Apology, a small part of justice, not a sufficient one and not even a necessary one, is still an important and positiveFootnote ¹ part of justice. Surely, there can be justice without apology. But apology, if well conducted (when taking place for the right reasons and in the right ways), can also be a significant conduit for justice. This is why the fashion for saying sorry that was referred to in a recent article published in the British magazine The Economist as the sign of what seems to be the emergence of a global culture of apology is worth noticing.Footnote ²

Indeed, while ‘public kowtows’, as The Economist puts it, are still rare compared with the manifold wrongs of the past, institutional apologies, including political apologies, have mushroomed in recent times, as the following examples taken from the past year illustrate. On 13 February 2008, the newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered a formal apology for the past wrongs inflicted by successive Australian governments upon the country's Aboriginal population. Prime Minister Rudd apologized in the Parliament to all Aborigines for laws and polices that ‘inflicted profound grief and suffering and loss’. He singled out the ‘stolen generations’, thousands of children forcibly removed from their families. A few months later, in June 2008, on the other side of the globe, it was Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's turn. He apologized on behalf of the Canadian government for a similar program initiated in the late nineteenth century that forced the removal of indigenous children from their families.Footnote ³ A few weeks later, in the United States, in July 2008, the House of Representatives passed a resolution offering the federal government's first formal apology to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States. More than 140 years after slavery was abolished, the apology mentioned the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under formal segregation laws known as ‘Jim Crow’ laws.Footnote ⁴ This came after the US Senate had apologized, in February 2008, for atrocities committed against Native Americans.Footnote ⁵ Finally, in late August 2008, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi apologized to Libya for damage inflicted by Italy during the Colonial era and signed a five-billion-dollar investment deal by way of compensation.Footnote ⁶

These most recent apologies are only the latest examples of a trend that has become an increasingly significant phenomenon in our political culture over the past 20 years, both nationally and internationally.Footnote ⁷ This phenomenon is all the more significant considering that the expectations put upon apology, as well as the stakes involved, are high. Indeed, acknowledging a wrong, admitting guilt, taking responsibility, recognizing somebody's inflicted suffering, but also seeking to reverse victimization, re-establish trust, empower the powerless, and end cycles of resentment and retribution, are some of the key aspects of the dynamics of apology. This complexity certainly explains how apology has become an important signpost of national and international politics, as a device to recognize past wrongs and attempt to amend them.

Against this background, this article touches the five following points. First, placing apology within the context of international modern history, it indicates why it has become a notable political and social phenomenon in our day and age. Second, it examines the paradoxes that are at very core of the process of apology and which give meaning to apology but also make the very possibility of apologizing quite challenging. Third, the article shows how these paradoxes are all the more intriguing in light of what apology, especially apology in a political context, aims to accomplish. Fourth, it analyses some of the political challenges and trappings of apology. Fifth, and finally, it touches upon what the phenomenon of apology tells us about our contemporary political culture.

1. The turn to apology in the international political landscape of the late twentieth century

Putting the phenomenon of apology in its historical context helps to understand its current importance. In this regard, the changes that have taken place in recent decades concerning the need to apologize build upon an evolution that started with the internationalization of democratic values. Eventually, this led to the use of this internationalization to politically and normatively denounce mass crimes. In the process, this evolution brought a number of countries to recognize the injustices that they had committed in the distant and not so-distant past and to apologize for them.

The importance of apology goes back far in history. Issuing an apology is a mechanism which, in one form or another, is closely associated with social interactions among human beings and the attempt to preserve them.Footnote ⁸ As a way to acknowledge that someone has been wronged, the act of apology has been called upon throughout history to help rectify the line of communication and civility among actors. This being said, modern democratic values, by putting human rights front and center, initiated a dynamic that contributed greatly to underlining the importance of apology and making it a notable political phenomenon of our time. This happened in connection with two major characteristics of democratic values in particular: the sense of universality and sameness (implying inclusiveness) among people, whoever they are and wherever they come from; and the idea of the betterment of people's condition. As the philosopher Philip Allot argues in his book Eunomia,Footnote ⁹ these highly inspirational characteristics have been decisive in encouraging individuals to embrace democracy and ensure its spread, internally and then internationally. In conjunction, these characteristics have made the violations of the human rights associated with them unacceptable, calling for punishment. In time this has favored a need for atonement, including apology, for the crimes committed by states.

However we should add here that the internationalization of democratic values must not be interpreted as a positive process through-and-through. For it is only one side of the constant oscillation between predation and humanism of the relationship of the West with the rest of the world during the past five centuries or so. For example, if democratic values and their diffusion have contributed, based on a sense of universal sameness despite cultural differences, to the establishment of a human rights culture worldwide, these same values have also been frequently called upon in self-serving ways by Western countries to expand their influence and power around the globe. It is therefore essential not to lose sight of the Janus-face of Western democratic values, if only for the sake of historical accuracy. From this perspective, as long as we do so, there is no harm in recognizing their positive impact on the rise of a culture of political apology, be it within or beyond borders, among Western actors, non-Western actors, or Western and non-Western actors.Footnote ¹⁰ There is no harm, also, in recognizing that the special currency that political apologies have gained in the past 25 five years is the latest illustration of this development.

To be sure, the first state apology that was offered in the twentieth century had not much to do with democratic rights and values. Issued by a begrudging Germany following the signature of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, the German apology was coupled with an acceptance of responsibility and enormous reparations demands forced upon her by the victorious powers. As such, it was a reluctant apology and not one expressing a real sense of guilt or remorse. Following World War II, this time the apology that Germany eventually offered was linked with the violations of human rights it had inflicted on millions of people, especially the Jews. The horrific nature of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime throughout the European continent during World War II and the establishment of the categories of crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity in the context of the Nuremberg trials left Germany with little choice.Footnote ¹¹ This is not to say however that apologizing was something that came easily to Germany. In fact, it took a long time for an apology, let alone a sincere one, to take place. It took a long time for Germany to emotionally recognize that it had committed crimes against humanity.

Indeed, with regard to the Holocaust, during the period 1945–1951, both Germany and Israel were silent about the past. Jews were waiting for the silence to end. They were waiting for a gesture of atonement. The first gesture came in 1951, with the German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, speaking before the Bundestag on 27 September. He indicated that the ‘great majority of the German people are aware of the immeasurable suffering that was brought upon the Jews in Germany and the occupied territories during the time of National Socialism’ and offered to ‘bring about a solution of the material indemnity problem, thus easing the way to the spiritual settlement of infinite suffering’.Footnote ¹² However, if Adenauer's declaration was an account of sorrow, it was not really an admission of guilt and moral responsibility, or a meaningful appeal for forgiveness.Footnote ¹³ This echoed the fact that all the way to the 1970s there was little public discussion of the Holocaust and more or less no feeling of responsibility among most German people for the atrocities that occurred. It was only in the 1980s that the issue started to make real headway in German public consciousness. In this perspective, the image of the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, falling to his knees in December 1970 at the site of the Warsaw ghetto to express the guilt, sorrow, and responsibility of Germany for the Holocaust, certainly served as a trigger. On 8 May 1985, during his speech commemorating Germany's fourtieth anniversary of defeat, Richard von Weizsäcker, then President of West Germany, offered another apology for the country's former Nazi regime. For many, this apology trumped even Willy Brandt's famous kniefall 15 years earlier. More than 20 years later, the words of Germany's current chancellor, Angela Merkel, during her visit to Israel at the end of January 2006, saying that the German people are ‘full of shame for what happened’ and ‘I am sorry that only a few righteous people were in Germany at that time’ seem to indicate that a gradual process of internalization of responsibility for the past has been taking place in Germany.

