retelling national history to incorporate these experiences. By bringing these experiences to the public, leaders can start a larger discussion about the consequences of abuses. They can also confront and resist consistent denials about the past to help the public overcome the painful and damaging silence that often follows violent histories. Without elite recognition, abuse remains a topic relegated to private discussion and solitary suffering, given little attention in schools or in the media.

Mere recognition, of course, is not enough. It is not uncommon for leaders to acknowledge violations but then treat them superficially; more is required if the justifications of perpetrators are to be interrogated, resisted, and overturned. Michael Ignatieff (1996, 113) has called the past an “argument,” that is, a narrative that is interpreted and fought over in many ways. Political leaders can contribute to these arguments by encouraging critical investigations of the past, highlighting the experiences of victims, and calling for public reflection on complicity and responsibility. This is more than simply the recognition of past wrongs in some passive sense; it highlights the need to condemn wrongs and those who committed them, and requires deeper and broader reflection on issues of responsibility and obligation toward fellow citizens. It entails a shift in how society sees itself and the obligation that citizens reflect on who is part of their moral community.

Public memory projects can begin this process of reinterpretation and reflection. These can include monuments, memorial parks, and museums that serve as signposts to give shape and contour to broader historical memory. Some authors note their importance by claiming that “people are forgetful and need their social memory bolstered by powerful mnemonic devices,” and “monuments are needed to transmit it across generations” (Savage 1994, 129). These projects are not, of course, final statements on the past, and should not be seen or used as such, though the temptations can be strong; as both moral and political devices, they are part of a larger struggle over collective memory and identity. Rather, they should be understood as encouraging citizens to reflect critically on the past, fomenting public discussion and deep moral reflection. Public memory sites not only honor victims and acknowledge their suffering but also demand a reassessment of society's obligations to its members. In this respect, then, they are critical devices, for they question what kinds of historical interpretations are normatively appropriate. But they are also symbolically laden, for they serve a ritualistic role in reconceiving society's sense of itself. This is clear in the tendency of victim memorial sites to draw our attention to how the abuses were wrongs not only against specific individuals but also against society as such. Placing victims at the center of such narratives challenges society to rethink the moral consequences of past violence, and its own responsibility for the abuse. Nevertheless, no public memory site can give a definitive, authoritative history; individuals approach the past from different perspectives and consequently draw different interpretations about its significance. Memory sites cannot determine these interpretations, as tempting as this may be, but they can situate them by providing a framework for making sense of history. In Chile, a public park and memorial was created on the site of one the military's most infamous torture centers, Villa Grimaldi, and today it serves as a physical marker of a reconceived social imaginary, offering a stark and powerful counter-memory to the triumphalist discourse of the Pinochet regime and its apologists. In Argentina, the state-backed Museo de la Memoria has functioned as a place where survivors’ myriad individual stories are connected to the larger events of the Dirty War, and the exhibit allows such personal stories to resonate with the larger public in the creation of a new history. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, incoming governments have sought to reposition victims at the center of understanding their civil wars to draw attention to the consequences of violence.

While civil society actors undoubtedly play a role in creating and shaping historical memory, elites enjoy a special status—and thus responsibility—for promoting public memory projects. In their capacity as leaders, they can mobilize state resources to create monuments and museums, thereby conferring official legitimacy to critical reflection. To be sure, remembering is neither static nor passive, and certainly cannot be commanded; individuals do not simply place preexisting memories in ready-made frameworks. Remembering is a dialectical process whereby memories influence broader understandings of the past while simultaneously shaping those broader understandings, and in this sense individuals as well as communities have complex relationships with their histories. Memory sites can play a role in these dynamics by helping question ossified historical understandings. Through these sites and public speeches, leaders help engender a morally sensitive reflection on events that still remain raw and traumatic.

