Justice in Reparations: The Cost of Memory and the Value of Talk

Abstract

Justice in Reparations:The cost of memory and the value of talk 1.Central and Eastern Europe's latter-day history has consisted in a number of spectacularly failed experiments in political philosophy. Communism's failure brought with it an important set of lessons; and in the former Soviet Union since 1989, the failure of unbounded capitalism has confirmed some important truths about healthy polities, for example the crucial role played by social trust in civil society, and the importance of a functioning tax and regulatory system. One important set of lessons, however, is yet to be fully distilled. These lessons arise from Central Europe's recent attempts to undo the expropriations and deprivations that occurred during the forcible transformation of peasants and bourgeoisie, institutions and individuals, from free-holders in land into unlanded participants in socialism.Many others, of course, were losers under state socialism: those denied a choice of career, freedom to travel, possibilities of political agency. But losing land has had a special salience, partly because of the special role land ownership plays in social memory, and partly because the formerly landed often have other assets, and are able to mobilize political forces effectively. Thus, the restoration of expropriated property in kind or in value has been a legislative priority in the new states. The programs themselves have varied greatly in pace, ambition, efficiency, and scope. Any complete assessment of the success or failure of these programs must be highly local and contextual. Taken together, however, they pose a common problem: what should a state do when deprivation and injustice are systematic, their correction Kutz, Justice in Reparations.2 necessarily piecemeal, and other projects of social repair are pressing? How much public attention and how many public resources are the victims of expropriation entitled to claim?Here I take up the issue of land reparations in transitional democracies because of its intrinsic interest, and because it raises a number of deep issues in political, moral, and legal theory. These include the limits of legitimate political transformation, the relation of corrective to distributive justice, the value of purely symbolic political action, and the significance of place to identity among the goods promoted by a liberal state. Although these questions have force outside the transitional context, they have a special urgency and clarity within it. 1 I will assume that reparations programs are generally permissible, assuming they are put into place by reasonably democratic processes that take account of, even if they do not accede to, the wishes of The Symbolic Worth of ReparationsIn philosophical and political theory, the functions of national claims and gestures of repair are varied and not wholly consistent. Claims of repair sound in two registers, individual and collective, and are best treated separately. At the individual level, and in the most literal sense, a claim of repair is a claim to be made whole, t...

Is there a Future for ‘Jus ex Bello’?

“…When they considered war, theologians in premodern times initiated their moral discussion by focusing on its onset. Today, lawyers, philosophers and the military themselves are more and more preoccupied by the later stages of conflicts (Kutz, ; de Greiff, ).…”

La justice pénale internationale, entre idéaux et justification

“…La dimension cathartique qui accompagne les témoignages permettrait aux témoins, en leur donnant l'occasion de faire le récit de leurs souffrances, de les valoriser comme agents moraux retrouvant de la sorte leur dignité (Ricoeur, 2000, pp. 627-628 ;Kutz, 2004 ;pour une critique, voir Stover, 2005). Enfin, la possibilité d'échanger la vérité contre l'amnistie, comme ce fut notamment le cas dans la Commission de vérité et réconciliation sud-africaine, permettrait de mieux identifier les chaînes de responsabilités qui ont conduit aux crimes.…”

Reparations and Racial Inequality

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A chief function of reparations movements is to create and hallow a particular set of memories, to restore to collective consciousness events otherwise obscured by official histories and “common sense” as defined by dominant groups. (Kutz 2004: 283)

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