Political apologies: Collective responsibility and political ritual

In the last fifteen years of the twentieth century the political apology appeared in the repertoire of strategies for dealing with systematic human rights violations in the past. Understood as individual expressions of an inner regret, appropriate to the sphere of personal relationship or religion, their appearance on the political stage has been seen as a type of category mistake. In so far as apologies imply both collective and in some cases inter-generational responsibility, they also appear to contravene fundamental liberal principles.; To make sense of their proliferation in the political sphere, one needs to recognize that collective apologies represent a distinct form. Unlike the individual, personal apology, they are not representations or expressions of an internal, subjective emotion (regret), but are rather a form of public symbolic action directed to shifting political norms. This public, collective trope, though largely displaced in popular imagination by the individual, internal trope has a long and well-etched institutional and conceptual history both in Judaism and Christianity, and the contemporary phenomenon draws on this alternative grammar.; Political apologies provide a means for picking up on the collective dimension of responsibility for systematic violations, particularly those with a strong identity component, that is wrongs committed against particular groups. They address the background public norms that underpin violations by failing to recognize certain groups as full and equal members of the polity. By recognizing that the political apology works at the level of the collective norms that orient individual action, it is possible to build up a more complex conceptualization of responsibility where collective and individual dimensions are not in conflict.; Moreover, apology does not simply describe the normative problem but itself performs the normative shift. Ideally, the apology assumes responsibility for the wrong, condemns the problematic norms and so legitimizes the alternative norms and provides political recognition of the victim group and its experience of violation.; Understood as a form of collective ritual action, the political apology suggests a rethinking of the distinction between the modalities of religion and those of modern politics and of theoretical conceptions of the sphere of the political itself.