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The Politics of Official Apologies: An Interview with Melissa Nobles
By Khatchig Mouradian
and Melissa Nobles
ZNet
March, 22 2008
Melissa Nobles is Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT. She
holds a BA in history from Brown University and an MA and PhD in
political science from Yale University. Her research interests include
retrospective justice and the comparative study of racial and ethnic
politics. She is the author of Shades of Citizenship: Race and the
Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000) and The
Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
In this interview, conducted in her office at MIT on March 11, we
discuss why and how governments apologize - or do not apologize - for
crimes committed in their country in the past and what significance
apology - or the absence of it - can have on the descendents of the
victims and the perpetrators.
Khatchig Mouradian - How did you become interested in the politics of
official apologies?
Melissa Nobles - I became interested when, in 1998, I read an article
in the New York Times about the Canadian government's apology to
indigenous Canadians. I thought that was interesting and unusual,
because governments don't usually apologize. Then I became aware of
the Turkish government's refusal to apologize for the Armenian
genocide. That also interested me. I knew that the U.S. government had
apologized to Japanese-Americans for their internment during WWII, but
also realized that the U.S. had not apologized to Native Americans or
to African-Americans for their experiences. So my interest was both in
cases where governments did apologize and where governments did not
apologize.
K.M. - In the book, you make a distinction between apology offered by
governments and ones offered by heads of state. Why is this
distinction important?
M.N. - It is important because government apologies typically require
more actors and tend to be the result of more deliberation. The
parliament, commissions and historians are involved, so more people
are weighing in and it's more of a collective decision. Moreover,
typically government apologies have been accompanied by
reparations. Examples of such apologies and reparations are the German
government's apology and ongoing reparations to surviving Jews after
WWII and the state of Israel, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan
providing $20,000 to surviving Japanese-Americans affected by the
internment.
Apologies that come from heads of state are important, of course,
because the person giving them is either the executive or government
official, but they are not necessarily the result of deliberation, so
they are more unpredictable and don't usually come with any kind of
compensation. They tend to be more fleeting. I thought that's the
distinction that should be taken into account.
K.M. - Speaking of reparations, in the book you write, `For vulnerable
and disadvantaged groups, moral appeals are often central to political
argument and action. ... But at the same time, group members also
express skepticism about the ultimate worth of moral appeals because
although they may be essential, they are infrequently followed by
action.' Do you feel that action is necessary for apologies to have
meaning?
M.N. - I do. Note that action can be broadly or narrowly defined. We
might think about action as an apology that marks the beginnings of a
government and citizenry talking more seriously about their own
history. Action can be something not regulated by the state or there
may be a commission that recommends compensation. But what is the
least desirable is an apology that is just said and is followed by
nothing - no discussion, or any kind of deliberation or compensation -
because then, it falls flat. Action need not be synonymous with
reparations as such, but it needs to be something more than a mere
utterance, which, once said, dies.
K.M. - Have there been cases where an official apology has not been
followed by any concrete steps - a sort of `I apologize, now let's go
home'? You mention in the book how some governments have refrained
from apologizing mainly because of what might come next...
M.N. - In general, the `let's go home' apologies have been given by
heads of state. I haven't found too many cases of governments giving
apologies that haven't been followed by something. An example would be
what's going on now in Australia, where there's resistance at least to
doing something that would be directly tied to the apology. At the
same time they're saying, We are going to change Aboriginal
policy-making, we're going to take action, but we're not going to give
money to the specific victims of this particular government policy [of
forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their parent's care].
Governments are reluctant to apologize precisely because of the
concern that there are going to be demands for money. But governments
have more power; they decide what they're going to do. So while there
is a tension, I don't think it's a tension that's insurmountable. The
issue is framed by political elites. They can decide to give nothing
and they often times make this decision.
K.M. - Isn't there also some dominance relation here? After all, it's
the dominant group that is deciding what to say and what to give.
M.N. - Absolutely. This is certainly an unequal dynamic. Much of the
dissatisfaction with symbolic politics is that it points up the
relative powerlessness of the groups that are asking for apologies.
If you're in power and feel that you don't need anything from the
groups that have victimized you, you would not ask for apologies. It
is the less powerful that do. The less powerful groups have fewer
resources and rely upon moral appeals in order to get what they
want. And there's value, of course, in bringing morality to
bear. That's just the dynamic of the world in which we live.
But you're absolutely right, there is asymmetry here. The powerful can
do as little as they want and, many times, they do nothing. They
ignore them. They won't apologize. On the other hand, the group can
continue to express their dissatisfaction, and continue to demand
it. The demand - just the idea that they're being asked for it - can
be discomforting to the powerful. That may be all that the side
demanding apology can do.