Beginning with Nuremberg, the adoption of various international legal instruments dealing with human rights after the end of World War II established the threshold of intolerance for human rights violations, preparing the normative ground for the development of contemporary political apology. By entrenching respect for human rights as a routine benchmark of legitimate governance, such instruments opened the gate to the condemnation of present, but also past violations. This came to be all the more the case considering that, in conjunction with this normative evolution, pressure mounted on political institutions starting in the 1970s, as victims, families, or representatives of victims called upon the norms of human rights to challenge states both nationally and internationally. The fact that throughout the 1980s a number of states shifted from dictatorship, in which basic liberties were regularly violated, to democratic government, only heightened this pressure. In this regard, Latin America is often identified as the region setting the precedent.

With these changes came the recognition of the scope and range of the ethical, legal and political challenges of transition from dictatorship to democracy,Footnote ¹⁴ but also the need for states in general to adopt a more self-critical attitude for their wrongdoings. With the problem of impunity becoming more and more of an issue, the imperative to somehow come to terms with past violations committed nationally and internationally gradually mounted. To the point that in the last two decades of the twentieth century, states and the international community began to invest more time and effort into developing mechanisms with which to better address abusive and criminal pasts.Footnote ¹⁵ The multiplication of formal political apologies emerged as a central mechanism of these efforts. Consequently, apology, a phenomenon that was relatively rare and exceptional in national and international politics up to the 1970s, increased rapidly towards the end of the twentieth century and in the early years of the twenty-first century.

2. The philosophical paradoxes of apology

The newly found importance of political apology is all the more intriguing to note considering the paradoxes which lie at the core of the dynamics of and the need for apology, and the challenges that these paradoxes generate. Three of these paradoxes are particularly significant. The first one has to do with time. The second one is related to what can be called the question of the ‘unforgivable’. And the third one concerns the ambiguous relationship between apology and law.

When it comes to temporality, we all experience in our life the fact that the main stages of time, that is the past, the present, and the future, are each in their own way elusive and that it is not easy to find continuity, which partly signifies meaning, among them. What is past by definition is past forever and will never come back. The past may be retrieved to a certain extent via memory but never exactly how we experienced it when we lived it. Our consciousness of the present is as impalpable as the one of the past since it is always in the danger of being pushed back into the past, or absorbed into the future. Being intellectually and existentially present in the present, so to speak, is a particularly difficult task. As for the future, it is marked by a sense of uncertainty and by the constant human quest to control the unknowns about what life has in store. Ultimately, from this intangible dimension of each of the stages of time, it is not rare to hear claims that the link between them is equally immaterial, in fact unreal. Hence, the notion of discontinuity which is referred to as a way to claim that there is more a succession of separate entities of temporality than solidarity among the past, present, and future.

Interestingly, although not surprisingly, it happens that those, both individuals and collectivities, who are eager to evade accountability for past wrongs are prone to value the elusiveness of each of the stages of time and the seeming discontinuity among them. They tend to call upon them to reject accountability and the need for and possibility of apology. In this regard, their constant refrain in connection with time is twofold. First, reality and its temporal character leave us unclear about what has happened and what has not happened. It makes us never entirely sure of what has been done and what has not been done, of what is true and untrue. Second, assuming that we can sort out facts from fiction as they unfold in time, the existing separation between the stages of time makes all this quite irrelevant. We hear from this side of the fence that the past is the past, has little or even nothing to do with the present and the future, and that it is therefore best to simply leave it behind, where it has always been and where it will always be.

In contrast, the idea that apology is possible and needed rests both upon the assumption that we can know what has happened and that this matters, as well as upon a unified conception of time. Regardless of when something takes place, it is possible to acquire at least basic clarity on it, including on the person responsible for what has happened. In addition, the past and the present are connected in the sense that the past continues in and has a bearing on the present. In the process, it also shapes the future. The ability to find out what takes place and the unified conception of time are all the more important considering that a sense of historical continuity is key for the assignment of responsibility and, consequently, the possibility of apology. This is less of an issue when the author of a wrong is still alive. The link between the crime and its perpetrator is relatively easy to establish. But it is of utmost importance regarding apologies for wrongs committed in the distant past, tens or hundreds of years ago, long after the individuals who were in power are gone. For as a way to break the chain of responsibility, insisting upon the gap between, for example, the state and its past identity which led it to commit atrocities, and its present characteristics, is commonly used as a shelter from accountability.

Incidentally, the recognition of the need to come to terms with the past is, in a way, an implicit indication that human rights extend over time, presenting some sort of a-temporality. In this regard, of course, our understanding of what is right and what is not, and, consequently, what is a violation of a right and what is not, also evolves over time. For instance, what is conceived as a wrong today may not have been conceived as a wrong yesterday. Nevertheless, by asking for accountability for wrongs committed at times very far in the past, the mechanism of apology acknowledges and gives a connotation of a-temporality to the idea of what is right in key areas of human rights. Thus, the retroactivity of justice claims. This somewhat a-temporality of right is confirmed by the fact that past violations can continue to structure the present and future of individual and collective actors in traumatic ways. This is further confirmed by the fact that the more the violations that have occurred are denied, the more the past becomes a lingering presence and haunts the present, with the pathologies that come with it.Footnote ¹⁶

A second intriguing aspect of issuing an apology in a political context is its relationship with what can be called the ‘unforgivable’. Since World War II quite a bit has been written on the question of the ‘unforgivable’, particularly in the context of Holocaust studies. But given the importance of this issue, it is worthwhile to briefly revisit the main arguments surrounding this question.

The concept of ‘unforgivable’ ultimately begins with the idea that not all wrongs are equal. Some are more serious than others. Against this background, the level of difficulty of apology, that is to say of issuing an apology or of accepting it, varies with the degree of gravity of the wrong. The less serious the wrong, the easier it is for an apology to be successful. It is relatively straightforward for the wrongdoer to issue it, and for the one receiving it to accept it. On the other hand, the greater the wrong, the more difficult the apology becomes. But it is also this growing difficulty which triggers an increase in value for an apology. For the value of apology grows with the extent of the wrong.

Yet, this situation introduces the paradoxical character of the relationship between apology and the unforgivable. If the value of issuing an apology or of accepting it is destined to be lower when the wrong committed is relatively benign (in this circumstance, it is rather painless to apologize and to forgive), the situation is entirely different when the wrong is enormous. It makes the apology priceless. Its value has grown proportionally with the extent of the crime. As Jacques Derrida puts it, the value of apology is at the highest when the challenge is at the highest, when it is confronted with the impossible, with the impossible tasks of issuing or accepting an apology for an unforgivable wrong.Footnote ¹⁷ As such, the more valuable the apology because the more serious the wrong, the more difficult it becomes to issue or to accept the apology. While the gravity of the wrong gives apology its high value, it also makes it extremely challenging to perform and succeed.

Hence, we are left with the following predicament: it is when an unforgivable crime has been committed that an apology has the greatest value. Nevertheless, it is also in this situation that issuing an apology, for the perpetrator, and accepting an apology, for the victim, are the most difficult. In this regard, crimes against humanity represent the ultimate ‘unforgivable’.

Crimes against humanity are indeed unlike any other crime, homicide included. They are crimes that go beyond hurting an individual person. The unforgivable nature of crimes against humanity is not simply that they go against the identification of human dignity, with respect for fundamental human rights, rather they attack and deny targeted people the right and even the essence of being human.Footnote ¹⁸ They challenge the very humanity of being human. It is for this reason, more than any other, that crimes against humanity, a notion introduced in the Statute of the Tribunal of Nuremberg in 1945, have become a major dimension of international justice, and apologies related to them have played a particularly significant part in the contemporary use of political apology. It is in relationship to these crimes that German and also Japanese, French,Footnote ¹⁹ and Catholic leadersFootnote ²⁰ have ended up issuing apologies.