Of course, memory sites do not guarantee such reflection. When used by leaders for explicitly political ends or building social solidarity with little attention to actual historical events, they can be amount to little more than an alternate, equally simplistic and problematic “monumental history,” to draw on Nietzsche's felicitous phrase (1997 66). Replacement only reifies a new “correct” interpretation, preempting reflection (Mosse 1991; Winter 1995). Memorials can introduce a new narrative that seeks interpretive closure. As discussed in Chapter 2, a critical history positions itself as interrogator of self-serving “monumental” accounts that legitimize violence. These earlier accounts are the primary historical understanding that new leaders and civil society seek to dismantle or replace through questioning their accuracy and showing how they created a framework for dehumanization while excluding some citizens from the moral order and the broader constellation of rights. The danger is that an alternative narrative may emerge whose primary function is to legitimize the new regime while doing relatively little to question the past with the necessary care and depth that is required. There is a common pattern here: Elites provide an account that bolsters their actions and beliefs through selective historical references by downplaying problematic or contradictory facts. A common version of this characterizes the previous regime as fundamentally “evil,” while the present regime represents a national rebirth (led, of course, by the new leaders).⁴ While such an approach does, in its way, deal with the past, it does so on rather convenient and strategic terms: It eschews critical appraisals in favor of simple narratives of redemption, which unsurprisingly give current elites significant symbolic capital and legitimacy for their own political projects. At their worst, these memory strategies provide little impetus for us to take on the obligation to remember, losing their proper normative content and becoming political weapons of new leaders in their ongoing struggles with their opponents and efforts to distance themselves from the past.⁵ That the needs and interests of the present help determine how we understand our history makes this danger all the clearer. Nevertheless, this danger is in some ways unavoidable, as Maurice Halbwachs (1992), the great theoretician of collective memory, reminds us. Political society's contributions to reconciliation are only part of the larger project, and thus should not be allowed to define the entire process of social reconstruction. Indeed, what becomes apparent is that political society is a necessary level for reconciliation, but is insufficient on its own.

Political Society, Consensus, and Exclusion

The difficulties surrounding memorials underscore a larger issue concerning political society. Clearly, it is desirable that leaders support peaceful, democratic deliberation and stay wedded to the rule of law. Nevertheless, elites must remain responsive to civil society, and not only to one another. Elite consensus, however, is frequently attained through exclusion; leaders achieve stability by ensuring that popular sentiments remain marginalized and contained. Elites operating in formal political publics (e.g., parliamentary bodies) must allow input from civil society, and although they are involved with state power and “cannot afford to subordinate strategic and instrumental criteria” (J. Cohen and Arato 1992, ix) of decision making to the open-ended communicative activity of civil society, they must be responsive to the latter. It is not uncommon for both previous and incoming elites to work on establishing rules of the game aimed at stability and self- interest while limiting exposure to and input from civil society. While this may lessen political violence and threats from antidemocratic forces, it can also have damaging consequences for reconciliation and democratic consolidation. The consequences of this for democracy have been discussed extensively (Linz and Stepan 1996; Menéndez- Carrión and Joignant 1999); here I want to point to a specific problem related to reconciliation: Privileging consensus may lessen sustained reflection in favor of superficial acknowledgment of past wrongs. In order to secure legitimacy of the fledgling state, political leaders agree to not look into the past too deeply, or do so only superficially. This is roughly what occurred in Uruguay, when the new leadership agreed to not interrogate past events for fear of upsetting what it considered to be a fragile political order (Barhona de Brito 2001; Weschler 1997). The result was the repression of historical inquiry (and with it, the nonrecognition of victims) in favor of future tranquility, and only relatively recently have public debates about the years of military rule become common, a pattern echoed in Spain and Mozambique. Or, alternately, elites may provide a new history that follows the redemptive narrative discussed above in reference to memorials—that is, they may emphasize the “harmonious” relations of the present by emphasizing past divisions and horrors, with little examination of the exclusions necessary to achieve the present condition.

A critical history must resist attempts at self-serving historical closure—both the narratives used to justify past violations, as well as those employed in the present to establish the legitimacy of the new state (and, by implication, the new leaders); both risk replacing real historical investigation and reflection with the strategic use of truth for political ends. Here, then, we see the danger of normatively overburdening political society. Leaders can undoubtedly help catalyze and frame debates about the past, and their participation is crucial for reconciliation; however, civil society must remain cognizant of the limitations and motivations. This is not to say, of course, that elites act only for strategic ends and are unconcerned with moral issues. Rather, it is to highlight the constraints and incentives in political society that can distort or otherwise mitigate broader moral reflection. The desire to secure legitimacy for the past or the present affects what stories are privileged in the public domain, and thus it is crucial that civil society groups monitor leaders and pressure them to confront difficult and politically uncomfortable truths.

