Reconciliation as a Political Value
2007; Wiley; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00375.x
ISSN1467-9833
Autores Tópico(s)Global Peace and Security Dynamics
Resumo[T]he same men who are held so sternly in check interpares by custom, respect, usage, gratitude . . . and who on the other hand in their relations with one another show themselves so resourceful in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship—once they go outside, where the strange, the stranger is found, they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey . . . [T]hey go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey, as triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a students' prank, convinced they have provided the poets with a lot more material for song and praise. This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex. For many contemporary readers the psychological insight that Nietzsche expresses in the quotation above is depressingly relevant to current events.3 The terrors and indignities reaped upon those viewed as strangers by officials and ordinary citizens have bedeviled the construction of political communities in societies seeking a transition out of systemic injustice. For these societies reconciliation would appear to be a particularly important goal. But the severity and extent of past injustices as well as the plurality of views about the good life among citizens often make the basis for reconciliation tenuous indeed. The term reconciliation has several meanings and applications, perhaps without a common conceptual core to these.4 An individual can be reconciled to her fate; members of an association can reconcile after some internal strife; or, reconciliation can be pursued as a political goal, as justice may also be pursued. It is this last sense that I wish to discuss. I shall use the term reconciliation for societal reconciliation, taken as a normative ideal, a goal that a polity might pursue through its public policy.5 Discussions of reconciliation in transitional societies have tended to focus on the role of truth commissions and in particular on matters such as the relationships between truth, amnesty, and criminal justice.6 To be sure, these are important issues but they only address a small part of actual reconciliation processes. The South African experience is illustrative. South Africa's recent and more distant history is tainted by racist practices and policies that cost many lives and caused untold suffering. With the election of a democratic government in 1994 and the ratification of a liberal constitution in 1996, the country entered a new reconciliatory phase of its history. As the Preamble to the 1996 Constitution states, this is a phase based upon a commitment to "Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based upon democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights. . . ."7 Now, some of the evil that occurred in South Africa under apartheid was vividly revealed in testimony heard by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). But because a central mandate of the TRC was to provide selective amnesty to perpetrators of gross violations of human rights, the testimony before it was far from representative of the severe harms and indignities of apartheid. Testimony was not taken on behalf of persons legally denied equality of opportunity in education and employment, on behalf of persons subjected to pass laws and the terror of forced relocation, nor on behalf of persons exploited in the labor market. To gain some perspective on the comparative extent of injustices, consider that "more than 69,000 workers died in apartheid mines; over one million were injured. For purposes of comparison, throughout the entire apartheid period, 68 political prisoners died in police detention. The mines killed one thousand fold more people than the police torturers did."8 Moreover, those who enjoyed the privileges of restricted competition for educational places and good jobs, the salaries that the latter afforded, cheap domestic labor, and the returns on investments from firms that benefited from a labor force subject to legal and military surveillance also were not required to testify. In such a context societal reconciliation cannot only be about setting things right between the perpetrators and the victims of political violence.9 Reconciliation seems to comprise both backward- and forward-looking aspects.10 A reckoning with the past is required, but so is the basis for reasonable hope about the future.11 Keeping in mind the horrors described by Nietzsche that can occur when persons are seen not as equals in a common political project but as strangers, I shall pursue the idea that a political community in which former strangers view and treat each other as equal citizens is partially constitutive of reconciliation as a normative goal for political purposes. When the erstwhile stranger is taken as a fellow citizen, treatment that might have been thought permissible in the past will be proscribed. Now the person is a co-participant in the political process, not one to be driven out, contained, or suppressed. This approach takes reconciliation to be a normative political ideal that is less than the whole of social justice, but that offers a basis for reasonable hope that further justice is within the reach of those pursuing it by constitutional means. The intuitive idea of this forward-looking aspect of reconciliation is that reconciliation exists when a minimal basis for politics based upon democratic equality is secured, a basis upon which a state may build in pursuit of justice, as personal reconciliation between two friends exists when the trust that comprises the minimum for the growth of the friendship is restored. In what follows I shall offer an account of reconciliation consistent with these intuitive ideas. Section II argues that reconciliation comprises both attitudinal and