Reparations can recenter histories and memories previously lost to expose past and ongoing violence

The great historical crimes of the last two centuries--slavery, genocide, mass internment, strategic bombing of civilian centers, Stalinist political repression, Maoist political "re-education'-mix elements of both these categories. On the one hand, these crimes exemplify the denial of their victims' humanity. Indeed, political leaders brought about many of these crimes precisely by getting the direct actors (soldiers, commissars, police, pilots) to see their victims as non-human. Either the victims' suffering simply failed to register; or the suffering was not seen as suffering at all but as a form of healthy discipline for the victims. This suggests that the mechanisms of reparative justice, namely confrontation and compensation, could be an important part of the moral reconstruction of the nation. This is part of the justification for the creation of international criminal tribunals to prosecute human rights violations and war crimes, for example, in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. And it occupies a central role in the contemporary U.S. movement for slavery reparations. Slavery's individual victims and perpetrators are long departed, but its institutional legacy lives on in many forms: mate-rially, in white-black disparities in wealth, income, and education, and socially, in white-black differences in status and vulnerability to official power. The point of reparations in this context is not, by and large, individual book-balancing, but rather mustering a national will to confront and take collective responsibility for slavery's long-term legacy.? On the other hand, often the very possibility of efforts at reparative justice only arises with a change of regimes, when many of the political leaders and direct offenders have disappeared from the scene (as well as their victims in the more lethal instances).® Confrontation in these cases will often be impossible, as will compensation for the victims them-selves. Moreover, even if the perpetrators are accessible to justice, the only legitimate sentence in cases of genocide or human rights violations will be life imprisonment. Repair of the personal relationship between victims and perpetrators is beside the point. When the relationship between perpetrators and victims is irrecoverable, the aim of reparative justice is not, strictly speaking, repair at all. It is, rather, the creation of a new political community, one less likely to create classes of victims, with a future lived in the shadow of its past. Post-war Germany's undertaking of massive reparations was aimed at restoring the lives of Holocaust survivors, and at protecting international Jewry through support of Israel; but another significant desired effect was that, in paying the reparations, the German public would be forced to accept a long-term burden of atonement. In short, gestures of repair help constitute the identity of a transforming nation. Despite the truth in Ernest Renan's famous aphorism, that forgetting lies at the heart of the nation, collective memory is also essential to the construction of a national identity.I° A chief function of reparations movements is to create and hallow a particular set of mem-ories, to restore to collective consciousness events otherwise obscured by official histories and "common sense" as defined by dominant groups. More ambitiously, a reparations movement oriented around recovery from an entire regime, as in Eastern Europe or South Africa, aims at the birth of an entirely new national consciousness. It is with such movements that the truth of Renan's observation re-emerges. He referred to the wars and conquests among peoples bitterly divided that become, in national myths, stories of ancient racial or religious unity. Reparations movements also aim, paradoxically, at instilling a forgetting, erasing an injustice and the festering resentments that resulted. The ideal of equal citizenship at the heart of democratic culture is one that can be sustained only through a forgetting of the differences in status and power that run through any nation. (In this sense, the ideal of democracy itself is a forgetting of facts of dominance and inequality, replaced by a dream of equality and the common good.) A different form of forgetting accompanies collective demands voiced by cultural or ethnic minorities who seek the return of traditional and sacred lands and buildings. Their wish is to restore a way of life made unlivable by prior regimes. Even if the land is unreturnable, for example because profaned, groups may seek money reparations to pay for rebuilding and relocation, or to try to reverse a diasporic trend by attracting former and would-be members of the group. The wish here is not for political inclusion but, to use Charles Taylor's term, recognition of the group's distinct identity and history." As Taylor argues, demands for recognition are claims of dignity, claims that the distinctive cultural formation of a group is not merely a curiosity but a splendor of the nation. Claims of recognition are, in effect, demands that members of the dominant group learn to see in a certain way; that they bring into focus the distinct normative contours of individuals or groups otherwise obscured in a nation's history of expansion, colonization, or cultural homoge-nization. This is a democratic appeal as much as an aesthetic pitch, for the claim is not (just) that a culture matters because it has produced something of beauty. Rather, a culture's beauty consists centrally in its being a presentation of its creators' humanity. Contra Joseph de Maistre, such claimants demand to be seen both as members of a nation and as (hu)mankind.'2 It follows that a dying culture's appeals are not simply calls for a new truth-telling in history, for they are invariably acts of creative nostalgia, and so are also acts of Renanian forgetting. As with the construction of national identity, so the reconstruction of a tribal identity involves an imagined past, a consolidation of tradition and ritual. Indeed, a reparative movement, whether or not successful, may be one of the only ways for a cultural group to create unity out of frag-mentation. (As I will argue below, the claim of necessity gives cultural groups priority over other claimants to reparative justice in the European context.) Across all these contexts the demand for reparations shares a common function: to demonstrate the legal and moral subjectivity of the victims. The demand for repair makes clear not just that suffering occurred, but that it was felt by a person, someone with interests akin to those of the injurer. In the political analogue to this moral point, victims seek re-inclusion in the community as moral and political agents, subjects of a universal kingdom of ends. To skeptics of moralism, the demand for repair represents a form of magical thinking according to which an actual history of subordination of the dominated to raw power can be replaced and reversed through subordination of the dominant to justice. Part of the appeal of the reparations movement is the power it gives to the claimants to determine the state of the national conscience. We need not agree with Nietzsche that morality's triumph represents victory of subterfuge over strength to see that morality does represent a form of power for the weak-indeed, to see that as its virtue. That power should breed fantasies of revenge, cloaked as demands of repair, is simply to acknowledge its attractions.