It is vitally important, then, to not assume that elite consensus constitutes reconciliation. Civil society must be able to influence elites and encourage them to face the moral challenges of the past in an adequate manner. As David Crocker (1999) has argued, civil society actors can help raise and define the normative issues that transitional societies face. They can generate public debates about responsibility and guilt that are avoided by elites, and ensure that debate is not preemptively closed or “settled” by leaders. Furthermore, they can pressure the government for accountability for the worst abusers, recognition for victims, and reform of abusive state institutions. Civil society expands and deepens discussion about the past well beyond what elites would prefer. Thus, while leaders should be tasked with engaging histories of abuse, we should be disabused of the thought that their actions are sufficient to achieve meaningful reconciliation. Their political-strategic calculations can limit the possibility of justice and historical reflection and may result in a superficial understanding of the past.

What emerges from this discussion is that political society can contribute to reconciliation in several ways: by promoting a political ethic of deliberation and nonviolence, supporting the rule of law, and publicly raising issues about the past through debate and the creation of memory sites. In the following sections I discuss one particularly popular device: the official apology. A careful analysis of apologies can highlight the symbolic power elites have at their disposal for furthering reconciliation, but also highlight the limits of this power. This analysis also shows how a series of key political and moralaims can come together in normatively complex ways.

Official Apologies

Official apologies for past wrongdoing have become increasingly popular among elites, who see them as an ethically appropriate way of dealing with violations while establishing the grounds for a society to achieve some form of closure. Their popularity is apparent from the number of situations in which they have been employed.⁶

At the very least, an official apology publicly expresses responsibility and regret for serious wrongs, with the ultimate goal of reconstructing badly damaged relations.

In this section, I discuss several normative aspects of official apologies and provide a qualified defense of their use in transitions. While I do not provide anything like a full theory of apologies here (I do so in Verdeja 2009b), I do believe that we can make some general claims of what a normatively satisfactory apology would look like, and draw from this some contributions it can make to broader societal reconciliation.

Conceptualizing Apologies

While apologies are occasionally promoted as an important means for “moving a society forward,” they are certainly not without their detractors. Some commentators have dismissed them as an easy way to mitigate feelings of guilt while granting a sense of self-satisfaction for confessing wrongs (Bowman 1998; Leo 1997; Steel 1998; Taft 2000). Indeed, they often seem insincere, given more to the expectation that the past can be left behind painlessly rather than as an attempt at confronting the moral consequences of past violations. An apology may make us aware of mass atrocities, but certainly this is not a complete response, in itself, to such violations. Many survivors of mass violence feel that there is an almost constitutive impossibility of closure on past injustices, that is, one that can be ameliorated perhaps through truth telling, punishment, and reparations, but one that a speech act on its own cannot fully repair.

Nevertheless, neither the danger of insincerity nor their popularity should dissuade us from considering an apology's value. Victims often demand that the state not only publicly acknowledge their suffering but also accept responsibility for it. As such, apologies include elements of truth telling, victim acknowledgment, and—SO the extent that responsibility is taken—accountability. But this is not the whole extent of their value. Beyond this, apologies may signal more than mere acknowledgment of past wrongs and provide a way of envisioning a new moral relationship between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. As such, they involve a kind of deeply symbolic “ritual cleansing,” in the words of Stanley Cohen (2001, 236). This transformation is (perhaps unsurprisingly) often associated with religious language, particularly Christian language. As Cohen notes, there is a constellation of closely associated terms that appear when we speak of apologies in the context of massive atrocity: “expiation: making amends for previous sins; exorcism: expelling evil forces by invocation of the good; expurgation: purification by removing objectionable matter; the many variations of contrition, confession, atonement and repentance”(2002, 174) Echoing Cohen, Nicholas Tavuchis (1991) has shown how the imagery of transformation through atonement and purification is a powerful and suggestive one for victims and (repentant) perpetrators, for it points to the gravity of the crimes (i.e., sins) that require contrition.

