It is commonly argued that countries seeking political reconciliation should acknowledge and apologize for past wrongs. Jennifer Lind's excellent new book compares the postwar experiences of two countries that would seem to confirm this proposition. Germany, which has engaged in a thoroughgoing process of “dealing with the past,” has enjoyed a dramatic reconciliation with former enemies in Europe. By contrast, leaders in South Korea, China, and Australia continue to be dismayed by Japan's more limited and conflicted process of remembrance. Sorry States rejects conventional wisdom regarding the relationship between apologies and reconciliation in favor of a more complicated argument. Official expressions of contrition for past abuses do have a significant impact, argues Lind, yet such apologies are not essential and can undermine international reconciliation by provoking and unsettling backlash from those who remain unapologetic.

Lind's central claim is that the way a state remembers past violence influences the way that other states perceive its intentions. Contrition can demonstrate that a former adversary has repudiated policies that caused past suffering. It is also a way for a state to demonstrate that it would like to restore good relations with others. Refusal to apologize may convey indifference or disdain. For these reasons, Lind argues that Japan's denial and unapologetic remembrance of its role in World War II atrocities has been unsettling for its neighbors. However, she argues, contrition is only one of many factors that countries examine as they assess intentions. The rapprochement between France and West Germany occurred in the 1950s, when Germans were still primarily focused on their own wartime suffering. And the author rejects the view that contrition is required for reconciliation, noting that many others who fought during the World War II reconciled without any expressions of remorse whatsoever.

Lind also argues that contrition affects reconciliation by influencing domestic mobilization. Official expressions of remorse may undermine nationalist mobilization by educating people about the costs of violence or acknowledging the suffering of victims. However, official contrition can also provoke a nationalist backlash, which fuels ongoing distrust among former enemies. According to Lind, this is precisely what happened in postwar Japan. As some leaders began to acknowledge Japan's responsibility for wartime suffering, a backlash that exposed and intensified denial and revisionism in the wider society was provoked. While its neighbors may not view Japan as a major threat, such denials fuel ongoing suspicions and wariness about the future. In Germany, this kind of backlash was effectively contained. Lind argues that the Japanese experience is likely to be more common and reveals the unexpected ways that official apologies can actually undermine reconciliation.

Official apologies come in many forms, ranging from the distinctly unapologetic “mistakes were made” to Willy Brandt's dramatic Kniefal before the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. One important contribution of this book is to develop a theoretical framework that breaks down these categories in order to examine the complex and dynamic logic of political contrition. Lind distinguishes between apologetic remembrance, which admits past mistakes and expresses remorse for them, and unapologetic remembrance, which fails either to accept responsibility for wrongdoing or to express remorse. This approach provides an important corrective to the tendency, in some empirical scholarship on transitional justice, to take official expressions of remembrance at face value. Lind demonstrates how policies that ostensibly acknowledge past wrongs may operate as strategies of forgetting. Even war crimes trials, which are often assumed to be an unambiguous expression of accountability, may function to reinforce denial. The trials of Nazi personnel from Auschwitz and the Einsatzgruppen that took place in the 1960s reflected a widening acceptance of responsibility for past abuses, according to the author. However, she argues, postwar trials reinforced amnesia in Japan by emphasizing misdeeds in the Pacific war while ignoring the sex slaves of the Imperial Army and the forced conscription and labor of Koreans and Taiwanese.

Lind develops her argument by tracing processes of remembrance in Germany and Japan from the immediate aftermath of the World War II to the present. She looks at how remembrance has been institutionalized in the form of reparations, trials, commemoration, and national education. For evidence of remembrance in the wider society, she examines public opinion polls and writings of mainstream opinion leaders. She then charts responses to Japan's process of remembrance in South Korea and responses to the German process of remembrance in France. Lind supplements the primary case studies with a chapter that surveys responses to Japanese remembrance in China and Australia, and responses to West German remembrance in Britain. Throughout, she carefully analyzes the reasoning behind these responses, evaluating the significance of contrition as against other explanations for threat perception.

Ultimately, Lind recommends an approach to official remembrance that she characterizes as “negotiated memory” (p. 190). She argues that leaders should focus on shared suffering in a “nonaccusatory” way, designed to acknowledge the suffering of victims without rattling apologists. The trouble with this approach is that it is not so easy to distinguish from the unapologetic remembrance that she associates with a denial of responsibility. Moreover, it is not clear that such an approach would minimize backlashes, given that nationalists might interpret even minimal contrition as a step toward greater concessions. Nevertheless, this book makes an important contribution to policy debates by demonstrating how official contrition generates conflicting internal and external demands, which can lead to unpredictable and unintended outcomes.

Sorry States should be of great interest to scholars of threat perception in international relations, as well as to those who are interested in the power of ideas. It also makes an important contribution to debates on transitional justice by challenging common assumptions regarding the role of apologies and examining forms of remembrance that are commonly overlooked, such as textbook reform. Lind brings an impressive set of skills to this ambitious project, moving deftly from expert interpretations of speeches, memorials, and textbooks to analyses of threat perception based on changing dynamics of power and capabilities. The result is a book that is unusually well written and a fascinating read.