institutional requirements of a political community of equals in the context of past injustices and divisions. In section III I hope to show that the attitudinal requirements of political regret and respect are not illiberal. Section IV seeks to show that there may be a liberal basis for a politics of reconciliation, despite the divisions and pluralism of transitional societies. The argument of this section involves extended comparisons to John Rawls's political liberalism but in the very non-ideal context in which reconciliation is a necessary political value. The overall result, if at all successful, is much less a theory of reconciliation than a theoretical sketch of certain central features of reconciliation and a defense of its plausibility as a normative goal in light of some important lines of criticism. Reconciliation requires general acceptance of the institutional order. Widespread acceptance of a common set of rules of public life is constitutive of peaceful political processes. Societies unable to generate such acceptance are marked by divisive strife and even violence. Acceptance is a pro-attitude toward, or an endorsement of, a state of affairs. We can distinguish the acceptance of rules that reconciliation involves from complete endorsement. Let's say that a person completely endorses a state of affairs if and only if she would choose them over all other conceivable states of affairs. Someone who completely endorses accepts, but complete endorsement is not necessary for the kind of acceptance required by reconciliation. Political community may exist without persons believing that social relations are ideal. The acceptance required by reconciliation is a kind of comparative endorsement. A person comparatively endorses a state of affairs if and only if she would choose it over another. People who comparatively endorse social relations accept them as better than certain alternatives. However, since many bad alternatives may be comparatively endorsed over even worse ones, comparative endorsement alone does not constitute reconciliation. Some kind of provisional satisfaction, even if not complete endorsement, is required. Provisional satisfaction raises the specter of adaptive preferences or false consciousness. Is reconciliation a political opiate that induces contentment with an unjust state of affairs? It need not be. Persons may accept relations that they do not believe to be fully just for a number of good reasons. They might rightly see them as providing a foundation for future justice; they might rightly take them as the limit of what is feasible in the circumstances; or, they might rightly believe that remaining injustices are not great. Since acceptance can exist in the presence of social injustice, whether or not acceptance is symptomatic of false consciousness depends upon whether those who accept the social relations do so for good reasons. Suppose, however, that persons of a certain group are treated as second-class citizens. They are denied a voice in political affairs and their freedoms of conscience and association are routinely violated. Several well-organized attempts at rebellion have gone down in bloody defeat. The costs of rebellion are high, even if successful, but the prospects of success are low. The combination of high costs and dim prospects seems to offer good reasons to accept the existing social arrangement. Does this possibility demonstrate that comparative endorsement is not a characteristic of reconciliation? I do not think so. It does, however, demonstrate that reconciliation does not consist only of comparative endorsement. The more general lesson is that in addition to the subjective state of acceptance for the right reasons, reconciliation has institutional requirements, which preclude the sort of social arrangement imagined above. What are the institutional requirements of reconciliation? How far in the direction of full justice must a society go in order to achieve reconciliation? Although these questions are directed toward the objective conditions of reconciliation, if acceptance is also a requirement of reconciliation, no definite answer can be given to such questions. For the kinds of institutions that enjoy widespread acceptance can vary, and sometimes involve much of what justice requires. Still the argument of the preceding paragraph is reason to believe that at least a minimal account of the institutional requirements of reconciliation is required in order to distinguish reconciliation from mass resignation. Insofar as reconciliation is a response to injustice, it must provide institutionally some of what justice requires. This requires establishing a measure of equality in relations that were previously characterized by oppression and violence. I employ the idea that a political community of equals is constitutive of reconciliation to provide a guide in establishing the minimal institutional requirements. The institutional order of a political community of equal citizens ensures formal equality of rights, liberties, and protections under the law. A class of citizens treated unequally by the legal order is incompatible with the ideal of a political community of equals. Moreover, such a community is self-governing in the sense that sovereignty is held by the people, rather than by an elite group that reproduces itself and denies equal opportunity for all to membership into the ranks of the elite. A political community honors principles of equal citizenship and inclusion. In using the term community, I do not mean to be implying a communitarian view of justice. Equal citizenship rather than a common understanding of the good is the basis of this conception of political community. A political community of equals requires juridical equality and a constitutional democratic legal framework. I use the term political equality to refer to these institutional arrangements. Political equality makes demands on