However, if the horrific nature of crimes against humanity has made these apologies more than welcome, it is also making them problematic, somehow threatening the possibility of their meaningfulness at a time when they are most needed. We can see this in three ways.

First, when it comes to the perpetrator, is it possible – is it even decent – to issue an apology for crimes against humanity? Indeed, crimes against humanity define the outer limit of evil. As such, they set their perpetrators apart from the realm of humanity. So, one could argue that the sheer inhumanity of the crime, the dark transcendence of humanity by such crimes makes the issuing of an apology by the perpetrator somewhat absurd, if not obscene. For example, what would have been the value and the meaning of an apology coming from Hitler for the crimes he instigated? For an apology, regardless of whether or not it is accepted, presupposes that the one who issues it is not entirely disconnected from the person towards whom the apology is directed, from his/her humanity. In addition, it seeks to help the perpetrator to reintegrate, if only in the margins, into the human community as well as into this humanity that he/she has lost by committing the crimes. Also, if the crimes committed make the victim more than anybody else a preeminent member of the human community, especially as someone to whom the greatest injustice has been committed and to whom therefore the greatest justice is owed,Footnote ²¹ should it not have the opposite effect on the perpetrator? Does not it remove in a fundamental manner the perpetrator from the human experience and by and large forecloses his/her right to be part of it again? After all, when the crime has been so grave that it defies human dignity beyond belief, it is far from sure that an apology from the perpetrator brings relief to the victim. In addition, assuming that apology brings relief to the victim, it is not sure that the relief can ever be substantial enough to justify the moral and psychological comfort that apologizing may bring to the perpetrator. In other words, is the perpetrator entitled to the relief he/she might get from the apology?

The challenge of apology in the context of the unforgivable is equally difficult on the side of the victim. Although it falls upon the victims to accept the apology, to forgive, this is based on an assumption that is rarely met after crimes against humanity. The assumption is that the victims are in the position to forgive the unforgivable. Yet, what partly makes the unforgivable unable to be forgiven is that it is merciless for the victims. Most of the time it prevents the victims from receiving and accepting the apology, and this is for two reasons: either because the victims are dead and, consequently, not physically able to forgive, or because the crime, by annihilating the human capacity of those who survived to feel empathy for the perpetrator, puts forgiveness beyond human reach. One might think a third party could be called upon to represent the victims and act on their behalf. But the fact of the matter is that no third party has stricto sensu the right to forgive. Take the example of a woman testifying in front of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission about her husband's torture and assassination by policemen in South Africa during apartheid.Footnote ²² As Archbishop Desmond Tutu recalls in one of his books, this woman made clear that no commission or government could forgive on her behalf. In her words, ‘Only I, eventually could do it. And I am not ready to forgive or for forgiveness.’Footnote ²³

A third way in which the unforgivable character of the crime threatens the possibility and meaning of apology is more political. To begin with, the unforgivable character of such a crime tends to exceed what politics can offer. Indeed, when political leaders decide to follow the apology and reconciliation route, this route often calls for negotiation. And trade-offs are the price that negotiation entails. This happened in South Africa, as the granting of amnesty through the process of reconciliation showed.Footnote ²⁴ South African victims had to forsake the punishment of the perpetrators to receive the benefits of an apology. This probably avoided more violence unfolding in South Africa. Also it is likely that this would not have been possible without the spiritual character of President Nelson Mandela and the forgiveness he offered to South African perpetrators.Footnote ²⁵ Yet one can wonder whether or not this was a fair deal for the victims.

But the way in which the unforgivable serves as an impediment for the possibility and meaning of apology in a political environment does not stop here. A second difficulty is the dependency of apology upon power. Regardless of what it achieves, apology is part of an agenda of reconciliation that requires a sovereign force – a sovereign force which has the authority to decide that an apology is needed and has the resources to pursue it. This is parallel to the fact that for the acknowledgment that a crime has been committed and that punishment is to take place, the backing of power is necessary. The problem is that such power is not easy to find and mobilize, and when it is found it is not foreign to self-serving and self-interested preoccupations.

This cannot come as a surprise considering that enrolling power in the service of justice presupposes reversing a long duration of history in the context of which the power to abuse has frequently led to the abuse of power. As putting power in the service of justice tends to amount to the indictment of established powers, there is much reluctance to do so. A case in point is how long it is taking countries to recognize and apologize for past wrongs. Another case in point is how countries continue to be reluctant to make amends. For all the recent apologies, many are still outstanding. The refusal of the United Kingdom, in the context of the United Nations conference against racism in early September 2001 in Durban, to have the European Union issuing a straightforward apology for the transatlantic slave trade is one such example.Footnote ²⁶ Another example is the fact that Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain,Footnote ²⁷ and Russia may think that they have got over their imperial past,Footnote ²⁸ but their former colonies do not, showing that victims (and their descendants) have longer memories than perpetrators. With this, not only do we see that it is difficult to have power supporting the possibility of apology even in the case of crimes against humanity, but it also becomes clear that power is eager to evade accountability and, if possible, manipulate apology to its advantage.

A third paradox of apology has to do with the relationship between apology and law. In this regard, apology is less than law, inferior, so to speak, to what law is and can do. Surely, there are many instances in the context of which the exercise of justice (for example, sentencing) envisions that the perpetrator of a crime should issue an apology to the victim, or to the family of the victim. But, very often, especially in a political context, an apology is asked for by the victims, and issued by the perpetrator, because law is not an option due to certain realities that make it impossible to prosecute people.

The South African transition and its handling of apartheid in the 1990s is a good illustration of this state of affairs. There, the scope of apartheid that structured the whole South African society, and the relations of force among South African white and black communities, made it impossible to disregard or prosecute the entire white community. Moreover, the future of the country depended partly on this white community continuing to play, at least in the initial years of the transition, a significant economic role. All this called for a compromise. As a consequence, perpetrators were not prosecuted in South Africa, as long as they were willing to apologize. Since punishment was beyond the reach of law, apology emerged as a second best, so to speak.Footnote ²⁹

Nevertheless, while, on the one hand apology is less than law because, for practical reasons, law is unable to implement a system of justice, on the other hand apology is more than law. For if it can be argued that while law is first and foremost about sanction, apology goes beyond this. Apology, to a large extent, is about human reparation or reconciliation. In this regard, compared to apology, the impact of law is quite limited. The sanction brought by law helps to repair but can only go so far. A third party system, which is what a system of law dedicated to justice is,Footnote ³⁰ does not possess the right to forgive on behalf of someone else. As we have alluded to earlier, it is the victim, and only the victim, who can decide whether or not he/she wants to or can forgive. In other words, a legal system of justice can punish, but it cannot forgive. Apology cannot punish, but it can open the road to forgiveness.

3. The principal aims of apology

These paradoxes and the challenges they represent for apology are all the more intriguing considering the importance of what apology tries to accomplish. From this perspective, before we examine what apology aims at achieving through its envisioned benefits at the personal and social levels, some clarification is needed on the notion of apology itself.

At the most basic level, apology is a written or spoken expression of regret, sorrow, and remorse for having wronged, insulted, failed, and/or injured another.Footnote ³¹ It is also an act that implies a relationship between the wrongdoer (who is the issuer of the apology) and someone who has been wronged (the victim, who is the receiver).

