The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 23, Number 3, 2015, pp.

261281

Theorising the Political Apology*

Stephen Winter
Politics and International Relations, University of Auckland

P EOPLE disagree over what political apologies are, and over what makes them
better or worse. Those differences revolve around different answers to the
question, Who is apologising? Some view the apologiser as an aggregate of
individuals, others as a collective, and yet others as a political institution. Those
different views provide the foundations for three contrasting accounts of the
political apologys constitution, value, and justification. I shall argue for the
superiority of the third (institutional) account of political apology, contending
that the law-making authority of political institutions distinguishes political
apologies from those made by individuals, private corporations, and churches.1
States have, or aim to have, political authority. That authoritative character
underpins both unique conditions for justifying political apologies and a distinct
set of qualitative criteria.
The article concerns descriptive accounts of political apologies for
wrongdoing.2 Apologies that aim to rectify wrongdoing constitute the
conceptually central case. Therefore, I do not discuss other apologetic
forms (such as those of courtesy).3 Furthermore, I am not concerned with
apologies provided by politicians for personal transgressions. Instead, the article
concerns official apologies, examples of which include apologies for policies of
colonialism, ethnic discrimination, and slavery. The next section describes an
example of such an apology: Canadas 2008 apology to indigenous residential
schools survivors. I then set out a minimal account of apologetic practice before

*I acknowledge helpful comments on earlier versions on this article by Geoff Kemp, Kathy Smits,
Martin Wilkinson, Chris Wilson, and Roxane Winter. My thanks also to audiences at the New
Zealand Political Studies Associations 2013 conference in Christchurch and a 2014 seminar in
Auckland. I also benefited from detailed comments provided by two anonymous reviewers for the
Journal and the work of its editorial staff.
1
The argument is restricted to domestic apologies. A parallel international account would
describe the conditions of international legitimacy and therefore involve different considerations. For
discussion, see Mark Gibney and Erik Roxstrom, The status of state apologies, Human Rights
Quarterly, 23 (2001), 91139; Catherine Lu, Colonialism as structural injustice: historical
responsiblity and contemporary redress, Journal of Political Philosophy, 19 (2011), 26181.
2
For discussion, see Nick Smith, I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1403.
3
The central case approach is outlined in John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 911.

2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

doi: 10.1111/jopp.12047
262 STEPHEN WINTER

using that account to describe and critique individual and collective approaches
to the political apology. The final sections describe the institutional account, set
out its virtues, and defend it against criticism.

I. AN EXAMPLE
For over a century, Canada operated an educational system with the
purpose of assimilating indigenous children into European settler civilization.4
Approximately 150 000 indigenous children were removed from their parents,
many through coercion.5 The state placed a large portion of these children
in residential institutions that provided housing, board, and education. The
schools were designed to assimilate children and thereby help eliminate distinct
indigenous societies.6 In addition, the state failed to discharge its duties of care
and protection to children in these schools with the result that many thousands
of children suffered systemic abuse and neglect. To summarise, Canada wronged
indigenous peoples and persons through forcible child removal, attempted
assimilation, and malregulation.
In 2008, indigenous residential school survivors received an apology. Canadas
apology said We are sorry (in five languages) and described responsibility for
wrongdoing in the schools as a burden [that] is properly ours as a Government,
and as a country.7 Benefiting from prior consultation, the Prime Minister
conveyed the apology to representative survivors on the floor of the House of
Commons. The parliamentary setting amplified the apologys public character as
it was broadcast on national media networks and written into Hansard, the
official record of the Canadian legislature. Canadas apology was widely
applauded; it has also been subject to searching criticisms, some of which I
consider below.8

II. A MINIMAL DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT

Apologies bring together diverse elements in different combinations to realise
different values in different contexts. This complexity of form and function has