K.M. - I want to bring democracy into the discussion. It would be easy
to argue that democracy should help countries face their past, but
there are some very striking examples that show that this is not the
case. For example, the United States has not apologized for slavery or
the genocide of the Native Americans. What are your thoughts on this?
M.N. - Democracy is the rule of the majority and there are inherent
disadvantages for minority groups within democracies. (Native
Americans, in this example, are less than one percent of the American
population; black Americans are 12 percent). And even though
democracies allow for an expression of desires and preferences, it
doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get what you want. It
typically means that minority groups have to get the majority on
board. That's why moral appeal is sometimes what's needed.
The majority decides whether it will pay any attention to the
minority. They can choose to ignore the minority, and, as I've said,
they oftentimes do. So what minorities have to do is try to find a way
to make the majority listen. And usually appeals to history, appeals
to the conscience are the peaceful ways that are used. There are
violent ways, of course, but those haven't been the avenues chosen by
Native Americans or African-Americans for obvious reasons.
The hope is that public discourse within democracies will force a
discussion. There's a need for a robust debate in the public arena,
which makes freedom of speech, freedom of universities and other
freedoms that democracy provides so important. Without those freedoms,
change definitely wouldn't happen.
K.M. - In the context of democracy and the minorities within that
democracy, do you feel that as long as there has been no apology, the
power asymmetry and the domination are still there?
M.N. - Yes, it's kind of unavoidable. Look at the situation of the
Native Americans. It's disgraceful and makes one despair a great
deal. It's our country's history. We don't want to talk about it, or
we barely talk about it. Even when we do talk, we certainly talk about
it incompletely. And more than that, I think many Americans thing that
the dispossession of the Native Americans was justified in some
way. They think, we certainly are not going to give anything back, we
love the U.S. now and the Native American circumstance is just the
unfortunate result of history. I think that some dimension of
domination will always be there and seems to be unavoidable. It is
also, of course, not a thing that anyone who has a conscience would
celebrate. It should cause us discomfort at the very least and I think
there is no real discussion in the U.S. about Native Americans because
of that discomfort and the implications of taking their situation
seriously.
K.M. - You have written, `Feelings of `nonresponsibility' are powerful
constraints against state support for apologies. Feelings of national
pride, derived from certain interpretations of national history, also
play a role.' What is shocking is that in each and every case that I
know of and that you mention in the book, the victimizers or their
descendents - the dominant group - deal the exact same way with the
victim group and its demands. This issue seems to cut across
civilizations.
M.N. - It is shocking. There are lots of justifications for not
feeling responsible. The most obvious is the argument that `I was not
personally responsible.' But, of course, that's a pretty easy one to
challenge. People aren't responsible for what goes well in their
countries, but they claim it, right? So it's kind of selective
claiming: `I like the constitution but I hate slavery.' Being part of
a country requires the good and bad, but it is human nature to want to
bask in the glory and then ignore the bad. Once I decide that I'm not
responsible for the act, why would I apologize for it?
Once this particular position takes hold, everything else follows and
makes apology impossible. So the point is to always try to deal with
that issue of responsibility by telling the person, `You are not
individually responsible, we get that, but somehow you are a
beneficiary of, or you benefited from, the historical circumstances in
which you were born in such a way that you must now think about making
amends.'
The challenge is to try and get people to see that they are somehow
responsible. Not that they themselves are responsible, but that
somehow they should accept responsibility, even if they were not
personally involved.
One thing the research has shown is that feelings of guilt are
determined by whether you think you are personally responsible or
not. If you recognize that your group, the group with which you are
associated, was responsible and you feel guilt about it, then you're
likely to apologize.
K.M. - How can the descendants of the victimizers argue for an
apology?
M.N. - Politicians make it such that the descendents are able to say,
`OK, this happened in the past, apologizing is the right thing to do.'
It helps to talk about the past but think about the future. So they
use the term acknowledgement without necessarily assigning
guilt. That's what Australia's Prime Minister did. He apologized to
Aboriginal Australians straightforwardly. He basically said, `We
acknowledge what happened and we are sorry.' But then he said, `Now
we're moving forward. The reason we are apologizing is to make a
better community for Australian Aboriginal peoples.' So one approach
that politicians use is not to dwell upon the past; even as they
acknowledge the past, they quickly move from it. That seems to be the
tactic that works best. If you dwell too much on the past, if there's
too much discussion about the past, then it becomes fertile ground for
those who oppose giving the apology. The idea is to always keep
looking at the big picture, and one useful big picture is the
future. I think that's the way that successful apologies are done and
politicians recognize that.