As such, apologizing begins with the willingness of the wrongdoer to acknowledge his/her responsibility and ask for forgiveness. Through a confession and expression of remorse, the apology of the issuer is conveying a fourfold message. First, it is about recognizing the reality and validity of the pain inflicted upon the other. Second, it is about acknowledging, in his/her own eyes as well as in those of others, responsibility for wrongdoing. This directs the apology of the issuer to the past, which is somewhat in contrast with the two other aspects of issuing an apology, geared more towards the future. Indeed, third, the apology of the issuer is about promising that the wrong and the pain associated with it will not be repeated in the future. Fourth, the apology is meant to open the possibilty for the victim to forgive.

For the offering of apology on the part of the wrongdoer to have a real value, it is essential that the remorse conveyed be sincere and genuine. In itself, this somehow requires a sense of guilt, that is the acute feeling and consciousness of having wronged someone. As Karl Jaspers indicates in his study on German guilt following the Holocaust, guilt unfolds at various levels. Although these are intimately related, they are also different. For Jaspers, guilt takes the forms of criminal guilt (established by the occurrence of violations of rights), political guilt (refering to criminal actions conducted by political leaders in the name of the state), moral guilt (based on the fact that acts are ultimately the products of individuals morally responsible for these), and metaphysical guilt (expressing the betrayal of the sense of solidarity existing between all fellow human beings and making each of us co-responsible for any injustice brought upon them).Footnote ³² While criminal and political guilt are meant to be treated with external tools, namely legally imposed punishment and political accountability, what Karl Jaspers identifies as moral and metaphysical guilt has to be dealt with first and foremost from the inside. Here, following self-assessment and self-understanding, it is penance and humility which can bring renewal.Footnote ³³

If the issuer of the apology is important, even more important is the receiver of the apology. Although apology calls for someone to issue it, unless the individual to whom it is directed is willing to accept it, is willing to receive it, apology remains incomplete – a message that fails to reach its addressee, its destination. But provided that the person to whom the apology is offered opens him/herself to it, it allows a public recognition that a wrong has been done to him/her.

All this shows the importance, in the issuing and acceptance of apology, of the relationship between the one who offers the apology and the one who is in a position to receive it. This is to say that an apology is an interactive act that depends upon the relationship between the issuer and the receiver, one asking for forgiveness while making a promise, the other receiving the offering and, if not forgiving, at least being open to trying to forgive.Footnote ³⁴ This parallels the fact that it takes two to experience a wrong, with one committing it and one suffering from it. In this context, the relationship between the issuer and the receiver of the apology serves as a reenaction of the past, but this time as a way to come to terms with the wrong which has been committed. Ultimately, it is from the positive outcome of this relationship, with the issuer genuinely apologizing and the receiver being as much as possible willing to accept it, that the benefits of the apology can be drawn.

In specific terms, what exactly are these benefits? They concern both personal and social benefits. While they are difficult to dissociate in reality since they work hand in hand, for sake of clarity we will address them here separately.

Regarding the benefits of apology on the personal level, it is helpful to distinguish the inter-personal and the intra-personal aspects.

The inter-personal benefits, from people to people, come down to the following. When apology goes forward successfully, that is to say when the perpetrator offers an apology in good faith, and the victim, or the family of the victim, accepts it, the relationship between the wrongdoer and the victim is improved. This is to say that an apology tries to open a dialogue between the two in order to give way to some sort of accommodation. In this regard, the experience of sharing an apology, assuming that the wrongdoer is sincere in apologizing, contributes to ease the antogonistic feelings on the part of the victim. Moreover, by helping to make sense of the wrong, an apology is part of an explanatory scheme that introduces a form of mutual understanding. In the best scenario, the deflation of tension between the wrongdoer and the victim eases the sense of distrust, especially on the part of the victim, if not leading to some mutual trust between the wrongdoer and the victim.

However, this certainly does not mean that the inter-personal relationship will be all well. As far as the victim is concerned, pain (psychological and/or physical) may persist, allowing resentment towards the wrongdoer to remain and be likely to surface on occasions. As for the issuer of the apology, the fact that his/her apology is accepted, while reducing the sense of guilt, does not (and should not) eliminate it, particularly if the apology is genuine. A sense of awkwardness is therefore prone to be a permanent feature of the relationship. To the extent that at times, despite a successful apology, keeping one's distance may be the most acceptable for the issuer and the receiver of the apology.

This being said, while successful apologies are about reconciling to some extent the wrongdoer and the victim with one another, they are also and arguably more than anything else about reconciling with oneself. In fact, it seems that the reconciliation with one another that apology achieves is destined to remain tentative, unconcluded and unconclusive, without a reconciliation with oneself. As such, apology is a form of intra-personal accomodation. It is about accomodation with oneself. It is about self-acceptance. In other words, successful apologies are, crucially, about inner benefits – and inner, or intra-personal benefits both for the victim and the perpetrator.

This does not mean that at the intra-personal level, like at the inter-personal level, a successful apology has the power to turn back the clock and make as if nothing had ever happened. Once the wrong has taken place, a state of innocence has been lost. Even the best of apologies cannot change this. Yet the dynamic of apology is an opportunity to heal the wound, at least partially, and regain presence for oneself. The benefit attached to this change is not to be underestimated. It is both for the wrongdoer and the victim an opportunity to connect better with oneself, and therefore one another and reality in general, which is offered. In this perspective, apology can enable the wrongdoer and the victim to break away from the sense of isolation, from the self-centeredness into which the wrong tends to throw them. It can allow them to cease being the captive, each in their own way, of the crime committed.

More specifically, for the victim, the intra-personal benefits of a successful apology, amounting to coping with the pain inflicted, are threefold.

First, in accepting the apology, the victim helps him/herself to accept the person that s/he has become now, with a post-crime identity. Sadly, this is not an easy goal, for victimization often goes so deep and is so painful that the victim becomes blind not only to the violation inflicted but also to themselves as a post-wrong person.

Second, the intra-personal benefits are prone to help in addressing the possible feeling of guilt that the victim may have. By assigning the origin of the crime to the wrongdoer, it gives the victim the possibility to release him/herself from the guilt, and shame, s/he may have regarding what happened to him/her and that society all too often teaches him/her to have.Footnote ³⁵

Third, by transfering the responsibility for the wrong from the victim to the wrongdoer, i.e. by connecting the wrong to its author, apology has an empowering effect. To begin with, there is the identification of the actor responsible for the wrong and the trauma brought about. Putting a face and a name to the author of the crime contributes to engineering and validating a sense of victimhood that is not directed against oneself, that is to say not self-destructive. In addition, from being on the receiving end of the wrong, the victim is now in a somewhat commanding position. The fate of the apology, and of the one issuing the apology, depends upon the victim's willingness to accept the apology or not. In the process, the tables of power are being turned around. In contrast with when the victim was and felt powerless vis-à-vis the perpetrator, the victim has now a say on the fate of the perpetrator. How s/he will live with and relate to his/her crime depends partly on whether or not the victim will accept the apology. For the victim, this does not lead to forgetting the past. But it provides them with the opportunity to reduce the paralyzing effect of the sense of psychological and physical insecurity associated with the trauma, giving them a better chance to reappropriate themselves and enable them to move on.

As for the inner benefits that apology brings to the wrongdoer, they fall under three main categories.

First, by offering psychological relief to the victim, apology brings about psychological relief to the wrongdoer as well. It releases them from some of their guilt. As such, despite the continuation of a sense of guilt, that is if s/he is sincerely aware of the wrong s/he has done, the wrongdoer is less likely to be consumed by it. This is all the more the case considering that apology, by giving publicity to the wrongdoing and its acknowledgement by the wrongdoer, allows for the experience to be shared with others. This sharing lightens the burden of the perpretrator. Somehow the publicity lifts the weight of having to carry the wrong alone, in the secret and solitude of the inner conscience.

