Possible Solvency advocate

Klein, and Fouksman, 2021 (Elise, Senior lecturer @Australian National University, Elizaveta, Lecturer at King’s College London, Reparations as a Rightful Share: From Universalism to Redress in Distributive Justice, Development and Change, Volume 53(1): 31-57)

There are intersections between redistributory universalism and reparative redress. In many cases, the links between class and race can be reflected in statistics of poverty. However, this can also hide the way in which race has been the grammar of unequal relations and has justified expropriation and exploitation in places like the US since colonization. This is also the case in Australia, where ignoring the ways in which race and coloniality have impacted and continue to impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ignores aspects of settler colonialism that are not only about economic dispossession, but also about racism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Yet (re)distribution must be as much a key part of reparatory justice as is recognition. As Nancy Fraser (2003, 2005) has pointed out, recognition without redistribution holds the danger of displacing struggles for economic justice—an issue that Fraser argues has plagued feminism in recent decades (Fraser, 2005: 298). The negotiations between Namibia and Germany around the Herero-Nama genocide are another example: while Germany is willing to recognize the genocide, and give some additional development aid as part of this recognition, it has declined to term the accompanying payment ‘reparations’, fearing to set a precedent for other or larger redistributive claims to reparative payments. Fraser has argued that both recognition and substantive redistribution are equally essential parts of social justice; one cannot be forsaken in favour of the other. Here we have built on that argument to make the case that the two are in fact intertwined in justice-based claims for shares of collective wealth. All three cases illustrate common themes. While the US is a post-slavery society, it is also a settler colonial state, and insights from the Australian case have resonance for Native Americans in the US who also have substantive claims for reparative justice. The US case gave us one possibility on how mechanisms of distributive justice can also do some measure of reparative work via universal, redistributive and individual payments framed as a rightful share. A U+BI contends with some of the issues of recognition and redress raised in this article. While it is universal in scope and rightful in framing, the addition of the plus includes recognition of specific historical ills in need of reparative justice. The Australian case also suggested avenues that could accompany reparations, showing how not just recognition but also sovereignty could include specific national truth-telling processes, returning of land rights and self-determination, along with a U+BI or other forms of reparative redistribution. These reparative packages would need to be directed by Indigenous peoples themselves. Decentralized and decolonial cosmopolitanism — such as a global UBI framed as reparations for colonialism and its after-effects — may help fulfil reparations for post independence injustice. However, these payments need to also transcend nation state boundaries and connect with people that are stateless, or diaspora dispersed because of colonialism and slavery. We have made the case that reparative justice must become a key part of conceptualizing claims for distributional justice or claims to a share of collective wealth. This is both for instrumental and intrinsic reasons. Universal forms of distributive justice that do not consider claims to redress can do damage, for instance if, in settler colonial states and post-independent states, a universal basic income is used to mute claims to more radical forms of redistribution as well as sovereignty or self-governance. At the same time, we contend that if claims to distribution are based on a historical case around the communal creation of wealth by past generations, then this view must also encompass the ways this wealth creation has been intertwined with a global history of racist expropriation. Thus, in conceptualizing claims to distributive justice, we must take into account claims for reparative justice, particularly as they highlight the limits of nation state boundaries and the importance of recognition and redress for past and contemporary harms. Only then can what is rightful also encompass the right to atonement and redress.