K.M. - Countless massacres and crimes against humanity have been
committed in the last two centuries alone. At some point, one might
argue that everyone has to say sorry to everyone else. Why are some
apologies more `important' than others?
M.N. - The aggrieved groups themselves must ask for it and others have
to see something in it for them. In fact, not everyone is asking for
apologies because there's a certain distrust of apology. Some people
ask, `What's that apology going to do?' They think, `They don't mean
it,' or `If I have to ask for it then it's not worth getting,' or
`They are morally bankrupt and don't even know that they should
apologize,' or `Whatever they could do for me wouldn't be worth it.'
So there are reasons why some people wouldn't even think about asking
for an apology, because they think it would be somehow tainted.
Are some apologies more important than others? I don't think there are
absolute measures. But at least in politics, it seems, the ones that
are considered worthy are the ones where the people who are giving it
stand to gain too.
K.M. - If a crime happened in the past but continues to have great
implications today and cause great distress, do you think it's more
`worthy' of being addressed? I have in mind the Native Americans,
African-Americans...
M.N. - I agree with the gist of your argument. But many would argue
that what happened in the U.S. happened. That we have found other ways
of dealing with African-American and Native American grievances, and
apology is kind of beside the point. They would say that an apology
would be so polarizing that it will do more harm than good.
In general, though, I think that if any party is going to do it, it's
the Democrats, although they haven't endorsed an apology - not even
Bill Clinton.
K.M. - What do you think about gestures by ordinary people who
apologize despite their government's reluctance to do so?
M.N. - Australia is a good example of that. When former Prime Minister
John Howard refused to apologize, he ended up inadvertently fostering
what is known as the people's movement. Australians themselves were
signing sorry books. Some critics judged it as political theatre, but
I didn't view it that way. The Australians were telling Aboriginal
Australians, `Listening to you makes me think about what happened,
makes me think about you as a neighbor that I care about. The
government can't change our attitudes. We're citizens, and we can
apologize.'
It seems to me that an official apology accompanied by real, serious
engagement by the population - as we've seen in Canada, Australia and
New Zealand, yet haven't seen here in the U.S. - makes a big
difference in the quality of life in those countries.
Khatchig Mouradian is a journalist, writer and translator, based in
Boston. He is the editor of the Armenian Weekly. He can be contacted
at: [email protected].
By Khatchig Mouradian
and Melissa Nobles
ZNet
March, 22 2008
Melissa Nobles is Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT. She
holds a BA in history from Brown University and an MA and PhD in
political science from Yale University. Her research interests include
retrospective justice and the comparative study of racial and ethnic
politics. She is the author of Shades of Citizenship: Race and the
Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000) and The
Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
In this interview, conducted in her office at MIT on March 11, we
discuss why and how governments apologize - or do not apologize - for
crimes committed in their country in the past and what significance
apology - or the absence of it - can have on the descendents of the
victims and the perpetrators.
Khatchig Mouradian - How did you become interested in the politics of
official apologies?
Melissa Nobles - I became interested when, in 1998, I read an article
in the New York Times about the Canadian government's apology to
indigenous Canadians. I thought that was interesting and unusual,
because governments don't usually apologize. Then I became aware of
the Turkish government's refusal to apologize for the Armenian
genocide. That also interested me. I knew that the U.S. government had
apologized to Japanese-Americans for their internment during WWII, but
also realized that the U.S. had not apologized to Native Americans or
to African-Americans for their experiences. So my interest was both in
cases where governments did apologize and where governments did not
apologize.
K.M. - In the book, you make a distinction between apology offered by
governments and ones offered by heads of state. Why is this
distinction important?
M.N. - It is important because government apologies typically require
more actors and tend to be the result of more deliberation. The
parliament, commissions and historians are involved, so more people
are weighing in and it's more of a collective decision. Moreover,
typically government apologies have been accompanied by
reparations. Examples of such apologies and reparations are the German
government's apology and ongoing reparations to surviving Jews after
WWII and the state of Israel, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan
providing $20,000 to surviving Japanese-Americans affected by the
internment.
Apologies that come from heads of state are important, of course,
because the person giving them is either the executive or government
official, but they are not necessarily the result of deliberation, so
they are more unpredictable and don't usually come with any kind of
compensation. They tend to be more fleeting. I thought that's the
distinction that should be taken into account.
K.M. - Speaking of reparations, in the book you write, `For vulnerable
and disadvantaged groups, moral appeals are often central to political
argument and action. ... But at the same time, group members also
express skepticism about the ultimate worth of moral appeals because
although they may be essential, they are infrequently followed by
action.' Do you feel that action is necessary for apologies to have
meaning?