4
For discussion, see John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the
Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999).
5
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Interim Report (Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2012),
p. 1.
6
MacDonald and Hudson, The genocide question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada,
Canadian Journal of Political Science, 45 (2012), 42749.
7
Stephen Harper, Prime Minister Harper offers full apology on behalf of Canadians for the Indian
Residential Schools system, Office of the Prime Minister, 11 June 2008; available at <http://
www.pm.gc.ca>.
8
See comments reported in Brodie Fenlon, Canada apologizies, Globe and Mail, 11 June 2008.
Also, Pauline Wakeham, The cunning of reconciliation, Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary
Studies, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University
Press, 2012), pp. 20933, at p. 224.
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 263

engendered a range of descriptive accounts. This section sets out a minimal

account of an apologys existence conditions that must be present in any
apology. These existence conditions differ from qualitative conditions.
Qualitative conditions affect how an apology can be better or worse, but are not
necessary to an apology.
Descriptive accounts of apology often begin by noting its performative
character and locating the analysis in the speech act tradition associated with
John Austin.9 Austin uses a different vocabulary to distinguish between existence
and qualitative conditions. For Austin, an act is unhappy if it is a failed attempt
at a performance, while an act is abusive if it is a performance of inferior quality
or is otherwise objectionable. For example, a good personal apology usually
involves affective expression. Non-abusive personal apologies generally convey
some combination of regret, remorse, repentance, guilt, grief, shame, or sorrow.10
Some authors go further and describe the behabitive expression of remorse as
necessary.11 But that is wrong. We can all imagine a remorseless apology. In
Austins terms, that might be abusive, but not unhappy. Expressions of
emotion concern the quality of (some) apologies, not their existence.
Many, if not most, qualitative conditions are contextually particular in the
sense that their propriety cannot be specified independently of the process in
which the apology emerges.12 That is one reason why the best descriptive account
of the apology will be thin. It is a good descriptive policy to avoid multiplying
entities beyond necessity.13 The best account of the apologys necessary
conditions will be sufficiently broad in conception, and flexible in application, to
permit actual practice to specify most qualitative content.
Although every individual case is complex, all apologies embody an
architectonic combination of function and form. The function of an apology is
the remedy of wrongdoing and its form is transactional.14 An apology is conveyed
by one agent to another at a particular time and place. That transactional
character shapes its composite existence conditions and stipulates its non-private
character. Because apologies are conveyed, they must conform to publicly
recognizable standards.15 Participants often use specifying labels such as I am

9
J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962).
10
Ibid., p. 83.
11
Craig W. Blatz, Karina Schumann, and Michael Ross, Government apologies for historical
injustice, Political Psychology, 30 (2009), 21941. See also, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Abortive
rituals: historical apologies in the global era, Interventions, 2 (2000), 17186, at p. 174.
12
Jeremy Bergen, Reconciling past and present: a review essay on collective apologies, Journal of
Religion, Conflict, and Peace, 2 (2009), unpaginated.
13
The phrase is, obviously, borrowed from William of Ockham.
14
The transactional character of apology is stressed by Michael Marrus, Official apologies and the
quest for historical justice, Journal of Human Rights, 7 (2007), 75109, at p. 94; Claude Steiner,
Apology: the transactional analysis of a fundamental exchange, Transactional Analysis Journal,
30 (2000), 14549; Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 467.
15
Austin, How to do Things with Words, pp. 26 f.
264 STEPHEN WINTER

sorry or I want to apologise to indicate that they wish their audience to apply
the relevant standards.
Specifying further, the apologys existence conditions include three elements.
To continue using Austins terminology, these are the verdictive, the attributive,
and the participatory. The verdictive element of the apology establishes a record
of the wrongdoing itself. It compounds a constative statement that wrongdoing
occurred with a judgement that it was wrong. The degree of specificity can vary.
Some apologies describe specific injurious acts while others simply indicate that
there has been wrongdoing. In the process, the apology may indicate why
wrongdoing occurred, but this is not necessary. By contrast, the need for the
verdictive is obvious when we reflect upon what is missing from commonplace
shams in which agents apologise for the fact that someone feels badly or has
taken offence.16 These apologies are counterfeit because they do not identify
wrongdoing. They are not bad apologies: they are not apologies.
The verdictive functions of an apology are closely related to the reflexive
attribution of moral responsibility. The apology acknowledges blameworthiness
on the part of the commissive agent. Together, the verdictive and attributive
functions are sometimes described as acknowledgementthe apology
acknowledges the offenders fault for wrongdoing. It is important to differentiate
between at least three relevant modes of responsibility. Apologies require the
agent to accept culpability. Agents may also accept responsibility for having
inflicted harm and an obligation to make amends, but the latter two points are
defeasible implications. A person might do wrong without harm (wrongdoing
might be beneficial), and the apologising agent might be unable, or poorly
situated, to repair associated damage. Because different accounts understand
the political apology as enacted by different agents, they differ over which
wrongdoings those agents can be rightly accountable for. Apologisers can assume
culpability by mistake. Theirs would be no less an apology, but it might suffer
qualitatively.17
In terms of participation, an apology comes from a party that assumes
standing to apologise, who conveys it to a party that claims standing to accept.18
There can be reasonable dispute over who stands in the relevant positions.
Political apologies are transacted by participants who perform representation by
virtue of a connection to the offending or injured parties, including familial or
institutional ties, or membership in the relevant group, such as co-ethnicity or
co-religiosity. In the political realm, apologetic representation is a claim, not a
natural fact: it is a performance embedded within the apology transaction.19

