From historical to enduring injustice

Political Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 5, 2007, Pages 574-597

  Spinner Halev, Jeff ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

collective memory; historical injustice; past injustice; responsibility

Indexed keywords

EID: 34548331682     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591707304585     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963).
2. When a government is the perpetrator, I mean all or nearly all of the people alive at the time of the injustice are now dead. By this definition, Holocaust victims or Japanese Americans sent to internment camps in the United States during World War II who are alive today are not part of the conceptual framework of historical injustice.
3. While some people dispute the point of whether African Americans are still victims of injustice, neither advocates nor skeptics of rectifying historical injustice do so, and I assume this injustice (and that of Native Americans) here.
4. The basic problem with alleviating an injustice to an individual done many years back is that it is hard to determine who is responsible for alleviating the injustice, how it might be done, or even whether the injustice has had lasting effects. A person may flee a country because of an injustice, but she and her ancestors may flourish in the new land. This argument is more fully developed in George Sher, "Ancient Wrongs and Modern Rights," Philosophy and Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (1981): 3-17.
5. See also Christopher Kutz, "Justice in Reparations: The Cost of Memory and the Value of Talk," Philosophy and Public Affairs 32, no. 3 (2004): 277-312.
6. Duncan Ivison, Robert Sparrow, Chandran Kukathas, Burke Hendrix, and A. John Simmons only discuss indigenous peoples in their arguments. Tamar Meisels discusses indigenous peoples and Jews, Renée Hill and Janna Thompson discuss African Americans and indigenous peoples, while Michael Ridge and Thomas McCarthy discuss African Americans. Duncan Ivison, "Political Community and Historical Injustice," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 3 (2000): 360-73;
7. Burke A. Hendrix, "Memory in Native American Land Claims," Political Theory 33, no. 6 (2005): 763-85;
8. Chandran Kukathas, "Responsibility for the Past: How to Shift the Burden," Politics, Philosophy and Economics 2, no. 2 (2003): 165-90;
9. A. John Simmons, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
10. Robert Sparrow, "History and Collective Responsibility," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 3 (2000): 346-59;
11. Renée A. Hill, "Compensatory Justice: Over Time and between Groups," Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 4 (2002): 392-415;
12. Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice (Cambridge: Polity, 2002);
13. and Thomas McCarthy, "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery," Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004): 750-72.
14. Kukathas also discusses victims of misdeeds by church, officials. Among the skeptics, Waldron and Lyons focus on indigenous peoples. David Lyons, "The New Indian Claims and Original Rights to Land," Social Theory and Practice 4, no. 3 (1977): 249-72;
15. and Jeremy Waldron, "Superseding Historic Injustice," Ethics 103, no. 4 (1992): 4-28.
16. For the latter of these injustices, see Barry Broadfoot, Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame: The Story of the Japanese Canadians in World War II (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1977);
17. and Geoffrey Gilbert Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples of Acadia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
18. The dean of an Egyptian law school has recently announced that he is investigating suing all the Jews in the world for taking items from Egypt during the Exodus. Though it would seem that the Jews would have a more powerful case for compensation for their slave labor during their years under the Pharaohs, both cases seem silly. Bruce Birnbaum, "A Family Deposition: Should Egypt Receive Reparations for the Exodus?" Atlantic Monthly, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200401/birnbaum (accessed February 14, 2007).
19. Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past; McCarthy, "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II";
20. Brian A. Weiner, Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005);
21. and Kukathas, "Responsibility for the Past." The quotation is McCarthy's (757). For similar arguments about history and responsibility, see Farid Abdel-Nour, "National Responsibility," Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003): 693-719; Ivison, "Political Community and Historical Injustice"; and Sparrow, "History and Collective Responsibility." I return to the argument about responsibility below. Michael Ridge is one of the few advocates who does not focus on history and responsibility. He argues that liberal states owe compensation to the actual victims of historical injustice. If they are dead, liberal states can benefit them by satisfying their desires. There are many possible desires, though, like revenge that may have negative consequences for innocent people oday. To allay this objection, Ridge argues that the desires that can be satisfied must be worthwhile and not constitute a moral vice.
22. Under these constraints, Ridge argues that the dead would want their descendants to flourish, which he interprets to mean promoting the welfare of the descendants in the standard liberal redistributive sense, a conclusion the skeptics would agree with. Michael Ridge, "Giving the Dead Their Due," Ethics 114, no. 1 (2003): 38-59.
23. Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past;
24. and Thomas McCarthy, "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in the USA: On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery," Political Theory 30, no. 5 (2002): 623-48.
25. Duncan Ivison gestures toward a different argument, which inches closer to explaining why the history of the injustice matters, when he maintains that indigenous and nonindigenous peoples do not share a common, framework of justice. I doubt this is the case; one might say that one key problem was the way that Western peoples viewed their own rules of justice with contempt when it came to indigenous peoples, by forcing indigenous peoples to sign treaties which were often then violated by Western governments; or by simply kicking indigenous peoples off the land, even though doing so violated key Western principles of property. Despite my disagreements with his argument, I do think. Ivison is right to hone in on the problem of justice, as I explain in the next section. Duncan Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
26. For American violations of treaties and their own understanding of justice, see Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2005).
27. Waldron, "Superseding Historic Injustice"; Sher, "Ancient Wrongs and Modern Rights"; Lyons, "Original Rights to Land"; and Richard Vernon, "Against Restitution," Political Studies 51, no. 3 (2003): 542-57.
28. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
29. Avishai Margalit elaborates on this point in The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
30. Vernon, "Against Restitution," 552. David Lyons argues that Native Americans have "a valid claim to a fair share of its [the United States' ] resources as well as to social and economic opportunities"; Lyons, "Original Rights to Land," 268.
31. Waldron, "Superseding Historic Injustice," 20.
32. Waldron is clear in his conclusion that the main subject of his essay is indigenous peoples, which he begins this way:
33. It is important that defenders of aboriginal claims face up to the possibility of the supersession of historic injustice. Even if this particular thesis about supersession is mistaken, some account has to be given of the impact on aboriginal claims and on the reparation of generations-old injustices on the demographic and ecological changes that have taken place. (Ibid., 27)
34. See particularly Lyons, "Original Rights to Land"; see too Simmons, Justification and Legitimacy, ch. 11.
35. See Hill, "Compensatory Justice"; McCarthy, "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in the USA"; McCarthy, "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II"; and Ridge, "Giving the Dead Their Due." Thompson also discusses Black Americans in terms of redistribution, though she does gesture at other sorts of arguments. Janna Thompson, "Historical Injustice and Reparation: Justifying Claims of Descendants," Ethics 112, no. 1 (2001): 114-35.
36. I can only briefly speculate here on why some broken collective narratives are overcome, while others are not. I suspect that when the break is not particularly severe or did not forcibly overturn a way of life, the narrative can be repaired. A bent narrative can be more readily repaired than a broken one. If there is a significant element of voluntary choice in the break, then it is probably more feasible to chart a new narrative than when the break is forced. Many immigrants did not fully choose to leave their homeland, but nonetheless some element of choice is often involved in their leaving, which I suspect eases their way into their new life, particularly for their children. There may be some longing for their old life, but there is also a determination to begin a new life.
37. United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980).
38. Aileen Yoo, "Kosovo: The Jerusalem of Serbia," Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/overview/ kosovo.htm (accessed February 14, 2007);
39. William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1998);
40. and Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
41. Sacred Land Film Project, "Black Hills," http://www.sacredland. org/historical_sites_pages/black_hills.html (accessed November 20, 2006); and United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians.
42. Greta Lynn Uehling, Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars' Deportation and Return (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
43. See generally Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983);
44. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991);
45. and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
46. My emphasis here is on identity, not culture. For the importance of this distinction, see Margaret Moore, The Ethics of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200.1), ch. 3.
47. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land;
48. Linda S. Parker, Native American Estate: The Struggle over Indian and Hawaiian Lands (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989);
49. and Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
50. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, abridged ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 344.
51. See the discussion of memory and history in Melissa Williams, Voice, Trust and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