In the Christian tradition in particular, the notion of apology rewritten as confession carries a central position, for it is intimately tied to the faculty of forgiveness and the creation of a new relationship between transgressor and victim. Theologian Martin Marty (1998) argues that the apology and forgiveness serve as exemplary instances of the transformative capacity of the spirit, signaling the beginning of a change in the relationship between the transgressor and the victim on the one hand, and a change in the relationship between the sinner and God on the other.⁷ Some Christian theologians have argued that such an understanding of apologies could work in the public realm, and call for a transformational notion of apology heavily based on scriptural interpretations of confession and righting of wrongs. Public leaders should fashion their apologies as a sincere confessional act that transcends the bitterness of past conflict in an effort to open a space for a new future (Johnston and Sampson 1994).

The merit of this argument is that it highlights how apologies should be something beyond the mere instrumentalism of “moving on” by requiring sincere reflection and public discussion about past actions. It requires, however, further theoretical elaboration to connect the apology to practical political challenges. Erving Goffman (1971) has offered a secularized version stripped of the more overt ontological requirements of its religious connotation. For Goffman, a proper apology contains several elements: It must express embarrassment or dismay, awareness of knowing what conduct was expected, recognition of the appropriateness of a sanction, rejection of the harm, a commitment to pursue a proper course of conduct in the future, and a commitment to do penance or offer restitution. Missing from Goffman's account is an explicit acceptance of responsibility for the wrongdoing (though it runs through all of his points), and a discussion of official apologies, a point I return to in a moment. What is important about Goffman's account is that while it avoids the deep ontological shift implied by more religious approaches, it retains the crucial normative aspects of apologies: the recognition of the dignity and moral worth of victims; a public expression of remorse and acceptance of responsibility; and a commitment to change future relationships, which may include some form of reparation.

Drawing on these points, we can begin outlining the core elements of an apology. An apology is different from an excuse, which implies the transgression was unintentional, or a justification, which admits only limited culpability by pointing to external conditions that made the violations necessary. Rather, an apology is a speech act that conveys “an expression of sorrow or regret” both to the victim, and where appropriate, to a broader audience (Scher and Darley 1997; Tavuc his 1991, 23). The wrongdoer acknowledges the legitimacy of the rule or norm that was violated, admits responsibility, and expresses genuine remorse for the harm caused to the victim by the transgression. In this respect, an apology is a type of what John Searle (1969, 20) calls “expressive speech acts,” insofar as it primarily expresses regret or sorrow for what was done. Furthermore, it signals recognition of the victim's moral claims to dignity and respect. Unwillingness to apologize for a serious wrong conveys that the victim is unworthy of such moral respect, and this could arguably be said to constitute a second wrong (i.e., that of nonrecognition). An apology may not fully restore a broken relationship, particularly one with a long history of violence and mistrust, but it does represent a type of moral redress for past actions, as Martin Golding (1984–85) has argued.⁸

A second dimension of an apology is material, or practical. An apology should include a commitment to some form of restitution or compensation that binds the speaker to some set of future actions. I call this the need for practical redress. Without a practical component, an apology amounts to little more than a hollow symbolic statement, achieving little real transformation in the status of victims. Apologies with no practical commitment to future change are problematic precisely because an apology carries with it a promise of future reform, even if only implicitly. The recognition of a past act as a transgression implies rejecting such actions in the future.

As a future-oriented component of an apology, the commitment to change behavior creates a promise. A promise, of course, can be broken; it is a normative rather than empirical constraint. It binds the actor to future behavior that ought to be followed. Nevertheless, the important point here is that the promise contained in an apology means that the apology is not fully instantiated when it is given; an apology should be understood not simply as an act but as a process including a commitment to a future relationship. Issuing an official apology is a brief act but does not exhaust the apology itself; it requires changes to ensure that the past is not repeated.