16
Paul Davis, On apologies, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 19 (2002), 16973, at p. 169.
17
I thank Martin Wilkinson for this point.
18
In some cases, apologies might be conveyed not to a specific party, but to a non-specific audience
or even to humanity at large.
19
Michael Saward, The representative claim, Contemporary Political Theory, 5 (2006), 297318.
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 265

These three elements, (verdictive, attributive, and participatory) are widely

accepted as necessary to an apology. Telling someone I apologise makes it
permissible for an observer to infer (defeasibly) that the three conditions are
satisfied. But the conditions of their realisation, and how the components connect
with one another, are subjects of significant dispute. It is worth mentioning some
of the more pervasive disagreements. People disagree over the wrongfulness of
acts and, therefore, they disagree over what acts require an apology. They
disagree about whether and which people can be held culpable. And they disagree
over whether an apology implies responsibility for cognate ameliorating acts.
Questions of standing occasion similar disputes. Adding to those difficulties, not
only do people disagree about whether an act meets the existence conditions of
apology; they also make qualitative judgements about elements that realise
existence conditions. Wrongdoings might be specified more or less accurately;
an apologiser might be more or less forthright in accepting responsibility; and
someone might be a better or worse representative. Although qualitative
judgements differ from existence judgements, facts relevant to one can be, and
often are, relevant to the other.

III. INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE APPROACHES

This section describes and critiques individualist and collectivist accounts of the
political apology. I begin with accounts in which the political apology is offered
on behalf of individuals. The individual model requires individual wrongdoing.
For example, Wohl, Hornsey, and Philpots five-step model of official public
apologies ascribes culpability to individuals who belong to a perpetrator group.
Wohl et al. interpret the apologys second existence condition as requiring
individuals to ascribe moral responsibility to themselves: group members must
accept [moral] responsibility.20 Nick Smith concurs, saying that without personal
culpability for wrongdoing political representatives will not apologise, instead
they will simply enjoy a breezy walk on the moral high road explaining how
others failed.21
The individualist requires the apologys three existence conditions to be
satisfied as follows. The constative content of the apology is a wrongful act(s)
committed by a set of individuals who attribute culpability to themselves.
In terms of participation, while individualists might accept representative
apologisers, they have a strong preference for apologies provided by culpable
individuals. As Smith states, when representatives replace individuals, the

20
Michael J. A. Wohl, Matthew J. Hornsey, and Catherine R. Philpot, A critical review of official
public apologies: aims, pitfalls, and a staircase model of effectiveness, Social Issues and Policy
Review, 5 (2011), 70100, at p. 89.
21
Smith, I Was Wrong, p. 210.
266 STEPHEN WINTER

