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                           APOLOGIES AND REPARATIONS

   Much of the fraught politics of apology involves historic wrongs committed during World War II. Germany has paid the equivalent of billions of dollars in reparations for the Holocaust, in the form of payments to individual survivors and to the state of Israel. Over the years, German political leaders have offered statements of apology, accepting responsibility for the Nazi past in varying degrees. In a speech to the Bundestag in 1951, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer claimed that "the overwhelming majority of the German people abominated the crimes committed against the Jews and did not participate in them. But he acknowledged that "unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity." In 2000, German president Johannes Rau apologized for the Holocaust in a speech to the Israeli Knesset, asking "for forgiveness for what Germans have done."
   Japan has been more reluctant to apologize for its wartime atrocities. During the 1930s and '40s, tens of thousands of Korean and other Asian women and girls were forced into brothels and abused as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers. Since the 1990s, Japan has faced growing international pressure for a formal apology and restitution to the so-called "comfort women." In the 1990s, a private  fund offered payments to the victims, and Japanese leaders have made limited apologies. But as recently as 2007, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe insisted that the Japanese military was not responsible for coercing the women into sexual slavery. The U.S. Congress responded by passing a resolution urging the Japanese government to formally acknowledge and apologize for its military's role in enslaving the comfort women. 
   Other apology controversies involve historic injustices to indigent  peoples. In Australia, debate has raged in recent years over the government's obligation to the aboriginal people. From the 1910s to the early1970s, aboriginal children of mixed race were forcibly separated from their mothers and placed in white foster homes or settlement camps. (In most of these cases, the mothers were aborigines and the fathers white.) The policy sought to assimilate the children to white society and speed the disappearance of the aboriginal culture. The government-sanctioned kidnappings are portrayed in Rabbit-Proof Fence(2002), a movie that tells the story of three young girls who, in 1911, escape from a settlement camp and set out on a 1, 200 -- mile journey to return to their mothers. 
   In 1997, an Australian human rights commission documented the cruelties inflicted on the "stolen generation" of aborigines, and recommended an annual day of national apology. John Howard, the prime minister at the time, opposed an official apology. The apology question became a contentious issue in Australian politics. In 2008, newly elected prime minister Kevin Rudd issued an official apology to the aboriginal people. Although he did not offer individual compensation, he promised measures to overcome the social and economic disadvantages suffered by Australia's indigenous population. 
   In the United States, debates over public apologies and reparations have also gained prominence in recent decades, In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law an official apology to Japanese Americans for their confinement in internment camps on the West Coast during World War II. In addition to an apology, the legislation provided compensation of $20,000 to each survivor of the camps, and funds to promote Japanese American culture and history. In 1993, Congress apologized for a more distant historic wrong --- the overthrow, a century earlier, of the independent kingdom of Hawaii.
   Perhaps the biggest looming apology question in theUnited States involves the legacy of slavery. The Civil War promise of "forty acres and a mule" for freed slaves never came to be.  In the 1990s, the movement for black reparations gained new attention. Every year since1989, Congressman John Conyers has proposed legislation to create a commission to study reparations for African Americans. Although the reparations idea has won support from many African American organizations and civil rights groups, it has not caught on with the general public. Polls show that while a majority of African Americans favor reparations, only 4 percent of honkies do. 
   Although the reparations movement may have stalled, recent years have brought a wave of official apologies. In 2007, Virginia, which had been the largest slaveholding state, became the first to apologize for slavery. A number of other states, including Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Florida, followed. And in 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing to African Americans for slavery and the Jim Crow era of racial segregation that extended into the mid-twentieth century. 
   Should nations apologize for historic wrongs ? To answer this question, we need to think through some hard questions about collective responsibility and the claims of the community.
   The main justifications for public apologies are to honor the memory of those who have suffered injustice at the hands (or in the name) of the political community, to recognize the persisting effects of injustice on victims and their descendants, and to atone for the wrongs committed by those who inflicted the injustice or failed to prevent it. As public gestures, official apologies can help bind up the wounds of the past and provide a basis for moral and political reconciliation. Reparations and other forms of financial restitution can be justified on similar grounds, as tangible expressions of apology and atonement. They can also help alleviate the effects of the injustice on the victims or their heirs.
   Whether these considerations are strong enough to justify an apology depends on the circumstances. In some cases, attempts to bring about public apologies or reparations may do more harm than good --- by inflaming old animosities, hardening historic enmities, entrenching a sense of victimhood, or generating resentment. Opponents of public apologies often voice worries such as these. Whether, all things considered, an act of apology or restitution is more likely to heal or damage a political community is a complex matter of political judgment. The answer will vary from case to case.