Second, the reassurance that the apology offers to the victim is also a reassurance for the wrongdoer. As much as it is the case for the victim, to a certain extent apology frees the wrongdoer from the past. It gives them the possibility of a new beginning, of a new beginning which is not entirely new, yet new enough to be cleansed from the darkest aspect of the past.

Thirdly, the acceptance of the apology provides a security benefit to the wrongdoer. Reducing the level of resentment in the victim and in principle containing the promise of non-retribution, an accepted apology contributes to reduce or even eliminate the desire for revenge directed against the wrongdoer. Apology becomes for the wrongdoer part of a justice process which contributes to his/her psychological security and physical safety for the future.

If apology is important at the personal level, it is equally significant from a social point of view. This does not come as a surprise considering that the inter- and intra-personal levels are in themselves social, made of and part of the various webs of social relations that constitute a community, its members and their relations. Furthermore they constitute two essential pillars of the functioning of society, of the extent to which this functioning is healthy or pathological. Against this background, the social benefits, the healthy social benefits, from a successful apology are threefold. They help society to free itself from the past, to pacify its present, and to secure its future.

Similar to the fact that apology helps the victim and the wrongdoer not to be exclusively defined by the roles and identities imposed upon them by the wrong committed, an apology contributes to liberating a social environment from its criminal past, and thus for it to be left behind as much as possible. Short of this, the social environment remains a captive of past wrongs, possibly condemned to repeat the errors of the past without progress, without ever going beyond the original traumatic events. Contentious views on the past remain central and make it impossible to forget. Victims are all the more unwilling and unable to let go of the reality of the wrong. As for the perpetrator, what s/he would want to forget and claim never happened is constantly brought up by those, including the victims, who will not allow the past to fade away without it first being acknowledged.

In the context of a past which does not pass − therefore, of an ‘ever-present past’Footnote ³⁶ − the social needs of ensuring that the past does not constitute only a source of trauma are best seen with regard to the present and future of society.

The positive impact that coming to terms with the past through apology can have on the present for a society is in helping to prevent it from being essentially pathologicaly structured. This has a pacifying effect in two main ways: first, it makes it possible for the victim and the wrongdoer, and for society as a whole, not to evolve strictly within the antagonism assigned to them by the wrong. Second, by trying to remove the alienation from the traumatic past, it sends society at large a message of reconciliation. It encourages wrongdoers and victims to learn how to live with each other, to be part of the same society, and invites society to find alternatives to that of open conflict.

From this perspective, we can see how the benefits regarding the past and the present translate into social benefits for the future. The most important of these is arguably to prevent the respective identities and roles of the wrongdoer and the victim from merging into a new identity, from achieving a state of fusion leading to a victim/perpetrator identity. This is particularly important because in this new identity, the victim mentality dimension tends to dominate and allows the actor to commit wrongs without seeing themselves as a perpetrator. As such, it is not difficult to guess that preventing this from happening, destined to have a positive impact, is essential for the social environment.

A successful apology provides the victim with the option of avoiding becoming a perpetrator in turn. It helps a victim to not feel that his/her wound has not been addressed. As a result, it keeps him/her away from the risk of experiencing resentment, hatred of him/herself and hatred of others. This is an extremely significant matter since once a person perceives themselves as a victim not recognized and not vindicated by the society in which they live, there is a chance that deadly consequences will follow. This person may decide to take matters into their own hands. In the process, they may turn into a perpetrator, since non-addressed wrongs undermine the ability to have empathy or compassion towards others, encouraging a potential perpetrator not to consider vengeful acts as wrong. The wound left open by the laws and institutions of a victim's society may also lead them to think that the lines that these draw between what is condemnable and what is not have no validity or legitimacy. There is therefore no reason for the victim to believe that the criminal actions they commit are crimes, that they are responsible and have to take responsibility for them and that, as a whole, they are a perpetrator.

Obviously, when nothing is done to prevent this state of affairs, when it spreads and becomes a structuring element of a society, this society and its members are put on the destructive path of reactionary violence, of a succession of ‘cycles of hatred’.Footnote ³⁷ Think about Hutus killing hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda in the spring of 1994 and, while doing so, seeing themselves as victims of the Tutsis.Footnote ³⁸ Or consider the victim mentality animating the Serbs during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.Footnote ³⁹

Ultimately, we see this at work nowhere more than in situations in which the distinction between reality and fantasy has by and large disappeared, where the paranoid vision of reality has taken over social relations and become the reality itself. At this stage, the quest for what one perceives as its physical and psychological defense and survival has become a mad one. With Hitler's paranoia shaping reality from the 1930s all the way to the end of World War II, we saw this unfolding at the highest and most tragic level.Footnote ⁴⁰ In conjunction, in this context the lack of inhibition concerning committing crimes is at its lowest. When this point has been reached, the sense of community based on respect for others has disintegrated.

4. The challenges and trappings of apology in a political environment

Political apology issued by a state, what we can call a ‘state apology’, has come to encompasses three main characteristics: it deals with wrongs or abuses of human rights; it is rarely issued by the direct perpetrator but rather by another actor, usually a personality representing the institution which has committed the wrong and speaking on its behalf; and it tends to be the result of negotiations and subject to political agendas, nationally and internationally. This is to say that here the apology is not simply a semi-judicial deed. It is a also political act. Hence it is not surprising that there is a complex relationship between apology, justice, and politics, including moral, legal, and philosophical issues. The complexity of the matter is deepened by the fact that a state apology cannot be equated purely and simply with an apology offered by an individual. The differences between the level and constitution of the state and the ones of the individual have an impact on apology. Consequently, apology is prone to encounter serious challenges and problems which are specific to the political context.

These challenges and problems are by and large the products of the value of apology. What makes apology valuable is indeed what opens it to being politically unpalatable, but also susceptible to manipulation and instrumentalization. By trapping and hijacking apology, political considerations devalue it and use it as a means of avoiding responsibility. In this regard, as we will explain in the following pages, apology is especially vulnerable to three types of misuse and the dangers they entail. First, while it is supposed to be a mechanism of accountability, an expedient political recourse to apology frequently aims at circumventing accountability. Second, while apology is meant to support the recognition and the purging of a wrongdoing, it can contribute to, if not to their normalization, certainly to the overlooking of crimes. Third, while apology is designed to facilitate the return of the victim and society to a life as normal and healthy as possible, instead, when misused, it can create even more alienation.

That being said, the political misuse of apology, or the political inability to handle well the dynamics of apology rarely constitutes a favorable situation. It ends up exacting a price in the context of which the credibility of political institutions and leadership is weakened. In some circumstances, for the society where it happens, it becomes a source of alienation from oneself and from other countries. In this regard, we will touch upon the case of Japan. Largely because of the ambiguity of its apologies for its actions during World War II, Japan has had to apologize multiple times without ever being able to bring the matter to rest, on the domestic and international fronts.

Apology does not in itself represent the whole picture of accountability. But it is a significant part of it. The fact that in a functioning system of justice it is appreciated that the wrongdoer, in addition to being punished, apologizes for his/her crime illustrates this state of affairs. However, the downside of this positive role of apology is that apology can be politically manipulated, that is used to evade accountability.

Performing a ceremonial apology without genuinely meaning to apologize is one way in which apology can be, and has been, politically used to avoid accountability. Apologizing without being sincere, therefore without truly apologizing, without really taking responsibility, amounts to trying to have it both ways. It is about trying to enjoy the political benefits of apology without being exposed to the human humbling that any honest apology encompasses. When combined with a narrow and exclusively self-centered pursuit of the national interest, this approach comes down to a practice of apology that is more geared towards short-term political gains than long-term reconciliation.

