Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies

Abstract

Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 214 pp. $US 24.99 paper (978-0-521-69385-1), $US 70.00 hardcover (978-0-521-87231-7) Government apologies fill the air these days, becoming, it seems, an endemic feature of modern political cultures. Even strident US regimes have entreated its victims over the debacle of Vietnam, the Abu Ghraib prison horrors, and locally, the botched relief efforts during Hurricane Katrina. Grievance in Canada has been no less prevalent, with official genuflections to various ethnic/racial groups (Japanese, Chinese, South Asian) for discriminatory immigration and wartime internment policies, including a very recent apology to First Nations for the culturally genocidal practices of Canada's Native residential schools. Private corporations appear to be following suit, witness the president and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, Inc. who printed a full-page newspaper apology to victims of tainted meat that had been packaged in one of its plants. Only two expository books on the politics of apology were written between 1991 and 2004 (Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation, 1991; Aaron Lazare, On Apology, 2004), but it is fast becoming a popular topic in academic circles. The very word apology, which centuries ago meant a defence or self-justification, has long since referred to an expression of regret for past actions. It implies a dialogue or process of communication between offending and aggrieved parties that can lead to reconciliation; on a broader scale, apologies reputedly promote transition to democracy by rectifying past wrongs. Apologies, then, can be uplifting, cathartic, and assuage long-term conflicts, granting hope to all parties. But dredging the past can also be a grueling experience, unsettling whole communities of allegedly blameless descendants. At worst, governments may address past abuses as a pretext for ignoring present ones. To this crucible of timely scholarship, Melissa Nobles has added a useful treatise that examines a segment of the official apology phenomenon. Viewing apologies as group attempts to advance rights based on historical claims--or more generally--as platforms for announcing new directions and promoting societal reconciliation (p. 114), Nobles presents the rudiments of a membership theory of apologies, by examining the way organized groups and state actors in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States use apologies to revamp the terms and meanings of national membership. This is viewed as the chief purpose in pursuing and granting official apologies--the acknowledgment of historical injustices in order to justify fundamental reforms designed to redistribute economic resources and political authority. Nobles focuses on three groups of actors: mobilized minority groups, state officials, and public intellectuals, principally historians. All are seen as driven by reason, emotion and interest, although the meaning of interest is curiously unarticulated while the preponderant influence in the apology process is tied to an overall determination of elites to change policy (p. 35). This assertion however, would seem to undermine the impact of minority group mobilization in a mediatized global community capable of challenging the parochial moral reflections and hidebound ideologies of national politicians. The potential contradiction is not well-explored by Nobles. …