apologies will be less good and responsible individuals may avoid discharging a
remedial obligation they owe to the survivors.22
The individual approach is commonly deployed by political apology critics. As
an example, the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard argued against
offering a political apology because one set of people cannot apologise for the
acts of another as a matter of principle.23 In response, advocates attempt various
responsibility-ascribing stratagems. In the Canadian context, it is argued that
individual Canadians wrongfully benefit from the social disruption inflicted
upon indigenous persons and endorse discriminatory attitudes and assimilative
principles.24 Other accounts strive to show how individuals wrongfully failed to
avert injuries.25 In the account proposed by Wohl et al., the personal attribution
of wrongdoing arises from membership in the group that committed the offence.
Individuals own the relevant wrongdoing when they identify with the group.
One advantage of the individual approach is its resonance with bottom-up
conceptions of rectification and reconciliation.26 Often associated with
micro-processes of conflict resolution and informed by restorative justice theory,
these accounts aim at personal rapprochement and healing.27 The Canadian
apology makes space for this personal understanding. The Prime Minister
describes a new relationship between indigenous peoples and other Canadians
that is characterised by individuals sharing historical knowledge, respect, and a
desire for a common future.28 A similar point might be made about that apologys
expressive content. When Prime Minister Harper says We are sorry, the
individual approach would understand him as representing the sorrow that
particular Canadians feel regarding the relevant injuries. If such personal
foundations are necessary to political reconciliation, then the individual
approach gains support.

22
Smith, I Was Wrong, pp. 1856, 99201.
23
See comments reported in Anne Davies, Apology was a mistake, says feisty Howard, The Age,
12 March 2008.
24
See, for example, discussion in Brian Rice and Anna Snyder, Reconciliation in the context of a
settler society: healing the legacy of colonialism in Canada, From Truth to Reconciliation:
Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools, ed. Marlene Brant Castellano, Linda Archibald, and
Mike DeGagn (Ottawa, Canada: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2008), pp. 4561.
25
Robert Sparrow, History and collective responsibility, Australasian Journal of Philosophy,
78 (2000), 34659, at p. 355; Glen Pettigrove, Apology, reparations, and the question of inherited
guilt, Public Affairs Quarterly, 17 (2003), 31947, at p. 332.
26
Kris Brown, What it was like to live through a day: Transitional justice and the memory of
the everyday in a divided society, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 6 (2012),
44466.
27
Jennifer J. Llewellyn and Robert Howse, Restorative justice: a conceptual framework, prepared
for the Law Commission of Canada, 1999, pp. 3842. See also David Crocker, Truth commissions,
transitional justice, and civil society, Truth v. Justice: The Moral Efficacy of Truth Commissions:
South Africa and Beyond, eds. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000), pp. 99121, at p. 108; Tristan Anne Borer, Reconciling South Africa or
South Africans? Cautionary notes from the TRC, African Studies Quarterly, 8 (2004), 1938, at
p. 24.
28
Harper, Prime Minister Harper offers full apology on behalf of Canadians for the Indian
Residential Schools system.
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 267

Yet, the personal approach to political apology confronts significant

challenges. To begin, the account of moral responsibility is unacceptable as a
description of political practice. Culpability is appropriate if and only if the
blamed party committed an offence. And in most cases of political apology, most
citizens will not have performed the acts the apology concerns. Of course (some)
Canadians might have acted wrongfully by paying taxes, or by not objecting to
the schools, or by endorsing their operative principles. But the constative content
of the Canadian apology focuses upon forcible removal, abuse, and assimilation.
It does not emphasise supportive (or non-oppositional) acts of Canadians. There
is a large gap between the examples apologetic content and what the individual
account supports. Perhaps, the right response is so much the worse for the
example. However, if political apologies rest upon an individual basis, then
nearly every actual apology oversteps its mark. The individual account is a theory
of a non-existent practice.
Underpinning that point, I think most Canadians did not accept moral
responsibility for residential school wrongdoing prior to the apology.29 Indeed,
one reason the apology was valuable was that it confirmed and publicised
relevant information about the schools. Many Canadians learned about
wrongdoing in the residential schools by listening to, watching, and reading the
apology and associated media commentary. For the supporters of individual
accounts, if the apology was to teach responsibility, that pedagogic function must
put the cart before the horse. An apology requires acknowledgement; it does not
anticipate it.
These difficulties are symptoms of a deeper, underlying problem. Although
plausible in itself, the individual account fails to grasp how the political domain
is a distinct realm of human activity. By collapsing the political into the personal,
the individual account leaves no space for independent institutional action.
That independence is a necessary condition of the ineradicable pluralism that
characterises politics. The sphere of politics is a space wherein reasonable people
differ both in their interpretations of events and over the moral and ethical
responses they warrant. That is one reason why the space of politics involves
different kinds of action, to be judged by different standards.
I now turn to those approaches in which the political apology is a collective
action of the form that has attracted significant attention from philosophers.30