An apology, then, contains both moral and practical dimensions. It is a first step in recognizing the victim as a moral person with legitimate claims to moral respect, and furthermore implies a promise on the part of the transgressor to make some form of reparation. More generally, apologies are both past-and future-oriented; they direct our attention to a past act (or series of acts) and cast them as wrongs while also drawing our attention to the necessity of establishing a future relationship where such transgressions will not occur.

Official Apologies

An official apology acknowledges state responsibility for a serious moral wrong (or wrongs) that remains salient in current political life. As Ridwan Nyatagodien and Arthur Neal (2004, 470) state, “the [official] apology is an admission that those in positions of authority failed to act when action was necessary, and recognizes that blameworthy behavior was ignored, rewarded, or in some way excluded from normative sanction.” Additionally, it attempts to reform the relationship between the government and the population by underscoring a change in future governmental policy (Digeser 2001; Harvey 1995). While there can be numerous motives behind an official apology, it is not uncommon for (at least some) political elites to endorse apologies for moral (i.e., rather than merely political-instrumental) reasons. An official apology ought to reflect a sincere future commitment to certain norms and an acknowledgment of past injustices.

Certainly, the deep symbolism of apologies, combined with their quick and easy public dissemination, make them choice tools for political elites seeking a powerful way to respond to complex social issues. What could be easier and cheaper than apologizing? Such a risk of political manipulation remains a serious threat. Some scholars downplay their political instrumentality and prefer to theorize apologies as devices that can recast moral relations between estranged groups or individuals, and thus they play a central role in promoting reconciliation (Casarjian 1992; Couper 1998; Muller-Fahrenholz 1997; Suchocki 1994). I am hesitant to follow these thinkers, however, for the very use of apologies by elites in deeply politicized contexts requires that we identify the relation between their instrumental and moral aims, and focus on whether they can satisfy, to some extent, both moral and political demands.

As an illustration of the uses of official apologies, consider Chilean President Patricio Aylwin's apology for crimes committed by his predecessor, dictator Augusto Pinochet. In 1991, President Aylwin publicly presented the findings of Chile's official Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report and proffered an official apology in Santiago's National Stadium, where many arrests and tortures had occurred during the first weeks of military rule. He chose a location that was symbolically laden, indicating the seriousness with which the new state took the violation of rights. Speaking in his official capacity, Aylwin (1995, 171) referred to disappearances as “executions” by “agents of the state,” and forcefully condemned past violence while committing his government to the respect and defense of human rights. The fact that the president, rather than a subordinate, apologized, highlighted the importance of having a speaker with sufficient authority and symbolic stature apologize (a prerogative of elites), and also reflected a reorientation of the main values in the new Chile. Indeed, through his apology, Aylwin signaled to the public the importance of recognizing the moral worth of victims and the need to reflect on society's complicity in the violence of the past.

With this example in mind, we can identify several contributions that official apologies, and elite discourse more generally, can make to reconciliation. Most importantly, apologies publicly affirm the moral status of victims. As noted by Trudy Govier (2002), apologies focus public awareness on victims and communicate to the community the necessity of reframing moral obligations. Such reframing requires that victims be treated as political, legal, and social equals deserving recognition of their moral status. Clearly, apologies do not accomplish this on their own, and Aylwin's apology should not be measured according to this expectation. At best, they can begin a process of moral reframing and repositioning victims as equals; however, this requires sincere engagement and reflection by the community as a whole and encouragement by leaders over a long period of time (Schaap 2005). Nevertheless, drawing public attention to the moral value of victims, as Aylwin did, represents an important first step. This public affirmation of dignity and equal moral worth—of victim recognition, sin the sense that I have used the term in this book—is perhaps the most important contribution an apology can make, and highlights the importance of elite discourse in promoting reconciliation.

