In the expanding literature on state apologies and transitional justice, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies takes on more than most. Even though it only tackles one component of addressing past wrongs — apology — it mines deeply into this “unusual approach to ‘doing politics’” (3) seeking to legitimize a move from liberalism's concern with individualized justice to a story of collective repentance.
Celermajer accomplishes this through four pairs of chapters. The first pair analyzes apologies as verbal formulations — as speech acts. The second pair sorts through religious rituals in Judaism and Christianity for grounds for public repentance. The third pair offers insights from the Australian case of the forced removal of Indigenous children. The final pair pulls from previous chapters to offer answers to objections and questions raised about political apology, particularly addressing the issue of collective responsibility.
A major conclusion — that apology is not just about the past and heartfelt speech (and therefore meaningless if insincere) but about the future and the perpetrator “establishing their own political-moral identity” (42) through the dynamic of the encounter with the other — is not new (see, e.g., Donald Shriver's An Ethic for Enemies). But the analysis is original, drawing mostly from political theory but also religious sources and contemporary cases.
Celermajer interjects simple yet tough questions throughout, such as “what is repentance doing in politics” (2), “what is it that we are doing when we apologize collectively?” (8), and “how does the apologetic act accomplish remediation or reparation of the apologizing collective?” (64). The last takes the literature beyond questions about the meaning and purpose of apology to its mechanisms of transformation. Celermajer concludes that apology is not about personal inner change but rather the “structure of collective normative identity” (64). This identity is not based in some fixed moral standard but is revisable and co-constituted by “individuals' identities and subjectively held normative frameworks and formal public institutions” (188).
In the chapters on Judaism and Christianity, Celermajer takes a rather narrow slice of the traditions (forgivable with only one chapter on each) to make her arguments. She appropriately selects Yom Kippur as the main ritual of collective repentance in Judaism, but less clear is the focus on the sacrament of confession within Roman Catholicism for Christianity. She only briefly notes the liturgy as a form of public repentance and fails to note creeds or historic revivals. Shriver's work on collective repentance as politics also points to the individualization of repentance in the private confessional but puts greatest blame on the Enlightenment itself for undoing the possibility of a communal ethic.
Celermajer comes across as being overly cautious about religion, taking great care to address objections to religious conceptions as backward and misinformed, incompatible with liberal democracy. She rightly breaks down some religious/secular dichotomies — one being that either apology has to be individual and private or tainted with religion. Yet, some of what she asserts as mainstream conceptions of religion seems too starkly posed (the view that modernity banished religion completely, for example). She takes care to extract the mechanisms of collective repentance from the sacred content of Judaism, yet later says many will still be unsatisfied with this conceptual framework since it is tainted with its religious source. Thus, she offers another secular (yet similar) theory of collective responsibility in chapter seven.
In the final pages of the text, rather than accommodating her argument to religious skeptics, Celermajer begins to question the adequacy of the theoretical categories in secular liberal politics, noting that “far from dismissing the religious overtones of apology as incompatible with the tenets of modern political communities, we can encounter them as new possibilities for apology's expression” (262). One might add that, in some cases, a religious basis for apology and repentance could be extremely appropriate such as with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Questions about the meaning of collective apologies in political life have received scant conceptual analysis, especially compared with other modes of transitional justice such as trials, truth commissions, and reparations. However, Celermajer does not point to how similar apology might be to some of these others, such as public memorials or truth commissions that often intertwine with apologies (though the apology is a unique component of these acts). These are all unusual ways of doing politics, and all raise concerns about moving beyond the individual wrongdoer to some kind of communal process of reconciliation. The forgiveness literature, which has even stronger religious undertones than the apology literature, unites many of these “tools” of reconciliation. Celermajer relates in a footnote that Shriver is a notable exception to providing an analysis of the meaning of collective repentance, but claims that he uses the rubric of forgiveness. In fact, examples in Shriver's work are mostly public apologies. There is more common ground between “forgiveness” and “apology” than she acknowledges, and potential fruitful dialogue.
Finally, Celermajer's dense theorizing is frequently grounded in real life cases, most notably Australia. This case seems suited to a theory nested in identity, raising questions about the translation of her theory to other contexts, particularly international ones where common political or normative frameworks are much thinner. Nevertheless, the cases are skillfully used to ground the hard questions, and Celermajer never loses sight of the practical work — the need for a ripe context, public buy-in, and the possible failures.