how one may respond to the claims of other citizens. It requires a person to take certain of the claims of other citizens as justified, even if doing so does not advance one's own immediate interests. I have in mind claims based upon fundamental rights and liberties of persons as well as equality under the law. Political equality also requires one to take other claims of other citizens as potentially legitimate regardless of whether doing so advances one's immediate interests. These claims are merely potentially legitimate because reconciliation does not require that citizens agree completely about all entitlements of citizens. A political community of equal citizens provides the basis for reasonable hope in part through the establishment of a framework for reasonable adversarial contestation within fair procedural constraints. Full agreement about the political direction of the country is not required. Reconciliation does not necessarily require institutions of special representations for groups whose members were victims of past injustices. Indeed such representation would be in tension with the principle of equal citizenship, especially if the special representation empowers some groups with a veto over certain state policies. Group rights for the oppressed are sometimes defended on grounds that such rights would lead to better deliberation and thus a more just policy.12 Some evidence of the tendencies of group representation to improve decision-making exists in the existence of schemes of group representation in many progressive social movements. But rules that are appropriate for unofficial groups may be entirely inappropriate for public institutions. It might be appropriate for a sports league, in deliberation about changing the rules of its game, to consult only with top officials and elite athletes, but that would hardly be exemplary for legislative processes in a democratic state. The causes of social movements might be well served by ensuring some degree of group specific representation, but as a means of representation in a state this would be in tension with the principle of equal citizenship. Moreover, the goal of improving debate by ensuring a diversity of views can be achieved by other means: Commissions can be entrusted with investigative oversight into the social conditions of persons who were victims of past injustices; proportional representation of political parties may ensure diversity; representational quotas might sometimes be appropriate. Various institutional means, more consistent with equal citizenship, are available. One way to clarify the requirements of reconciliation is to distinguish it from other political values, in particular social justice and legitimacy. Of course doing this involves making certain assumptions about the nature of social justice and legitimacy, and any such assumptions will be contentious. But I am less concerned here with the fine details of the accounts of justice and legitimacy than I am with distinguishing reconciliation from these values with the use of rather broad-brush strokes. Reconciliation is distinct from justice in virtue of its requirement of real-life acceptance. A society in which a great many citizens reject the ruling order is one in which reconciliation does not exist. But acceptance seems neither necessary nor sufficient for social justice. It is conceivable that a just social order could be viewed as unacceptable by a large number of people who comprise it. Additionally, acceptance does not entail that all social relations be just. Citizens may accept the social order without it being fully just. The objective requirements of reconciliation seem to be morally more minimal than the requirements of justice. Consider the case of a political order that is widely accepted, and that permits contestation over remaining disagreements in democratic fora, under background conditions of political equality. There might be socio-economic inequalities in such a society that are incompatible with social justice, but this goes to the heart of the forward-looking aspect of reconciliation. Insofar as the political order is both widely accepted and provides the reasonable hope that through constitutional means the remaining injustices, even if structural, can be remedied—so far as such remedies are understood—then such injustices are not incompatible with reconciliation. Reconciliation is also not identical to legitimacy. It is possible that servile accommodation is at times a rational survival strategy in response to oppression.13 Under such conditions the oppressed might be willing to accept less than they are due; for example, they may accept some sort of second-class citizenship. Such an order might be thought to be de facto legitimate insofar as it has the resources to generate acceptance of some kind. However, there would be no reconciliation there since political equality would not exist. Still, one might respond that reconciliation is by its very nature a matter of compromise, especially since I allowed in the previous paragraph that reconciliation might be consistent with the existence of injustice. To be sure, the process of reconciliation involves finding acceptable terms for peaceful association. Is it the case, then, that there is no value to reconciliation other than that it puts an end to conflict, making the various goods of association possible? I would not want to deny that the terms of reconciliation might involve some compromise, and that this might make the goods of association possible, but this cannot be all that there is to reconciliation. The requirement of political equality has institutional ramifications, which distinguish reconciliation from other forms of compromise. Reconciliation might be thought to require the restoration of a previous order. For generally the term reconciliation has connotations of restoration. We think of two friends who have reconciled after a period