BOOK OF THE WEEK: GUILT OF NATIONS, ELAZAR BARKAN
As George Bush and his allies re-write the rules of international engagement, it pays to look at the new trends in global politics. In his The Guilt of Nations, Elazar Barkan identifies the trend towards *apology* and *restitution* as a key trend. Barkan highlights the restitution made by Germany to the Jews in the 1950s (payment of which was greeted by riots in Israel) as the model for later reconciliations, like the restitution paid to Japanese-American internees, Japanese apologies to Korean 'comfort women', Swiss restitution to Jews over 'Nazi Gold', Queen Elizabeth II's apology to the Maori, and the campaign for restitution for slavery.
Barkan notices that it was more Germany's desire for international acceptance than the demands of the World Jewish Congress that drove the pace of restitution paid Israel. Unfortunately, he fails to sustain the insight that the motor for restitution and apology is more likely to come from the perceived perpetrators than it is from the victims. So for example, the campaign for restitution for slavery was largely moribund until the Japanese-American internees won their case, reinvigorating slavery restitution. Though victims' desire for restitution can be assumed, the real thing that needs to be explained is why authorities that ignored past atrocities woke up to them, generally around the given moment of 1985-1995.
Barkan is astute in realising that the restitution movements displace the Marxist left as champions of the underdog, and that on the basis of a liberal notion of restitution, or compensation for past ills, instead of on the basis of meeting human needs and orienting to the future. But Barkan overstates the correspondence between restitution and the ideas of the European enlightenment that established the rule of reason and freedom of the individual. Restitution seems to restore the proper order of private property relations and protection of the person to events that threatened to destroy them. Calculations of injury belong to the civil courts' work of restoring loss on the basis of private property relations.
But though it seems to restore relations of private property, restitution should be seen more clearly as their internal decay. Features of restitution that Barkan notices but fails to highlight are the interminability of claims for compensation, and the creation of group rights to property that are neither shared ownership or sovereign control. Interminability is a profound problem for the market system that relies on breaking up social relationships into discrete exchanges with a given finality. Where private property stands perennially under the threat of expropriation, the interest in wealth-creation is threatened. Similarly, group rights, such as those enjoyed by American Indians, stand in contrast to the principle of individual freedom. Where group property is inalienable, as in reserved lands, tribe-members have found that it is they that belong to the land, rather than vice versa.
Barkan does not understand that the atrocities that lay the basis for the restitution movements are not a failure of liberal economies, but a special condition of their existence: all capitalist property is based upon original expropriation of communal property. A full restitution of that property stolen by Conquistadors, Slavers, enclosures and Scottish Landlords would cancel out private property altogether. Subsequent re-divisions of the world market, like the Second World War, are similarly a vicious condition of the reproduction of the capitalist system. If the compensation paid to German slave labour were extended to all coerced labour, then the post-war economic boom would not have happened - and not just in Germany but worldwide.
The drive to restitution says more about the ruling elite's own sense of its historical redundancy than it does about the challenge to it. It is the elite's own guilty self-loathing that is driving the movement to restitution. But ultimately restitution could succeed only in paralysing all social progress. And as Barkan warns; 'no restitution has lifted the burden of victimisation; instead it has routinized it'. Instead of seeking to undo the past, it is time to build a new future.
Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices, Norton, 2000
-- James Heartfield