Repairing Historical Wrongs and the End of Empire

Abstract

It is a truism to say that we live in a world that has been deeply shaped by imperialism. The history of humanity is, in many ways, a story of the attempted and achieved subjugation of one people by another, and it is unsurprising that such interaction has had profound effects on the contemporary world, affecting cultural understandings of community identity; the composition of, and boundaries between, modern day states; and the distribution of resources between different communities. This article addresses the claim that some contemporary states may possess obligations to pay reparations as a result of the lasting effects of a particular form of historic imperialism: colonialism (Ferro 1997: 1-23, Larsen, 2000. Claims about the harms and benefits caused by colonialism must make some kind of comparison between the world as it currently is, and a counterfactual state where the injustice which characterised so much of historic interaction between colonisers and the colonised did not occur. Rather than imagining a world a world where there was no such interaction, this article maintains that the appropriate counterfactual is one where relations between different communities were characterized by an absence of domination and exploitation. This means that current day states may possess reparative duties which are much more extensive than is often supposed.Quite what it means for a form of interaction to be "colonial" is disputed. Osterhammel defines colonialism as "a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders" and notes that "the fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis". (1997: 16-17) Such a general description masks the very wide 2 range of practices which could be described in such terms: Young writes that colonialism "involved an extraordinary range of different forms and practices carried out with respect to radically different cultures, over many centuries", and lists examples including settler colonies such as British North America, Australia and New Zealand, French Algeria, and Portuguese Brazil; administered territories established without significant settlement for the purposes of economic exploitation, such as American Philippines and Puerto Rico, British India, Dutch East Indies, German Togo or Japanese Taiwan; and maritime enclaves, such as American Guantánamo, British Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, and Singapore (2001: 17). While there is great variety in terms of the experience of colonized peoples, it is nowadays commonplace to maintain that the domination that they suffered at the hands of the We recognize that colonialism has led to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent, and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences. We acknowledg...

The Paradox of Administrative Decentralization Reform in Young Asian Democracies:South Korea and Indonesia

“…The 1974 Decentralization Bill could not be implemented due to resistance from government employees of several central administrative bodies and a relevant plan in the early 1990s also failed due to financial problems. These situations worsened the so‐called “rich provinces and poor people” problem, which refers to the situation wherein resource‐rich regions were subjected to Jakarta's economic, military, and bureaucratic controls and exploitation (Butt 2010).…”

Colonialism and Postcolonialism

“…However, this is not the only, and arguably not the most appropriate, way to calculate who has won and who has lost. It may better to imagine a counterfactual where there was extensive interaction, fully consensual in nature, that took place in a context of nondomination and nonexploitation, and which would seemingly require very substantial levels of compensation in some cases (Butt 2012). Third, one may expand one's understanding of the wrongs committed in the colonial period to encompass failures to fulfill duties of distributive justice.…”

The Beneficiary Pays Principle and Strict Liability: exploring the normative significance of causal relations

“…Accepting such a corrective principle is almost certain to have many important implications in many areas of political philosophy, including on the questions of who holds remedial duties for the damages of climate change (Gosseries 2004;S h u e1999) or for the past injustices committed by colonial powers (Butt 2012). The literature is divided between those who think that such a principle has independent normative force (Haydar and Øverland 2014;Butt 2007;Goodin and Barry 2014) and those who think that the principle has no independent normative force and that the cases where beneficiaries owe remedial duties to victims of injustice can be accounted for by reference to other principles (Huseby 2013;Knight 2013).…”