The done thing

George W. Bush, judging by his repeated invocations, thinks that time will eventually prove that he was right. He is not alone in putting his faith in the future. We all call a lot on history these days as the impartial tribunal which will eventually dole out the gold stars and the black marks. We also seem to think that we set past wrongs right by making apologies to groups and individuals. A descendant of that Elizabethan freebooter, Jack Hawkins, has apologised for slavery; post-war Germany apologised and made recompense for the Nazi crimes against the Jews; and the Australian and Canadian governments have said sorry for their treatment of their aboriginals.

It is easy to be cynical about some of this. Apologies, at least in democracies, are today’s fashion. The Canadian government has had a field day apologising for past policies towards a series of ethnic groups: Italian, Ukrainian, Sikh, Chinese, Japanese and Jews. (It might just have something to do with getting votes.) And how far back do we have to go in accepting guilt for what our ancestors did? While it is easy and correct to say that the Germans who both committed and profited from the murder of the Jews and the theft of their property owed restitution to the survivors, it is more difficult to determine what the United States owes the descendants of the slaves whose ancestors were transported from Africa to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries. And how much should we judge the past by the standards of the present? Should the Canadian government apologise and pay compensation for imposing a head tax on immigrants from China in the first half of the 20th century? At the time the public supported deterring migration from China; today such policies are seen as abhorrent and racist.

These are important issues and so Melissa Nobles’ judicious and sober study is a welcome addition to what is sometimes an overheated debate. An American political scientist, she examines the process by which official apologies have happened in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and why an apology for slavery has not yet happened in the United States. On the whole she does so with a welcome absence of jargon, although there are occasional lapses into academese, as for example when she tells us that an apology can change ‘emotional dispositions’.

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