History, Ethics, Politics: Rethinking the Legacy of Truth Commissions

Abstract

This paper investigates how truth commissions problematize and transform the ways in which citizens of contemporary societies think and speak about historical truth, memory, justice, reconciliation, recognition (of victimhood and violations), and official historiography. I initiate a dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Nora, Jurgen Habermas, and Hannah Arendt, whose insights into the public use of history, ethics of national reconstruction, collective memory, and the place of factuality in modern politics, provide new perspectives on how truth commissions preserve, question, and transform the ways in which societies articulate the relationship between history, ethics and politics. I argue that truth commissions have opened a critical space to resignify the complex relations between history and memory, the past and the present, ethics and practical considerations, nationalism and the post-national context. They produce critical, fact-based and national (yet not nationalist) histories to reconstruct the nation and the nation-state on the basis human rights ethics, and to restore the status of factuality in politics. They emerge in the context of a double failure of the nation-state: the failure of the state to provide protection from agents acting in its name and/or private combating groups, aggravated by the failure to stand up to a measure of honesty concerning the nature of the conflict and the accompanying violations. Consequently, commissions have produced a new dynamic whereby the state seeks to legitimize its central position between history and politics only by accepting a high degree of societal penetration into the production and diffusion of official national history. The problematization of the link between historiography and state sovereignty is evidenced by the incorporation of individual and social memory-narratives into the production of official historiography. However, the tremendous challenge of articulating an ethics of national reconstruction in a transitional context exposes many of the ambiguities and limitations built into the truth commission process. They seek to recuperate the status of factuality in politics, but their findings have limited or no legal sanction. They reference post-national legal norms to address the nation-state’s failures, but their national scope prevents them from advocating a post-national political project. Ultimately, their striving for a supra-political, ethical ‘founding moment’ for the nation falters in the face of their built-in vulnerability before traditional state bureaucracies and political actors.