29
Nearly half of Canadians apparently did not believe that the residential schools were wrongful
at the time of the apology. Environics Research Group, National Benchmark Survey, prepared for the
Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
2008, p. 13; available at <http://www.nrsss.ca/IRSRC%20TRC%20National%20Survey%20Final
%20Report.pdf>. See also discussion in, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Interim
Report (Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2012), p. 9.
30
Examples include: Christopher Kutz, Complicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001); David Miller, Holding nations responsible, Ethics, 114 (2004), 24068; Margaret Gilbert,
Sociality and Responsibility (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Raimo Tuomela, The
Philosophy of Social Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael Bratman,
Faces of Intention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
268 STEPHEN WINTER

These writers often use examples drawn from sport such as: The team won the
game. While individual team members contribute, it may not be true of any one
member that she won the game. And just as an attribution of victory can repose
irreducibly at the collective level, so might the political apology.
A prominent strand of apologetic collectivism ascribes the act to particular
identity groups, usually nations or ethno-cultural communities. My discussion
concentrates on those accounts that see the apology as emanating from a nation.
I focus on accounts wherein the nation is a politically salient and irreducibly
collective agent distinct from the state.31 However, analysts do not always observe
the distinction between the nation and the state and the association of political
apologies with the rise of identity politics has encouraged descriptive attempts to
bridge the distinction. These attempts often fail, leaving collective approaches
uncomfortably between two stools.
The primary strand of apologetic collectivism concerns the connections
between apologies and national membership. The membership approach builds
upon the influential work of Nicholas Tavuchis.32 For Tavuchis, the collective
apology defines or changes the conditions of membership. Either the apology is
part of a process of creating a new identity or it reflects identity changes that have
already occurred. Recent studies by Danielle Celermajer and Melissa Nobles
reflect this approach. For Nobles, apologies change the meanings and workings
of national membership.33 And for Celermajer, the apologising agent is neither
the institution of the state nor the feeling individual. Rather it is the people of
the nation, constituted both socially and politically, for whom the apology
restructures the grammar that orients the judgements of members as regards
to membership.34 For collectivists, the apology is a performance by a political
community.35 It works to restructure the collective identity by repudiating the
wrongful act. The apology thereby (re)commits the nation to its constitutive
values by making repudiation a matter of public record. In the process, the
political apology reflects or compels changes that shift the imaginary boundaries
of the national community and make identification possible for previously
marginalised or excluded groups. For settler nations like Canada, such a
nation-building approach often locates apologies to indigenous peoples as an
aspect of postcolonial politics.36

31
For a richer definition, see David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1245.
32
Tavuchis, Mea Culpa, pp. 78, 1001.
33
Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), p. 152.
34
Celermajer, The Sins of Nation and The Ritual of Apologies (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), p. 259.
35
Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, p. 36; Celermajer, The Sins of Nation and The Ritual
of Apologies, pp. 42, 53, 58, 2301.
36
John Morton, Abortive redemption? Apology, history and subjectivity in Australian
reconciliation, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 112 (2003), 23859, at p. 241; Rosemary Nagy,
The scope and bounds of transitional justice and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 269

