Book examines 'new guilt of nations'

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NEW YORK (Reuters) -- History scholar Elazar Barkan calls it "the new guilt of nations" -- from Europe to the Americas to Australia, leaders are apologizing and countries are paying restitution for historical injustices.

The relative prosperity and political openness of the post-Cold-War era have made restitution and reparation possible for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, among others, Barkan argues in "The Guilt of Nations" (W.W. Norton).

"The most important thing is the acknowledgment, because that shapes not only our past but ... what we think and act in the present and in the future," Barkan, chair of cultural studies and associate professor of history at California's Claremont Graduate University, said in a New York interview.

"The fact that we recognize that we have been guilty with regard to the past means that, all other things being equal, we would really try hard not to be guilty in the future."

His book compares restitution and reparation negotiations in different places, and one chapter examines the growing debate in the United States over whether and how to recompense African-Americans for the injustices of slavery.

He describes an era of "neo-Enlightenment" occurring as governments and activists discuss and settle claims of Korean "comfort women" who served as sex slaves of Japanese soldiers in the Second World War; the Swiss plundering of Nazi gold taken from Jews; Native American excavations for tribal burial; Maori land claims in New Zealand and Aborigines in Australia; Eastern Europe's post-Cold-War reconstruction, and "truth and reconciliation" commissions in former authoritarian countries such as South Africa, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

"In human history, there has never been voluntary reparation of the kind we are talking about here. It's an international standard of being willing to acknowledge your past injustices."

The cases are related, Barkan said -- "a new international morality which is characteristic of the post-Cold-War period."

Realpolitik, a belief that realism rather than ideology or ethics should drive politics and international diplomacy, has given way to more questions about morality and justice, he said.

"The new international emphasis on morality has been characterized not only by accusing other countries of human rights abuses but also by self-examination ... this national self-reflexivity is the new guilt of nations," Barkan wrote in the introduction to the book.

He said in the interview that the prosperity enjoyed by the Western industrialized nations and the shift in global politics following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Communist governments of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s had been crucial to the phenomenon. But places such as Cambodia, Rwanda and Yugoslavia, where injustices were more recent, have been unable yet to address restitution and reparation.

"Those places where the genocide is on the one hand very fresh, very recent, and on the other hand this is not a democracy and certainly not an affluent place, there is no room yet for that phenomenon," Barkan said of Cambodia, where a million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

While Western countries have condemned the enslavement of Africans, they have neither apologized nor compensated victims and their descendants, Barkan writes in a chapter headed "Restitution for Slavery: Opportunity or Fantasy?"

"But the subject refuses to go away," he writes. "The call for reparation is as much a call for repentance and mourning as it is for restitution."

In the United States, slavery remains "the most glaring example of an unaddressed historical injustice" that "stands in direct contrast with the public culture that embraces the concept of attempting to redress its imperfect past."

He noted in the interview that the process had started more intensively at the local level in the United States, with race riots and reparations. Cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Dallas and Cleveland want to hold hearings on reparations. Others are considering or already paying damages for past race crimes.

Barkan said "an acknowledgment would be a first step, an apology would be a first step," in the United States, and he believes a national commission should air testimony that would be a central part of potential restitution.

"In a depression it would be much more difficult, but if prosperity continues I think the country will have the space to deal with it," he said.

Democratic Representative John Conyers of Michigan has sponsored a bill every year since 1989 to establish a commission to study reparations for slavery, but it is stuck in committee.

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Simon Wiesenthal Center: Reparations
Slavery Reparations for African Americans

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