anger and mistrust. Their friendship has been restored. In the political world then one might be tempted to think that reconciliation involves restoring the structures of a past political order after, say, a period of civil unrest. So taken, the term would have no application to some societies.14 In South Africa, for example, there is no minimally acceptable past political order that reconciliation might restore. Moreover, the importance of political community is the same for societies that have lacked it, regardless of whether in the more distant past some of the societies possessed such community and others did not. Therefore, despite the prefix of the term, and despite the misleading analogy to personal life, societal reconciliation need not involve the restoration of a political community of the past. It is not backward-looking in that sense. As a conceptual matter, however, reconciliation, unlike justice or legitimacy, necessarily implies a prior conflict. A just or legitimate society need not have had a history of injustice, a reconciled one must. In this sense reconciliation is necessarily partially backward-looking. There are also contingent reasons deriving from the requirement of acceptance to believe that reconciliation requires some reckoning with the history of injustice. The establishment of a peaceful political community after a period of conflict arising from severe injustice requires resolution of some of the central terms of the conflict; and acceptance of the terms of the resolution often requires public expressions of appropriate regret about at least some of the injustices that occurred. Once the grounds for regret are clear, public policy may express this in a number of ways including engaging in symbolic acts of reparation and commemoration, instituting name changes of public buildings or streets, and establishing public holidays.15 These are properly understood as, at least in part, expressions of regret because they acknowledge that the injustices ought not to have happened. Although the backward-looking practices of reconciliation involve public policies and official pronouncements that express appropriate regret about past injustices, these matters are not purely backward-looking since such regret typically involves a commitment to prevent similar injustices in the future. In practice, of course, there are likely to be various contingent relations between the elements of reconciliation: widespread acceptance, political equality, and expressions of appropriate regret. For example, if the political order came about as the result of popular struggle, it is most unlikely that it could relegate those who were oppressed to second-class citizenship status and still enjoy widespread acceptance. These, and other, contingent relations may be especially important in forming policies that aim to achieve reconciliation. Societies that have been bitterly divided along racial, ethnic, or religious lines often contain deep personal enmity that stands in the way of serious consideration of other persons as equals in a political community. Ezekiel Mphahlele eloquently expresses the lasting effects of such feelings in his autobiographical account of coming to age under apartheid. I've felt the heartburn of frustration and didn't feel sorry for my hates. I can't feel sorry even now, removed as I am from it all. The other man shut me off in Second Avenue. And now he has taught me never to expect mercy—but who wants mercy? Never to beg for favours through the kitchen door, but to take by force what I possess while he wasn't looking. He has driven me against the wall so that I never forget I am black. He has taught me to lie to him and feel triumphant. Because he has made me get used to the back door, I bought goods, stolen from his shop by his own Black worker, for less than the cost. And there are millions of me.16 Some prominent public proponents of reconciliation argue that it requires contrition and forgiveness on a personal level.17 Although personal reconciliation might have to address feelings of resentment, fear, and distrust, a state is severely constrained in what it may do in this regard. Perhaps a new and more just social order could gain reinforcement from dramatic changes of heart, but it would be a serious infringement on freedom of thought and conscience to require legally that citizens hold feelings of forgiveness and brotherhood toward one another.18 Additionally, success in cultivating such feelings, even if massive re-education and panopticon-like surveillance were employed, would be very limited. Public policy is poorly suited to produce changes of heart, at least directly. And a legal system is even less capable of enforcing them. It is less fanciful to hope that a society based upon political equality will produce more tolerant attitudes on the part of citizens over time as the daily lives of citizens become somewhat more intertwined and the political debate becomes more inclusive. In the previous section I argued that policies of reconciliation often need to employ expressions of regret. This might seem inconsistent with the claim that political reconciliation must not require changes of heart. Recall, however, that I claimed that the regret required is to be expressed through public policy and official pronouncements. This can be distinguished from the regret expressed by persons in the course of their private lives. If in the past wrongs resulted from official disrespect for persons, then representatives of that state, even if not personally involved in the injustices and committed to political change, as state representatives may be required to express regret.19 Perhaps, however, this merely situates the inconsistency at a deeper level, if the distinction between regret expressed by state representatives and ordinary citizens cannot be maintained. For consider that political regret requires specific public policies, which