M.N. - I do. Note that action can be broadly or narrowly defined. We
might think about action as an apology that marks the beginnings of a
government and citizenry talking more seriously about their own
history. Action can be something not regulated by the state or there
may be a commission that recommends compensation. But what is the
least desirable is an apology that is just said and is followed by
nothing - no discussion, or any kind of deliberation or compensation -
because then, it falls flat. Action need not be synonymous with
reparations as such, but it needs to be something more than a mere
utterance, which, once said, dies.
K.M. - Have there been cases where an official apology has not been
followed by any concrete steps - a sort of `I apologize, now let's go
home'? You mention in the book how some governments have refrained
from apologizing mainly because of what might come next...
M.N. - In general, the `let's go home' apologies have been given by
heads of state. I haven't found too many cases of governments giving
apologies that haven't been followed by something. An example would be
what's going on now in Australia, where there's resistance at least to
doing something that would be directly tied to the apology. At the
same time they're saying, We are going to change Aboriginal
policy-making, we're going to take action, but we're not going to give
money to the specific victims of this particular government policy [of
forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their parent's care].
Governments are reluctant to apologize precisely because of the
concern that there are going to be demands for money. But governments
have more power; they decide what they're going to do. So while there
is a tension, I don't think it's a tension that's insurmountable. The
issue is framed by political elites. They can decide to give nothing
and they often times make this decision.
K.M. - Isn't there also some dominance relation here? After all, it's
the dominant group that is deciding what to say and what to give.
M.N. - Absolutely. This is certainly an unequal dynamic. Much of the
dissatisfaction with symbolic politics is that it points up the
relative powerlessness of the groups that are asking for apologies.
If you're in power and feel that you don't need anything from the
groups that have victimized you, you would not ask for apologies. It
is the less powerful that do. The less powerful groups have fewer
resources and rely upon moral appeals in order to get what they
want. And there's value, of course, in bringing morality to
bear. That's just the dynamic of the world in which we live.
But you're absolutely right, there is asymmetry here. The powerful can
do as little as they want and, many times, they do nothing. They
ignore them. They won't apologize. On the other hand, the group can
continue to express their dissatisfaction, and continue to demand
it. The demand - just the idea that they're being asked for it - can
be discomforting to the powerful. That may be all that the side
demanding apology can do.
K.M. - I want to bring democracy into the discussion. It would be easy
to argue that democracy should help countries face their past, but
there are some very striking examples that show that this is not the
case. For example, the United States has not apologized for slavery or
the genocide of the Native Americans. What are your thoughts on this?
M.N. - Democracy is the rule of the majority and there are inherent
disadvantages for minority groups within democracies. (Native
Americans, in this example, are less than one percent of the American
population; black Americans are 12 percent). And even though
democracies allow for an expression of desires and preferences, it
doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get what you want. It
typically means that minority groups have to get the majority on
board. That's why moral appeal is sometimes what's needed.
The majority decides whether it will pay any attention to the
minority. They can choose to ignore the minority, and, as I've said,
they oftentimes do. So what minorities have to do is try to find a way
to make the majority listen. And usually appeals to history, appeals
to the conscience are the peaceful ways that are used. There are
violent ways, of course, but those haven't been the avenues chosen by
Native Americans or African-Americans for obvious reasons.
The hope is that public discourse within democracies will force a
discussion. There's a need for a robust debate in the public arena,
which makes freedom of speech, freedom of universities and other
freedoms that democracy provides so important. Without those freedoms,
change definitely wouldn't happen.
K.M. - In the context of democracy and the minorities within that
democracy, do you feel that as long as there has been no apology, the
power asymmetry and the domination are still there?
M.N. - Yes, it's kind of unavoidable. Look at the situation of the
Native Americans. It's disgraceful and makes one despair a great
deal. It's our country's history. We don't want to talk about it, or
we barely talk about it. Even when we do talk, we certainly talk about
it incompletely. And more than that, I think many Americans thing that
the dispossession of the Native Americans was justified in some
way. They think, we certainly are not going to give anything back, we
love the U.S. now and the Native American circumstance is just the
unfortunate result of history. I think that some dimension of
domination will always be there and seems to be unavoidable. It is
also, of course, not a thing that anyone who has a conscience would
celebrate. It should cause us discomfort at the very least and I think
there is no real discussion in the U.S. about Native Americans because
of that discomfort and the implications of taking their situation
seriously.