I return to the last point below. But first I set out how the collective account
understands the three existential apologetic criteria. The account specifies the
constative content of the apology as wrongdoing that pertains to membership
and identity either by causing exclusion or by inscribing marginalization into
national history. In terms of the attribution of responsibility, the apologetic nation
acknowledges that it acted wrongfully and that is blameworthy. Finally, the
participants in the apology are the offending nation (acting through representatives)
and the survivors, who participate directly or through mediated representation.
In comparison to individualist accounts, collectivism has certain advantages.
To begin, it is more commodious of individual disagreement. Political apologies
make something of national identity by changing some of the relevant facts.
National identity is not merely a matter of subjective opinion or affect. Certain
facts make it true that someone is or is not a member of a nation. Therefore, the
relationship between political identities and political apologies can reflect certain
facts, such as the fact that Canadians created and ran assimilative Indian residential
schools.37 And the apology can enact further facts that change a nations
membership without universal, or even widespread, acceptance by its members.
There is a second advantage to the membership approach. National
membership entails a certain standing and therefore nationals can demand
appropriate treatment based on their membership.38 The connection between
appropriate treatment and membership may help explain the tendency to connect
apologies with appropriate cognate actions. Celermajer states [t]here is strong
intuitive appeal to the claim that an apologys success depends in part on other
actions being carried out.39 If, after the apology, survivors are not subsequently
treated as members, the apology retrospectively becomes less good (or perhaps
vitiated). The apparent attraction of that claim strengthens the membership
account.
Turning to criticism, it is unclear whether the remedy of wrongful exclusion is
necessary to political apologies. Alice MacLachan notes that political apologies
are demanded by, and provided to, groups that are unquestioned (and
unquestioning) members of the collective in question.40 MacLachan gives the
example of the quest by Ukrainian Canadians for an apology for wartime
wrongdoing, and I would add the political apologies offered to service
personnela good example is the 2008 apology offered to Australias Vietnam

Commission, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 7 (2013), 5273; Andrew Woolford,

Genocide, affirmative repair, and the British Columbia Treaty Process, Transitional Justice: Global
Mechanisms and Local Realities After Genocide and Mass Violence, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 13756.
37
History is inevitably more complicated. The schools had a multinational staff.
38
For discussion, see Bas van der Vossen, Associative political obligations, Philosophy Compass,
6 (2011), 47787.
39
Celermajer, The Sins of Nation and The Ritual of Apologies, p. 255.
40
Alice MacLachlan, The state of sorry: official apologies and their absence, Journal of Human
Rights, 9 (2010), 37385, at p. 378.
270 STEPHEN WINTER

Veterans. To return to the Canadian example, wrongful exclusion is not the focus
of the residential schools apology. Forcible child removal for an assimilative
purpose is perhaps better described as a wrongful practice of inclusion.
In response, an advocate might argue that the relevant they are the
offenderswrongdoing demarcates the relevant group identity. If so, the account
simply devolves into an individual account in which there are as many aggregates
as there are injurious groups of offenders. That approach will not work for the
membership approachs assignment of culpability to the nation. If nationality
does the work of assigning responsibility, responsibility cannot do the work of
defining nationality.
That problem points towards another. If the Canadian Prime Minister is
apologising on behalf of a nation, then Prime Minister Harper must represent
the offending group. But who is Harper representing? Is the apology on behalf of
the Canadian nation? Are indigenous Canadians part of that nation? If Harper
represents a Canadian nation and indigenous peoples are members of that nation,
then Canada would have apologised to (part of) itself. And that seems odd.
Apologies are not solipsistic; they are transacted. In a membership account, the
apology must exclude indigenous peoples from the apologising nation. Yet
membership theories describe the apology as means of including the injured party
as members. Perhaps there is some post-modern dialectic through which
survivors are included through exclusion, but the possibility appears strained.
A natural response might suggest that Harper spoke on behalf of a national
subset of Canadians. Perhaps the most plausible subset is something called White
Canada. But White Canada is not a nation independent of its institutions.41
Harper might represent a constitutional Canadian nationality in which values
embedded in political institutions constitute the national identity. However,
without political institutions, White Canada is a multinational melange and not
a national actor. That point does not deny that Canadian institutions are biased
unjustly in favour of whites. The point is that White Canada is either an
ethno-national hodgepodge, and therefore not an agent, or it is an agent by virtue
of its political institutions and better represented in the terms of the institutional
account offered in the next section.
As an aside, suppose, arguendo, that Harper represents the/a Canadian nation
and that the apology extends or recognises membership within that nation. In
postcolonial writing, this nation-building understanding informs critics who
describe political apologies as a continuation of colonialism.42 Those writers