52. I do not want to delve into the political details about how these judgments should be made, but international organizations like the UN or European-wide institutions can devise ways to do so.
53. A classic source on the genocide is from Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to Turkey at the time. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1918).
54. See also Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed, 2004);
55. and Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St. Martin's, 1992). I focus on the Armenian case here, but a similar case is the denial or belittling in Japan of a massacre and rape of thousands of Chinese that took place at Nanking in 1937-1938 by Japanese soldiers.
56. On the way the Nanking massacre has been portrayed in Japanese, Chinese, and American collective memory, see Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the "Rape of Nanking": History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
57. My argument here is different from the Rawlsian conception of self-respect in A Theory of Justice. Rawls argues that without self-respect, people will not find their plans and projects worth pursuing. Rawls's conception is individualistic, while my version of dignity here is tied to the group, and has little to do with the plans and projects of individuals, which are tied to the Rawlsian conception.
58. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), §67.
59. In The Law of Peoples, Rawls briefly mentions self-respect in a way that is more akin to my use of dignity here, as something that a people as a whole may or may not have.
60. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 34-35.
61. I elaborate on this idea in Jeff Spinner-Halev, "Democracy, Solidarity and the Possibility of Post-Nationalism," Political Studies, forthcoming.
62. See too Hendrix, "Memory in Native American Land Claims."
63. Thompson, discusses trust extensively in part 1 of Taking Responsibility for the Past;
64. Ivison discusses trust in Postcolonial Liberalism;
65. while Hendrix discusses it very briefly in "Memory in Native American Land Claims." See too Williams, Voice, Trust and Memory, for her argument on Black Americans and trust.
66. Susan Moller Okin, '"Mistresses of Their Own Destiny:' Group Rights, Gender and Realistic Rights of Exit," Ethics 112, no. 2 (2002): 205-30;
67. Susan Moller Okin, "Multiculturalism and Feminism: No Simple Question, No Simple Answers," in Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights, Diversity, ed. Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
68. Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200.1);
69. and Sarah Song, Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
70. For an extended reply, see Jeff Spinner-Halev, "Feminism, Multiculturalism, Oppression and the State," Ethics 112, no. 1 (2001): 84-113.
71. John Borrows, "Re-Living the Present: Title, Treaties, and the Trickster in British Columbia," BC Studies, no. 120 (1998/1999): 99-108.
72. expand on this argument in Spinner-Halev, "Feminism, Multiculturalism, Oppression and the State." See too Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism;
73. and Margaret Moore, "Internal Minorities and Indigenous Self-Determination," in Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev, Minorities within Minorities.
74. See note 8, above, including the accompanying text. One exception is Tamar Meisels, "Can Corrective Justice Ground Claims to Territory?" Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2003): 65-88.
75. A description of these deportations can be found in J. Otto Pohl, "Stalin's Genocide against 'Repressed Peoples,'" Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 2 (2000): 267-93.
76. Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past; and Kukathas, "Responsibility for the Past."
77. Jonathan Hartlyn and Arturo Valenzuela, "Democracy in Latin America since 1930," in Latin America: Politics and Society since 1930, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
78. Some recent Latin American governments have in fact taken strides to be more attentive to the needs of indigenous peoples. See Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
79. Variations of this argument include Kukathas, "Responsibility for the Past"; Sparrow, "History and Collective Responsibility"; and McCarthy, "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II."
80. Waldron, "Superseding Historic Injustice."
81. How to share the land will depend in part on where people currently live, environmental considerations, political realities, and so on. In the case of the Tatars, they can be given the opportunity to buy land (and perhaps be given the funds to do so) in their ancestral home-land without much trouble; in the case of the Palestinians, partition into two states, with, return to the Palestinian, state for Palestinian refugees, might make more sense. The Chechens, also expelled during World War II, were able to return to their ancestral homeland in the late 1950s. See Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
82. UNESCO, "World Heritage," http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/ (accessed February 14, 2007).
83. Michael Luo, "Iraq's Christians Flee as Extremist Threat Worsens," New York Times, October 17, 2006;
84. and Michael Kuser, "Iraqi Catholic Asylum Seekers in Turkey Suffer Neglect and Poverty," Turkish Daily News, December 6, 2006.
85. McCarthy, "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in the USA." See too Hendrix for a similar argument in the context of Native Americans, "Memory in Native American Land Claims."