Using apology opportunistically in order to hold on to power is another trick for politics to run away from true accountability. It is particularly favored by politicians in periods of crisis, nationally and internationally, when they have much to be forgiven for in terms of failures and wrongs and yet do not want to lose their position of power. From this perspective, the offering of an apology amounts to recognizing that if in the past things have gone wrong, if people have been let down, in the future this will not happen again. In the process, what is sought after is to re-establish a sense of legitimacy. Apology is a tool that political actors use to reassure and regenerate support that is eroding. Needless to say, more often than not, this does correspond to a serious commitment to change, let alone to the reality of change. For experience shows that entering into an apology mechanism with this mindset is frequently not much more than a calculated way to buy time, only to return to business as usual afterwards. Of course, the credit line does not extend ad infinitum for political leaders pursuing this line of action. There are limits to the credulity of the ‘masses’. When repeated too many times, the trick ceases to have a legitimizing effect. Notwithstanding this, unscrupulous political leaders never stop trying to use it and bet on the short-term memory span of people.

In addition, issuing a political apology, even if it is heartfelt, does not necessarily express a willingness to take responsibility and be effectively sanctioned for past failures. In this regard, the fact that international failings continue to be out of reach of accountability is unsettling, especially when it is the case of the United Nations. After all, since the UN claims to be serious about the defense of human rights and the prevention of mass crimes, one would think that its shortcomings in this area would be sanctioned accordingly. Nothing is further from the truth. It seems that in the United Nations context, in particular at the senior management level, for all the current talks about accountability, the words are not matched by a real sense of responsibility. Take for instance how the UN reflected on its institutional failures regarding its handling of the conflicts and humanitarian crises of the 1990s.

To be sure, the inability of the United Nations to protect the Muslim Bosnians placed under its responsibility in Srebrenica and to stop the genocide in Rwanda did trigger the commissioning of reports in order to assess what had gone wrong.Footnote ⁴¹ These reports gave the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan the opportunity to issue some sort of an apology. In the Srebrenica report, he declared: ‘It is with the deepest regret and remorse that we have reviewed our own actions and decisions in the face of the assault on Srebrenica . . . No one regrets more than we the opportunities for achieving peace and justice that were missed. No one laments more than we the failure of the international community to take decisive action to halt the suffering and end a war that had produced so many victims.’Footnote ⁴² On the occasion of the publication of the report on Rwanda, he stated that ‘[a]ll of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it [the genocide] . . . On behalf of the United Nations, I acknowledge this failure and express my deep remorse.’Footnote ⁴³ Compared to the past, this was progress, very much to the credit of Kofi Annan. However, simply expressing regret and remorse is not exactly issuing a powerful apology, let alone taking responsibility for the wrongs committed, which, in these specific circumstances meant doing nothing or close to nothing, standing by while people were killed.Footnote ⁴⁴

That said, this state of affairs should not come as a surprise. Even if a proper apology had been offered to the victims of Srebrenica and Rwanda, short of the people responsible for the UN failures being sanctioned, this would have still represented a very thin form of accountability. As such, this echoes the lack of provision in international law for global political accountability, itself mimicking the lack of serious engagement in support of global solidarity and responsibility.Footnote ⁴⁵

Not only can apology be politically used to evade accountability, but it can also be called upon to help normalize a wrongdoing. This is all the more damaging in light of the fact that apology has precisely the opposite objective. Nevertheless, when the use and re-use of apology vis-à-vis a wrongdoing fails to enhance, in an indisputable fashion, the sense of responsibility and the imperative to abide by it, when it fails to generate change, one can only conclude that a ‘banalisation’, to use a French expression, of crime is being encouraged and is de facto taking place. One can only conclude that the wrong has become more banal. This futile handling and therefore conception of the crime is somewhat reminiscent of the absolute lack of concern and of ethics, of political ethics as of any other type of ethics, manifested once by a French Minister with her infamous ‘responsable mais pas coupable’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this perspective, cynicism regarding politics, and political apologies, is prone to win the day and settle in. At best, people come to think that they should not expect much from political actors and political apologies. At worst, along with the political establishment, it is politics itself that runs the risk of being viewed as rotten to the core, and consequently hopeless. When this happens, the very idea of political apology, a mechanism designed as part of a system of restorative justice meant to be victim-oriented,Footnote ⁴⁷ has turned against the victim.

The possible perversion of apology can also take place in the political world when it is shaped by a paternalistic attitude towards the victim. Ultimately, this reflects an inability to respect him/her as an individual regardless of the crime itself. The critical need for apology to be respectful of the victim is a good starting point to clarify this issue.

For an apology to be successful in restoring both the victim's self-respect and respect for the victim on behalf of others, it must treat the victim with dignity. In other words, apology has to project towards both the victim and the onlookers that it is respectful of the victim. In this regard, the greater the crime, the greater the requirement for the apology to be respectful. Short of this, apology simply fails to be part of restorative justice. It is a form of disregard that doubles the status of the victim. Adding insult to injury, it introduces, on top of the first wrong, the second wrong of patronizing the victim. It also sends the message that apology is taking place mainly as a product of external pressure and not as an expression of inner contrition and deep conscience that the victim has been wronged, that there even is a victim.

But, of course, for apology to respect the victim, and in fact to recognize the victim as a victim, it has to consider the individual who has been victimized, or the individual in the victim, so to speak, worthy of respect. It has to avoid paternalism or a barely veiled disdain for the person who has been made a victim. This calls for the person who has suffered from the wrong not to be reduced to the status of being a victim. This requires seeing the person behind the victim, i.e. for the victim not to lose his/her individuality and agency. For while being recognized as a victim necessitates seeing the act committed against the victim as a crime, it also demands that the victim is considered as a fully fledged individual and not as a passive and almost inanimate entity, essentially on the receiving end of life. Short of the victim being seen as 100% human, not only will his/her rights and consequently his/her status as a victim not be recognized, but, perhaps more importantly, the individual who has been wronged becomes the captive of the victim status. The individual becomes the captive of the victim status from which s/he is supposed to benefit. In effect, the individual is deprived of his/her identity as a unique and active agent. S/he becomes some sort of a social type, and one that is viewed as unable to be in charge of his/herself and his/her own history. When this happens, the victim status, rather than being an acknowledgement of one's rights and a tool to regain the dignity that the wrong took away, turns into a jail and an additional form of alienation.

Even in a democratic environment, addressing this challenge is not an easy task. To be sure, in the democratic culture, where each individual is said to have value and where the value of each is said to be equal to others regardless of race, religion, gender, social and economic conditions, respecting the individual and the victim is meant to be the norm. It is supposed to be both the foundation and the horizon of any decent and meaningful policy and individual and collective behavior. Against this background, the purpose of law, as an expression and tool of democratic values, is to ensure that the rights of each individual are recognized and implemented and that, based on this, due respect is given to the victim when a violation of these has occurred. Reality, nevertheless, is quite different. While values, norms, laws, and institutions of democracy engineer mechanisms of equality and inclusiveness, they do not get rid of exclusion, hierarchy, and prejudice. The toll that it takes on the social, economic, and political justice of society as a whole varies with the level and particular conditions of the democratic regime in a given country. However, this toll can never be eliminated. For all the declared efforts to improve society and, as such, to minimize exclusion, hierarchy, and prejudice, the conception and functioning of the justice system in democracy depends upon these and endorses them. It is as much alienating as it is empowering.Footnote ⁴⁸ The dangers of this state of affairs are multiple, including the fact that overlooking the rights of an individual puts society on the course of being oblivious to the rights of this individual as a victim. As dismissing the individual goes hand in hand with overlooking the victim, his/her rights and pain, rather than liberating the victim, only makes them further captive of the wrong and locks them deeper in the wound.