Second, and closely related to victim recognition, an apology raises questions about basic social norms and values, and places these in the center of public debate. Under authoritarian or genocidal regimes, harassment, abuse, massacre, and terror are officially sanctioned methods of dealing with certain minorities or political enemies, and society's basic moral grammar is rewritten to cast all opponents of the regime as “deserving” of what they get. An apology helps reframe state actions as wrongs that violate basic social norms, and thereby force a society to confront these abuses and reflect on their consequences for state-society relations and the very conception of national identity. Aylwin explicitly condemned the behavior of the state and reaffirmed the importance of human dignity and respect that had been violated by Pinochet's government. Aylwin also enjoined fellow citizens to reflect on what kind of society they want and which values they hold dear. Obviously, an official apology given by an elite cannot secure the adoption of human rights, national consensus on basic values, or reconciliation. But it can generate public debate about what those values ought to be by recasting the terms of deliberation.

Third, and less directly, an official apology can promote an alternate and critical reading of history. Melissa Nobles (2008) has convincingly shown that apologies reshape the meaning of the past by re-situating victims at the center of interpretations of history. While an apology cannot achieve such a critical reorientation on its own, it implicitly redraws the topography of historical truth, and thus redirects public attention to the importance of engaging critically with the past. Aylwin's apology sought to catalyze a discussion about how citizens understood what it means to be Chilean, and the moral obligations they may have toward fellow compatriots. This was, of course, a first step in promoting a historical reckoning, but the apology sought to contribute to a much broader debate about national identity and history.

Elite apologies, then, can perform at least three key tasks. First, they promote the restoration of victims’ sense of moral value and represent a first step at integrating them as citizens. Second, apologies can generate public reflection and debate about social norms by refocusing public discussion to their violation and requiring a new consideration of desired relations between the state and society. Third, they can make critical reinterpretations of history necessary by reframing the past and consequently undermining apologist historical accounts. These are real accomplishments, but they are obviously not the same as societal reconciliation. Much more must happen for a society to be reconciled, including commitments to accountability, the elimination of impunity, and the long-term promotion of the norms of respect and tolerance among citizens. Indeed, without real governmental policy changes, skepticism about the efficacy of apologies is appropriate. Apologies should be one part of a broader reckoning with the past.

The Illocutionary Problems Surrounding Official Apologies

While the discussion up to now has been relatively positive in its treatment of apologies, their political uses by elites raise several concerns. Trudy Govier and Wilhelm Verwoerd (2002) have helpfully identified a number of these challenges, but here I focus on a few that specifically confront official apologies. These are tied to their illocutionary status and tell us something about the elites’ role in reconciliation.

The first challenge concerns whether survivors consider the apology satisfactory. In personal scenarios, there is an individual who can choose whether to accept the apology. He or she may decide that it was inadequate—it was insincere, it minimized culpability, and so on; regardless, the individual maintains the ability to accept or reject it, and thus retains his or her moral autonomy. Contrary to Minow's (1998, 115) stricture that official apologies should allow for “a stance that grants power to the victims to accept, refuse or ignore the apology,” in an official apology there is no identifiable addressee who accepts or refuses it. Certainly, some survivors may come forth as representatives of victims, but the notion that they can accept an apology (much less grant forgiveness) for all victims is morally problematic, for it ignores those victims who may choose to reject it. The absence of an identifiable addressee with the power to accept or reject the apology means that its positive illocutionary force (i.e., the perception that it is a fait accompli) faces little challenge. I purposefully refer to the apology's illocutionary, not perlocutionary, character. While it may seem that official apologies are perlocutionary speech acts—that is, they must persuade or convince the listener and do not simply gain force from the utterance of the apology (an illocution)—the lack of an identifiable addressee means that, practically speaking, once the apology is uttered the speaker can claim that the apology was in some sense “successful” and that it was “accepted” by the victims. This is not to say that there is no perlocutionary component; rather, it is to draw our attention to the illocutionary dangers contained in this particular type of speech act. From the state's perspective, of course, this illocutionary aspect can be politically attractive. A public official can apologize and argue that the apology itself already places the nation on a course toward “reconciliation.” The impossibility of total acceptance and the space this provides for political exploitation are ineradicable, constitutive weaknesses of official apologies, at least from a normative point of view.

