ASTK18326U Forgiveness, reconciliation, and apology in politics and political theory

In 1958, Hannah Arendt contended that forgiveness should constitute a central aspect of political theory: Against the fact that forgiveness “has always been deemed unrealistic and inadmissible in the public realm,” she maintained that forgiveness is an indispensable part of political experience. Yet, despite Arendt’s injunction to take forgiveness “seriously in a strictly secular sense,” scholarly explorations of forgiveness remained few and sporadic throughout the Cold War period. For obvious historical reasons, there was a marked over-representation of Jewish thinkers during these years. By the same token, virtually all these thinkers contemplated the unforgivable—a contemplation that led some of them to a wholesale skepticism regarding forgiveness, as in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s famous statement that forgiveness died in the concentration camps.

But during the 1990s, the scholarly literature on forgiveness began to grow rapidly and became increasingly cross-disciplinary. This sudden development arose out of a number of political events and transformations. Most notably, public forgiveness was invoked in relation to various countries’ transitions to democracy, and their attendant efforts to cope with state-sanctioned violations against their own citizens. Examples include the former Eastern-Bloc countries and South Africa, not to mention the mass atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In many cases, these transitions led to the establishment of truth and reconciliation commissions. In relation to these endeavors to institutionalize forgiveness and reconciliation, new political and judicial theories have emerged, revolving around the concept of transitional justice. Another noteworthy trend is that of public apologies, or what is referred to as “the politics of apology.” As one commentator notes, “we see not only some individuals but entire communities, professional corporations, church representatives and hierarchs, sovereigns and chiefs of state asking for ‘pardon.’”

In discussing public forgiveness, political theorists usually take as their point of departure an emotion account, according to which forgiveness is to be understood as a change in emotion; preeminently, as the overcoming of resentment. A central issue, then, is whether this emotion account can be extrapolated to larger social and political contexts. This issue has provoked a good deal of skepticism and critical questions, such as: Can a community display attitudes and emotions, and can it be regarded as a moral agent? To what extent is it meaningful and appropriate to speak about collective senses of guilt and/or responsibility? Who has the standing to forgive and to ask for 

forgiveness—is representative or vicarious forgiveness and apology possible? In other words, does it make sense to apologize for something that one hasn’t personally committed, or to forgive on behalf of someone else?

In this course, we will inquire into the vexed question of what place, if any, apologies, forgiveness, and reconciliation have (or should have) in politics. In doing so, we will consider three cases: PM Mette Frederiksen’s 2019 apology to the victims of historical abuse in state-run children’s homes; former PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s 2005 apology for the extradition of innocent people to Nazi Germany; the Reconciliation Commission of Greenland (2015-17) and the similar, ongoing state initiatives in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. The latter constitutes a novel approach to historical injustices, insofar as theories and practices originally developed in transitional contexts are being applied to stable democracies. More concretely, the Nordic cases concern the assimilation and modernization (or “Westernization”) policy that early welfare states imposed upon indigenous peoples.

The course will also include supervision on assignment writing.