I accept that collective punishment is always wrong. I can't think of an instance when it wasn't an excuse for revenge or repression of the lowest sort. But collective atonement is not always wrong -- and therefore, neither is collective guilt. The guilt that Germans have felt for the Holocaust has been in many ways a salutory and sometimes even a radical impulse. I wish the Americans and British felt as much guilt for their genocides. Similarly, it doesn't seem wrong to me for a citizen of an OECD country to feel the first world owes the third world a debt of atonement for ravages of colonialism both classical and neo. So long as all national action is collective; so long as all national identity is collective; and so long as we think that international politics has a moral dimension; then some sort of notion of collective guilt seems inescapably implied by those premises. Not, I underline again, as a warrant for punishment, but as a framework for assigning blame. That is to say: collective guilt is moral guilt, not criminal guilt. Using it for punishment is a perversion of law, not a perversion of morality. (It removes the individual and universal dimensions that both define modern law and provide its legitimacy.)
Benedict Anderson wrote something interesting along these lines in the current New Left Review (235, in "The Promise of Nationalism," an address on the immediate past and future of Indonesia). There he argues that collective guilt is indispensible to a nationalism worth having. (And that in Indonesia, a nationalism worth having would be the best of all possible options.)
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In a book I recently published, half-jokingly I put forward the slogan "Long Live Shame!" Why so? Because I think that no one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling "ashamed" if her state or government commits crimes, including those agianst her fellow citizens. Although she had done nothing individually that is bad, as a member of the common project, she will feel morally implicated in everything done in that project's name.
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Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com