A second concern is that an official apology instantiates some form of forgiveness, or at any rate mitigates the ability of victims to make future legitimate grievances. Aylwin (1995, 171), for example, asked for “forgiveness from the victims’ relatives,” and many Chileans considered his apology sufficient for the state to be “forgiven” and allow society to move forward. Official apologies, then, may be construed as already bestowing an element of forgiveness on the speaker and the represented institution, such as the state or some agency of the state implicated in abuses. Citizens who were not victims may argue that an official apology is a sufficient statement of the state's acceptance of responsibility and marks at least a partial clearing of the historical slate. Thus, apologies may be seen by some as carrying a surplus of illocutionary force; not only is the apology itself instantiated when given but it may also imply some degree of forgiveness, or at least the belief that some past actions have been adequately addressed and therefore any additional demands by victims are seen as an attempt at using their position to demand irrelevant and undeserved privileges.⁹

Nevertheless, there is a legitimate counterclaim: If an official, say a prime minister or president, does in fact sincerely apologize and ask for forgiveness from victims, should there not be an obligation or at least a legitimate expectation of forgiveness? Do sincere symbolic gestures that acknowledge responsibility and seek forgiveness require, at a minimum, that victims explain why it is reasonable to continue their resentment?¹⁰ Many theoretical formulations include an assumption that forgiveness should follow a properly sincere apology, and if the apology is sincere, one could plausibly argue that forgiveness can reasonably be expected. Joanna North (1998) and Margaret Holmgren (1993) have both argued that forgiveness following an apology is not only reasonable but in fact signifies the victim's ability to recover his or her self-esteem by expressing his or her agency. As such, the conceptual formulation that connects the apology and forgiveness also includes salutary consequences, namely, the reaffirmation of the victim's sense of self-worth. The problem with such an understanding is that the apology is treated as a discrete act that is complete upon enunciation, with a clear expectation of what should follow immediately thereafter. This, it seems, ignores the apology's future or forward-looking component discussed earlier—that is, that it demands a change in future behavior by the state, and therefore represents the beginning of a process rather than a singular event. Insofar as it begins such a process, the expectation that forgiveness should immediately follow an apology is misplaced, for it implies that there has indeed been a change in relations between the state and the victims (and society, for that matter), when in fact this change remains to be seen. Perhaps another way to put it is this: Only if the state makes good on its promise to change, can forgiveness be considered an appropriate response. This change takes time and patience, but it can occur. In any case, an official apology should not be equated with closure. It points toward a commitment to change, but does not exhaust the change itself.

The first two points deal with two interrelated illocutionary pitfalls surrounding apologies: one concerning the risk that some victims will be ignored because of the theoretical inadequacy of an addressee, and the other concerning the very real possibility that an apology may include its own instantiation—forgiveness may be considered to follow the apology almost automatically. In both cases, the inability of survivors to address the apology is at stake. A third and crucial point concerns the status of the speaker who is apologizing.

Many philosophical conceptions of apologies focus on their content and formulation rather than the authority of the speaker. In Goffman's (1971) definition the status of the speaker is not addressed at any length, nor is it in Marty's (1998), except to say that the apology should be given by the person responsible for the transgression. Normally, it is assumed that the person apologizing is authorized to do so and thus the issue becomes whether the apology is properly formulated. Such approaches underplay the crucial contextual aspect of apologies that give them a large part of their symbolic power and illocutionary force. In the case of an official apology, a properly sanctioned authority (i.e., a political elite who is vested with the power to speak in the name of the state), must enunciate it. Indeed, illocutionary acts gain their symbolic power not only from the force of words but also from the status of the speaker. Consequently, an official apology is not merely a freestanding statement with internally generated legitimacy. As Pierre Bourdieu (1995, 107) has argued, “the power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson, and his [sic] speech—that is, the substance of his discourse and, inseparably, his way of speaking—is no more than a testimony, and one among others, of the guarantee of delegation which is vested in him.” An apology finds much of its power in the status of the person who gives it—in our case, the political elite who speaks on behalf of the state. The difficulty in transitional situations arises when the apology is given by a successor elite who is not responsible for ordering past crimes, but nevertheless has taken the mantle of authority to speak in the name of the state and thus apologize on the state's behalf. To be credible, the speaker must assume the position of representative of the state, a symbolic move that must resonate with the population. This is largely possible because it is the office (e.g., of the presidency, the prime minister) that is, in a certain sense, apologizing in the name of the state. The individual performs the speech act in his or her official capacity, and thus it is the state that is making symbolic amends for past crimes. Whether this is successful (i.e., whether a particular elite is judged successful in conveying the state's apology) depends not only on whether the apology is well crafted but also on whether the elite is considered a legitimately endowed speaker. This issue of authority also has consequences for the legitimacy of the new state.