41
The claim that there is no White Canada agency is controversial. For countervailing discussion,
see Himani Bannerji, Geography lessons: on being an insider/outsider to the Canadian nation, The
Dark Side of the Nation, ed. Himani Bannerji (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2000), pp. 6386.
42
Andrew Woolford, Nodal repair and networks of destruction: residential schools, colonial
genocide, and redress in Canada, Settler Colonial Studies, 3 (2013), 6581, at p. 69; Wakeham, The
cunning of reconciliation. Cf. Paul Muldoon and Andrew Schaap, Confounded by recognition: the
apology, the High Court and the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia, Theorizing Post-Conflict
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 271

describe the proposition that the 2008 apology recognised indigenous Canadians
as members of White Canada as unattractive. I think that, if advocates wish to
resist that implication, then they will struggle to avoid collapsing the collective
account into the institutional. To make the point quickly, if a unified identity
is the appropriate telos, an acceptable membership account must include an
appropriate account of political unity, which, in cases such as Canadas
indigenous peoples, must respect rights to self-determination. If the account is to
do that, it will require significant institutional elements. And if those institutions
are required to satisfy normative demands, the ostensibly collectivist account will
be subsumed by the institutional.
This is not the first analysis to note the problem of standing for collective
apologies.43 One way collective accounts attempt to finesse the problem is by
discarding the transactional character of the apology. Collectivists often follow
Tavuchis in arguing that the raison dtre of the collective apology is the
production of a record.44 This reduced account limits the necessary conditions
of apology to the verdictive and attributive. The political apology simply
affirms previous changes to national membership or affirms that membership is
now open to change. However, it is unclear if what is left remains an apology.
Affirmation is not apology. If, in the Canadian example, the political apology
merely records an acknowledgement of culpability for the residential schools,
then it would seem, in principle at least, that the apologetic form might
be dispensed with. That is an unattractive position and the fact of its
unattractiveness reflects the transactional character of apology.
As a further point, it is very unclear whether nations and other collectives are
capable of bearing and discharging moral responsibility for wrongful acts.45
This is a contentious area of philosophy.46 But it is notable that theorists who
attribute responsibility to nations tend to talk about responsibilities that
individuals bear for their nations part in wrongful acts and omissions.47 Group
structures might distribute remedial responsibility, but individuals are the
relevant moral agents in question.

Reconciliation, ed. Alexander Hirsch (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 18399, at p. 184; Haydie
Gooder and Jane Jacobs, Belonging and non-belonging: the apology in a reconciling nation,
Postcolonial Geographies, eds. Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan (New York: Continuum, 2002),
pp. 20013.
43
For discussion, see Pettigrove, Apology, reparations, and the question of inherited guilt.
44
Tavuchis, Mea Culpa, pp. 10917.
45
This linkage is sometimes prosecuted through the claim that if contemporary members of a
nation take rightful pride in the actions of their predecessors, then they must bear their liabilities. I
will not argue against this claim. I will remark that it is not obvious that pride and blameworthiness
respond to the same sets of reasons. For example, I might take rightful pride in my appearance, but this
does not imply that I should be blamed if I appear shabby. For an influential discussion of the pride-blame
linkage, see Farid Abdel-Nour, National responsibility, Political Theory, 31 (2003), 693719.
46
For expansive argument, see Larry May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), p. 47; Virginia Held, Group responsibility for ethnic conflict, Journal of Ethics,
6 (2002), 15778; Miller, Holding nations responsible, p. 244.
47
Cf. the account of the riot in Miller, Holding nations responsible, p. 249.
272 STEPHEN WINTER