The handling of the legacy of slavery in the United States is an illustration of this vicious circle, serving as a testimony of the problematic status of African-Americans and of their rights. Of their problematic status as victims of past discriminations but as well as individuals continuing to be discriminated against more than any other group in America.

Up to now no proper apology has been offered to the African-American community from the highest level of the United States’ government. The closest to such an apology has been when President Bill Clinton, in March 1998, on the occasion of an official trip to Uganda, declared that ‘European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade. And we were wrong in that.’Footnote ⁴⁹ This statement represented progress compared to the past. Nevertheless, it felt short of being a full apology. As we alluded to at the beginning of this article,Footnote ⁵⁰ the inability to apologize for slavery has to do with the question of financial compensations since, presumably, by acknowledging responsibility, America will make itself liable and could have to pay reparations.Footnote ⁵¹ But the issue of money alone cannot explain the United States’ reluctance to apologize at the highest level. It goes far deeper than this. Arguably, it reveals the ‘we’ versus ‘them’ divide continuing to separate African-Americans from mainstream US history and population, indicating that racism has not vanished all together from American life.Footnote ⁵² As such, the victim status of African-Americans more often than not ends up more alienating than empowering. This, combined with the belief many Americans still hold that African-Americans are second-class individuals, a belief serving as a rationale for the fact that historically they have been, especially the poorest of them, makes them the prisoners of a fixed identity. This fixed identity, which instead of portraying them as victims of circumstance that can be reversed and overcome with better social policies, defines them in terms of essence, as lacking agency in essence. In other words, in the worst case scenario, once the individual agency of African-Americans is not recognized, their victim status, far from empowering them, alienates them further.

To be sure, the struggle of the black emancipation movements, including the abolitionists and civil rights activists, in their efforts to defend the rights of African-Americans, by making American democracy richer has helped it to be partly redeemed.Footnote ⁵³ It has in some way mitigated the exclusionary culture of the United States’ democracy which estranges millions of African-Americans from the national community and, more importantly, from themselves.Footnote ⁵⁴ In addition, the historical election of Barack Obama as President of the United States on 4 November 2008 may emerge as a decisive event to move forward. Yet, when the problematic status of their rights as individuals and as victims of the past turns out to be one and the same thing, it makes it difficult to accept the message of US democracy at face value.

As we have alluded to before in the course of this section, it is not only the apology itself that ends up being trapped by political calculations or prejudices. The political mishandling of apology can also exact a significant price on political actors themselves. In some circumstances, for the society where this takes place, it can even be a source of alienation from oneself and other countries. The case of Japan is an interesting example in this regard. Indeed, Japan finds itself in the unusual situation of having expressed remorse many times for the crimes committed during World War II, when pursuing its imperial ambitions throughout Asia. Yet, it seems that because of the ambiguities of its apologies, the country has not been able to put the past to rest. On the international front, this has led Japan to have relatively tense relationships with its neighboring countries and the people it victimized. As for domestically, one could argue that this lingering problem has been part of the lack of Japan's confidence in the post-World War II era regarding its own history and identity.

As historian John W. Dower puts it, contrary to much media commentary, the issue of Japanese ‘war responsibility’ has been quite debated within Japan itself for many years, and these debates intensified following the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989.Footnote ⁵⁵ Between the 1960s and the 2000s, Japan has issued multiple statements of apology, in particular to South Korea and China. As a matter of fact, Japan is probably the country that has issued the greatest number of such statements among the countries involved in crimes against humanity during World War II. The most comprehensive of Japan's apologies is generally regarded to have been the one made by socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the war's end, on 15 August 1995. At the time, it was heralded abroad as the country's ‘first’ clear and explicit apology for Imperial Japan's colonial rule and aggressive acts. In this apology, the key phrase was the expression of feelings of ‘profound remorse’ (tsusetsu na hansei) and ‘heartfelt apology’ (kokoro kara no owabi), most particularly the later phrase. This statement was not however an unprecedented one. Two years before, on 23 August 1993, the then Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa had made a similar ‘albeit terser statement’Footnote ⁵⁶ before the Diet expressing ‘deep remorse and apology’ (fukai hansei to owabi). But clearly, this apology and the others have not been sufficient for Japan and Asia to put the past behind them. One could even say that the more Japan has apologized, the more it has had to apologize, a phenomenon that continues to this day.

In this regard, many commentators, especially outside Japan, refer to the ambiguity of Japanese apologies right from the beginning as a reason for the fact that, despite the acts of contrition, the past simply will not go away. As such, in essence it is said that the various expressions of remorse that Japan has offered over the years have lacked in sincerity. It is argued that this lack of sincerity is at work in the carefully vague wording of some of the Japanese statements of apology. These tend to give the impression, at least from an international point of view, that they are not only designed to express remorse for the crimes committed, and therefore satisfy the victims, but also to avoid Japanese loss of face. The same mechanism appears to apply to the fact that for almost every apology issued, Japan has managed to produce actions sending a message that tends to be contradictory to what apology supposedly seeks to accomplish (recognizing the truth and putting the protagonists on the path of reconciliation).

Take the issue of ‘military comfort women’ (jugun-ianfu).Footnote ⁵⁷ This euphemism is used to describe the approximately 200,000 women from Korea, China, and Japan,Footnote ⁵⁸ but also from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, and other Japanese occupied territories, who were forced to work for the Japanese military brothels during World War II. The effects of their sexual enslavement were so devastating that it is estimated that no more than 25 per cent of them survived the war and that most were unable to have children as a consequence of the multiple rapes and the diseases they contracted. Initially, the Japanese government denied any involvement. But after the discovery of incriminating documents in Japan's Defense Agency archives, which showed official connections to the wartime brothels, it was forced to renege on its former claim that the brothels were run by private contractors and to present formal apologies. Yet the apologies were ambiguous, as exemplified by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's 1995 apology.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, for critics the fact that his apology was signed on a document establishing the ‘Asia Women's Fund’, for atonement in form of material compensation, lessened its value. For them, as this fund was based on private donations and not government money, it amounted to avoiding the direct linking of the government with the abuses. Furthermore, as late as 2 March 2007, the issue of ‘comfort women’ was raised again by Japan in a very counterproductive way, with then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denying that the Japanese military had forced women into sexual slavery during World War II.Footnote ⁶⁰

Against that background, it is not surprising that Japan has alienated the neighboring countries that it victimized during World War II. To be sure, it is not as if these countries themselves were perfect. At times, they have not hesitated to use the apology issue whenever it seemed possible to mobilize it for political gains, China being one example.Footnote ⁶¹ Still, it is Japan that has first and foremost dug the diplomatic hole in which it finds itself. By minimizing, through the ambiguity of its apologies, or even denying the atrocities it committed, it makes it all too easy for these countries to see Tokyo as deceitful and self-centered, incapable of putting itself in others’ shoes and connecting with them on a human level. For regional onlookers, the abduction controversy with North Korea illustrates in vivid terms this state of affairs. In this regard, South Koreans have difficulty understanding Japan's agony over the fate of a few dozen abductees compared to what they see as being a lack of empathy for the hundreds of thousands of comfort women, forced laborers, and other Korean victims of the Japanese colonial government.

That being said, it is not only the reconciliation between Japan and its neighbors that remains in limbo due to the contentious issues of war memory and apology. To some extent it is also Japan's post-World War II identity. For, arguably, the continuing pending issue of apology, what seems to be the inability of the Japanese government to deal with the historical truth and to handle it efficiently, indicates a sense of uncertainty about itself.Footnote ⁶² In this context, it is as if the Japanese political class thinks that preserving the dignity and political honor of Japan and admitting the undignified crimes of the past are antithetical. It is as if it thinks that admitting that the nation has committed unacceptable and irreparable acts would taint and undermine forever the international reputation and position of Japan.Footnote ⁶³

Obviously, there are deep and inter-connected cultural and institutional factors accounting for this political state of mind and how it affects Japanese official apologies.