require the support of citizens not just after the fact as a matter of obedience to the law but before and after in deliberations. The politics of reconciliation would then seem in any case to require personal contrition. Responding to the refined challenge of inconsistency requires clarifying the nature of the regret required. I call this political regret. Political regret can be understood as an attitude involving the judgment of past injustices and the disposition to support policies honoring victims and activists. Political regret can be distinguished from shame and guilt. Philosophical accounts of shame and guilt often take them to be more deeply personal than regret. For example, Rawls holds that "both shame and regret are self-regarding, but shame implies an especially intimate connection with our person . . ."20 Alan Gibbard claims that "Shame stems from things that indicate a lack of the abilities, powers, or resources one needs if one is to be valued for one's cooperation and reciprocity. Guilt stems from things that indicate insufficient motivation."21 Shame and guilt would appear to be closely connected with personal responsibility. Political regret, on the other hand, does not require the imputation of personal responsibility. The representative of the state who says "I regret that our state carried out these atrocities" is not necessarily taking personal responsibility for the actions of the state. In order for shame or guilt to be generally appropriate for citizens of a state pursuing a course of reconciliation, it would have to be the case that simply in virtue of being a citizen of a state one bears responsibility for the actions of the state. Such responsibility might exist if a national community were "a dense web of customs, practices, [and] implicit understandings" partially constitutive of our personal identities.22 Or less generally, such responsibility might exist if those who take pride in the accomplishments of their nations are responsible for wrongdoing "via their imagination."23 But such accounts strain the notion of moral responsibility by attributing it in the absence of individual wrongdoing. The account that I have been presenting does not depend upon any such strained attribution of moral responsibility. Rather, regret may be appropriate even if one were not individually responsible. What I call political respect can be understood as analogous in certain respects to political regret. I assume that respect for persons involves, among other things, an attitude toward persons comprising various dispositions to act and to refrain from acting. To claim that one person respects another person is to claim, among other things, that there are certain actions that the first person can reliably be expected to do, or not, in relation to the second. Political respect can be taken as the attitude involving the disposition to obey just laws. Citizens may be required to observe laws that protect and promote equality, even if they cannot, and should not, be required to like one another, to be contrite, or to forgive. Both political regret and respect so understood may be necessary for reconciliation; and both can be encouraged by a state without unreasonably infringing on freedoms of thought and conscience. Policies of reconciliation may in this limited way be directed to the attitudes of persons: They may encourage certain judgments and affect certain dispositions to act. The judgments are limited to political morality, to the requirements of equal citizenship, and directed toward state responsibility. The dispositions to act, or refrain, are directed toward the requirements of the law and do not incorporate comprehensive moral conceptions. In this way, policies of reconciliation affect attitudes of persons, but only as citizens. The previous discussion touches on another criticism of the appropriateness of reconciliation as a political goal, namely that it is necessarily motivated by a comprehensive, and perhaps sectarian, worldview. In practice, of course, reconciliation sometimes has certain religious overtones. Indeed, one well-known version of reconciliation is Christian, based upon Apostle Paul's views. Once you were far off, but now in union with Christ Jesus you have been brought near through the shedding of Christ's blood. For he is himself our peace. Gentiles and Jews, he has made the two one, and in his own body of flesh and blood has broken down the barrier of enmity which separated them; for he annulled the law with its rules and regulations, so as to create out of the two a single new humanity in himself, thereby making peace. This was his purpose, to reconcile the two in a single body to God through the cross, by which he killed the enmity.24 According to Paul the crucifixion of Jesus uniquely provides the basis for reconciliation among human beings. Alternatively, Hegel's political philosophy takes reconciliation to be the central value that philosophical thinking can serve.25 Philosophy, according to Hegel, may serve the goal of reconciliation by demonstrating that the modern family, civil society, and state (the elements of Ethical Life) constitute the instantiation (or Idea) of freedom in and through which human self-consciousness comes to be actual. This condition Hegel also refers to as the "living good."26 A fundamental problem for the politics of reconciliation is that a history of mistrust and injustice creates societal divisions that are often enormous, rendering appeals to a common normative basis both necessary and parlous. Hence, policies of reconciliation must be able to, and in fact, be officially justified in terms of claims that are acceptable to people who hold different reasonable religious views of the good life.27 But the reasonable disagreement that surrounds both the Christian and the Hegelian conceptions of reconciliation render them ill suite
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