Official Apologies and State Legitimacy

The consequences for state legitimacy are well illustrated in the case of Chile. When Aylwin apologized, he explicitly acknowledged the state's responsibility and apologized as president, in the process positioning himself as a uniquely endowed speaker who could acknowledge responsibility to victims, their relatives, and the population as a whole. The official apology offered a measure of acknowledgment and rehabilitation of victims. In doing so, Aylwin gave an important expression of responsibility in transitional contexts, and also provided a remarkable example of the difficulties of successor regime responsibility and the challenges of legitimacy elites face. When a successor regime expressly repudiates earlier state actions through an apology, it is both distancing itself from the previous authoritarian government and establishing a link of legitimacy to the past, insofar as its privileged position as apologizer (to coin an ugly word and avoid the ambivalence of apologist) indicates its authority to speak on issues of the past and pass judgment on state actions. Aylwin (1995, 171), in fact, explicitly spoke “as President of the Republic.” Thus, the official apology seeks to establish a continuity of state authority and responsibility while simultaneously stating its rejection of the previous government. This double movement is part of a broader effort at founding a new political order (rejection of the past) while claiming the right to do so legitimately (demanding to be recognized as the legitimate successor authority); as such, successor elites are forcefully making a claim of separation and continuity with the past, with all of the symbolic ambivalence that this entails. In this sense, it shares much with the debates over successor justice and, more broadly, constitution making in transitional settings.

Undoubtedly, apologies do not carry the weight of constitution making and successor trials, but they do highlight explicitly the tensions of both rejecting and embracing a morally compromised legitimacy. While they can symbolize a break with the past, they also underscore the normative ambiguity surrounding elite claims to legitimacy, and thus to their elite status. In order to displace this ambiguity, apologies are given in the name of the state and the authority to perform it is thereby secured. Whether this is successful in practice depends, of course, on whether the population as a whole—and survivors in particular—accept the displacement. In the case of Chile, Aylwin's apology drew public attention to past violations and helped catalyze a public debate about national identity and responsibility. Nevertheless, many victim and survivor groups considered it only a first step toward additional reparations and redress, and remained frustrated with the lack of accountability that followed his apology (Loveman and Lira 2000; Verdeja 2000).

Political society plays a particularly privileged role in reconciliation because leaders command the respect and loyalty of their followers and are thus in a unique position to shape social attitudes and beliefs. A primary contribution they can make is to underscore the importance of a peaceful politics that takes seriously contestation, debate, and the rule of law as well as the rejection of violence to solve differences. “Leaders,” Michael Ignatieff writes, “give their societies permission to say the unsayable, to think the unthinkable, to rise to gestures of reconciliation that people, individually, cannot imagine” (1998, 188). This is perhaps too strong a formulation, but he is right to note that without elite support for peace and mutual respect, these values are unlikely to take root in the broader population. The behavior of leaders marks the boundaries of democratic contestation, what is acceptable and what is not, and influences civil society and individuals alike. Elites’ expressions of remorse and their affirmation of the rights of citizens make it more likely that these issues will be taken up by fellow citizens, while creating a space for debate about responsibility, complicity, and the legacies of violence.

Such actions, nevertheless, do not guarantee transformations on other levels. While elites can help shape discourse and behavior throughout society—and, in fact, are shaped by them too—the relationship is a complex, dialectical one, as has been argued in this chapter. A more complete understanding of reconciliation is possible only if we move to other levels as well. In the following chapter, I investigate the use of two institutional mechanisms, truth commissions and trials, to promote reconciliation.