K.M. - You have written, `Feelings of `nonresponsibility' are powerful
constraints against state support for apologies. Feelings of national
pride, derived from certain interpretations of national history, also
play a role.' What is shocking is that in each and every case that I
know of and that you mention in the book, the victimizers or their
descendents - the dominant group - deal the exact same way with the
victim group and its demands. This issue seems to cut across
civilizations.
M.N. - It is shocking. There are lots of justifications for not
feeling responsible. The most obvious is the argument that `I was not
personally responsible.' But, of course, that's a pretty easy one to
challenge. People aren't responsible for what goes well in their
countries, but they claim it, right? So it's kind of selective
claiming: `I like the constitution but I hate slavery.' Being part of
a country requires the good and bad, but it is human nature to want to
bask in the glory and then ignore the bad. Once I decide that I'm not
responsible for the act, why would I apologize for it?
Once this particular position takes hold, everything else follows and
makes apology impossible. So the point is to always try to deal with
that issue of responsibility by telling the person, `You are not
individually responsible, we get that, but somehow you are a
beneficiary of, or you benefited from, the historical circumstances in
which you were born in such a way that you must now think about making
amends.'
The challenge is to try and get people to see that they are somehow
responsible. Not that they themselves are responsible, but that
somehow they should accept responsibility, even if they were not
personally involved.
One thing the research has shown is that feelings of guilt are
determined by whether you think you are personally responsible or
not. If you recognize that your group, the group with which you are
associated, was responsible and you feel guilt about it, then you're
likely to apologize.
K.M. - How can the descendants of the victimizers argue for an
apology?
M.N. - Politicians make it such that the descendents are able to say,
`OK, this happened in the past, apologizing is the right thing to do.'
It helps to talk about the past but think about the future. So they
use the term acknowledgement without necessarily assigning
guilt. That's what Australia's Prime Minister did. He apologized to
Aboriginal Australians straightforwardly. He basically said, `We
acknowledge what happened and we are sorry.' But then he said, `Now
we're moving forward. The reason we are apologizing is to make a
better community for Australian Aboriginal peoples.' So one approach
that politicians use is not to dwell upon the past; even as they
acknowledge the past, they quickly move from it. That seems to be the
tactic that works best. If you dwell too much on the past, if there's
too much discussion about the past, then it becomes fertile ground for
those who oppose giving the apology. The idea is to always keep
looking at the big picture, and one useful big picture is the
future. I think that's the way that successful apologies are done and
politicians recognize that.
K.M. - Countless massacres and crimes against humanity have been
committed in the last two centuries alone. At some point, one might
argue that everyone has to say sorry to everyone else. Why are some
apologies more `important' than others?
M.N. - The aggrieved groups themselves must ask for it and others have
to see something in it for them. In fact, not everyone is asking for
apologies because there's a certain distrust of apology. Some people
ask, `What's that apology going to do?' They think, `They don't mean
it,' or `If I have to ask for it then it's not worth getting,' or
`They are morally bankrupt and don't even know that they should
apologize,' or `Whatever they could do for me wouldn't be worth it.'
So there are reasons why some people wouldn't even think about asking
for an apology, because they think it would be somehow tainted.
Are some apologies more important than others? I don't think there are
absolute measures. But at least in politics, it seems, the ones that
are considered worthy are the ones where the people who are giving it
stand to gain too.
K.M. - If a crime happened in the past but continues to have great
implications today and cause great distress, do you think it's more
`worthy' of being addressed? I have in mind the Native Americans,
African-Americans...
M.N. - I agree with the gist of your argument. But many would argue
that what happened in the U.S. happened. That we have found other ways
of dealing with African-American and Native American grievances, and
apology is kind of beside the point. They would say that an apology
would be so polarizing that it will do more harm than good.
In general, though, I think that if any party is going to do it, it's
the Democrats, although they haven't endorsed an apology - not even
Bill Clinton.
K.M. - What do you think about gestures by ordinary people who
apologize despite their government's reluctance to do so?
M.N. - Australia is a good example of that. When former Prime Minister
John Howard refused to apologize, he ended up inadvertently fostering
what is known as the people's movement. Australians themselves were
signing sorry books. Some critics judged it as political theatre, but
I didn't view it that way. The Australians were telling Aboriginal
Australians, `Listening to you makes me think about what happened,
makes me think about you as a neighbor that I care about. The
government can't change our attitudes. We're citizens, and we can
apologize.'
It seems to me that an official apology accompanied by real, serious
engagement by the population - as we've seen in Canada, Australia and
New Zealand, yet haven't seen here in the U.S. - makes a big
difference in the quality of life in those countries.
Khatchig Mouradian is a journalist, writer and translator, based in
Boston. He is the editor of the Armenian Weekly. He can be contacted
at: [email protected].