First, there is a high sensitivity to status, with, as one author puts it, ‘the Japanese on the whole (being) comfortable with “knowing one's place”’.Footnote ⁶⁴ From this perspective, while it is easy for Japanese people to know their place in the national context, it is more difficult for Japan as a country to know its place in the international environment. Internationally, the self-referential dimension that works within Japanese society no longer applies or exists. And as Japan experiences a sense of uncertainty about its place and status in the international realm, it makes it difficult for it to find the confidence to recognize its wrongs, to open itself to the vulnerability associated with the recognition of past crimes.Footnote ⁶⁵

Another factor is Japan's insistence on portraying itself as homogeneous and culturally unique,Footnote ⁶⁶ which is somewhat of a national passion.Footnote ⁶⁷ This characteristic, which carries the double burden of feelings of superiority and inferiority,Footnote ⁶⁸ is not conducive to apology coming naturally. It creates what could be called an ‘ontological wall’ between oneself and others.

Japan's sense of historical insecurity,Footnote ⁶⁹ which includes seeing itself as belonging neither to the East nor to the West, facilitates the establishment of this ontological wall and the obstacle that it constitutes for apology. This is further entrenched by the Japanese tendency to have a victim mentality. Specifically, on this point, it might be the case that this sense of considering itself a victim leads Japan to, deep down, feel that it deserves an apology just as much as others.Footnote ⁷⁰

Another obstacle to apology is the fact that the Post-World War II political institutional arrangements are more or less based on a view of history which considers that issues of Japanese responsibility have already been settled. Indeed, according to this view, only a small group of ‘renegades’, mostly military men, led Japan into war, essentially usurping the power of the emperor and misleading the Japanese people into a self-destructive and imperialist war. From this perspective, issues of Japanese guilt are perceived as having been addressed with the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and other less prominent tribunals. As for reparations, they are viewed as having been solved with the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 and the series of bilateral treaties (with the signatories of the Peace Treaty and also Taiwan, South Korea and the People's Republic of China).Footnote ⁷¹ Consequently, additional apologies and offers of compensation are not necessary.

Finally, the fact that some of the crimes committed abroad by the imperial army may have echoed prejudices and similar denials of rights taking place at home, may be another explanation for the ambiguity and reluctance of Japanese apologies. We see this in the case of the organization of the comfort women stations since, given the well-organized and open nature of prostitution in Japan, it may not have been seen as out of the ordinary to establish ‘comfort facilities’ to serve the Japanese Armed Forces. In fact, later on, following the defeat of 1945, the Japanese government did not hesitate to organize such ‘comfort facilities’ in Japan with enlisted Japanese women for the occupying US army.Footnote ⁷²

However, regardless of the merit of these arguments, it remains that short of coming to terms with the challenges that they represent, Japan is likely to continue to be unable to move beyond the issue of apology and to look itself squarely in the eyes. Japan is likely to continue its reflective and anxious soul-searching, yet lacking self-criticism,Footnote ⁷³ without much hope, therefore, to achieve real positive and healing results for itself and others. As such, it will continue to be difficult to build trust-based relationshipsFootnote ⁷⁴ and to have true friends in the region.Footnote ⁷⁵ Even being frank and open about the pursuit of its legitimate national interest will remain an uphill battle.Footnote ⁷⁶ These are not considerations which should be overlooked.Footnote ⁷⁷

5. Political apology and international contemporary culture

As we have seen throughout this article, the issue of apology is now a significant feature of our political landscape. This is so much so that in certain circumstances, when mishandled, as the example of Japan shows, it makes it extremely difficult for a country to go beyond the past. One is therefore left wondering what does this phenomenon mean for and tell us about our contemporary culture? In this regard, since in recent years apology has mainly been a Western-induced trend, one question inevitably comes to mind. Does the fact that, compared to the relative willingness of states from the West to apologize for crimes committed domestically and internationally, non-Western countries appear reluctant to come forward, give a moral edge to the West, and push the non-West into a lower moral ground?

The short answer to this question is ‘no’. Western powers have no high moral ground to expect from apologizing. After all, the political apologies issued by the West are the results and expressions of the duality of Western identity and of how it has been, and continues to be, projected in modern times vis-à-vis the non-Western world, within and among countries. Three points are particularly telling in this context.

First, while it is a good thing that Western powers are able to apologize, this comes about after (and because of) the mass crimes that they have committed as these powers expanded worldwide over the past five hundred years, and which they seek to amend. The inclusive and humanistic values associated with Western apologies cannot be dissociated from the exclusionary and predatory identity and behaviors of the modern West, which are precisely what it tries to correct by apologizing.

Second, the fact that the West has been willing to apologize on a number of occasions does not mean that it is open to apologizing for all the wrongs committed. Western apology is selective, tackling only the cases that the West estimates it can afford to address. Beyond these, many remain out of reach. This applies to the past and even more so to recent events. While Western powers have yet to apologize seriously for the transatlantic slave trade, they are even further from apologizing for colonization, in particular the colonization of Africa,Footnote ⁷⁸ let alone for neo-colonialism.

This brings us to the third point. Western apology amounts to a low form of accountability. Ultimately, this low form of accountability is on display in the refusal of the West to change, and especially to relinquish its commanding position. More than anything else, it wants to have it both ways. Following Mark Gibney and Eric Roxstrom, we could say: ‘it wants credit for recognizing and acknowledging a wrong against others, but it also wants the world to remain exactly as it had been before the apology was issued’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Thus, Western political apology shows that the West is, to this day, faithful to its history of the last five centuries or so, oscillating between right and wrong, without ever being able to choose one over the other. This is to say that short of being more self-reflective in a humbled manner, short of moving away from righteousness, the moral success of the West continues and will continue to be politically trapped in and undermined by its moral limitations.

Does this exonerate non-Western countries for their uneasiness about political apology? Here too the answer is ‘no’. Four considerations help understand why.

To begin with, the fact that non-Western countries have often been on the receiving end of Western power in modern history is no excuse for them not to be forthcoming about their own criminal record, within and beyond borders. As the saying goes, two wrongs do not make a right.

In addition, the practice of apology is not a phenomenon limited to the culture of the West. Although historically apology is frequently traced back to Western Christianity and humanism,Footnote ⁸⁰ it is by no means an invention and a monopoly of the West. Non-Western home-grown apologetic mechanisms exist, which have their specific characteristics, and their importance cannot be mistaken. There is therefore no cultural reason for the political non-Western world not to apologize when needed.

Moreover, concerns for human rights are also part and parcel of non-Western traditions. Compared to the West, non-Western societies may have different ways of expressing their concerns for the rights of their members and of people beyond borders. The nature and the hierarchy of these rights as well as their social embedded character may differ from the Western paradigm.Footnote ⁸¹ But this does not imply that respect for human rights, especially beyond kinship, either within the society or beyond, is not recognized and valued.Footnote ⁸²

Finally, the democratic modernity that is now, nationally and internationally, one of the sources of legitimacy of non-Western societies, far from creating in the non-West an estrangement from the demands of human rights, only adds to an already existing local sensibility to human rights.Footnote ⁸³

In other words, cultural diversity cannot be used as a justification for non-Western countries to not apologize for their human rights violations when apologizing would be, for them and their victims, a catharsis and would contribute to the quest of justice. Continuing to refuse to apologize when this could have positive effects will only reveal their dysfunctional characteristics, if not their authoritarian nature.