A good example showing how national membership is insufficient to engender

culpability is the case of those German nationals resident in America during the
1930s, many of whom formed pro-Nazi organizations such as the German
American Bund.48 Many of these German nationals were anti-Semites. They
belonged to a nation that is often ascribed responsibility for the Holocaust.
However, being a German national is insufficient to make an American resident
culpable for genocide. It is important to be clear about what is being claimed.
Some American-Germans did act in ways that made them culpable for the
Holocaust. However, as Hannah Arendt emphasises, questions of culpability
always relate to the person and what the person has done.49 When one shoulders
responsibility for what co-nationals have done, that responsibility may concern
the substantive burdens one must bear, but it is not, therein, a question of ones
culpability.
In terms of responsibility, collective apologies fall between two plausible
accounts. The first is the individualist account, in which a persons participation
in a collective act can engender individual moral responsibility. The other is the
institutional account, to which the argument returns below. Both of those
accounts describe agents capable of bearing moral responsibility. I think that
much of the collective accounts allure depends upon eliding the differences
between engendering and bearing responsibility, and/or equivocating collectivist
accounts of how substantive responsibility is distributed with the conditions for
either personal or institutional culpability. It is worth noting that the membership
theorys attempt to explain apologies risks getting the normative structure
backwards. A state does not apologise in order to improve its civic identity. A
state apologises because it owes it to survivors. Changes to membership are a
potential consequence of the apology, not a condition of it.
As a last point, the collective account treats the political apology as an act in
the same mode as those performed by corporations, churches, golf clubs, and
other collective associations.50 But political institutions are not like other
associations. They seek to exercise political authority, that is, they aim at creating
a special kind of reason (law). And if that fact explains the political apologys
constative content, the best account should reflect it. Canadas political apology
is centrally concerned with the injuries of forcible child removal, regulative
malpractice that led to abuse and assimilation. It is hard to see how these acts of
state were enacted by a/the nation. Those wrongful acts and omissions are
attributable to the individuals and institutions that enacted and enforced (or
failed to enforce) the relevant laws.

48
See V. Bell Leland, The failure of nazism in America: the German American Bund, 19361941,
Political Science Quarterly, 85 (1970), 58599.
49
Hannah Arendt, Collective responsibility, Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought
of Hannah Arendt, ed. James W Bernauer (Boston: Martinus Nijoff, 1987), p. 44. See also Richard
Vernon, Historical Redress: Must We Pay for the Past? (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 945.
50
Cf. Tavuchis, Mea Culpa, p. 48.
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 273

IV. AN INSTITUTIONAL ACCOUNT

The third approach to the political apology describes political institutions as
the apologising agent(s). It takes the institutional character of modern polities
seriously. These accounts represent state wrongdoing as undercutting the
legitimacy of political institutions.51 Political legitimacy is the basis for the
citizens endorsement of a political institution as an authoritative creator of law.52
In order for law to be reason-giving, it must meet formal standards of clarity,
publicity, and so on, along with certain legitimating criteria, both substantive
and procedural. In general, states are responsible to citizens to provide law that
helps citizens serve reason.53 Legitimacy theory thereby provides a rubric for
understanding how states are morally responsible agents.54 Discharging that
reason-serving responsibility makes political institutions legitimate and thereby
authoritative. Although there is plenty of debate about what the right reasons for
political institutions to serve are, and further debate over how they should serve
them, in the end the fact of pervasive disagreement works to support the demand
for legitimate and authoritative political institutions.55
At first glance, using legitimacy theory to explain political apologies might
appear unpromising. There is no settled account of political legitimacy, and some
people deny the possibility of legitimate political authority.56 Therefore, I
emphasise that the institutional account requires little substantive content, only
the formal requirement that political legitimacy concerns obligations owed to
citizens.57 Legitimate authority depends upon what Stephen Darwall might
describe as institutional respect for persons.58 The following account is likely,
therefore, to be compatible with any plausible account of political legitimacy.
Further, the account is compatible with the vicious histories of actual states and
with the proposition that apologetic states currently lack legitimacy. The account

51
Examples include: Mihaela Mihai, When the state says sorry: state apologies as exemplary
political judgments, Journal of Political Philosophy, 21 (2012), 121; Pablo De Greiff, The role of
apologies in national reconciliation processes: on making trustworthy institutions trusted, The Age
of Apology, ed. Mark Gibney et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008),
pp. 12036; Michael Cunningham, The ideological location of the apology, Journal of Political
Ideologies, 16 (2011), 11522. One might also include Jeff Spinner-Halev, but his discussion of
political apology is quite individualistic: Jeff Spinner-Halev, Enduring Injustice (Cambrige:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 85119.
52
Of course, there are many different forms of political authority, but to simplify discussion the
paper simply refers to political authority as creating law.
53
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 47 ff.
54
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 217.
55
David Estlund, Democratic Authority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008),
pp. 4364.
56
Robert Paul Wolff, Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Note there is no
problem with the influential brand of anarchism associated with A. John Simmons.
57
The slogan for this position is that legitimate states recognise citizens as self-originating
sources of moral claims. John Rawls, Justice as fairness: political not metaphysical, Philosophy and
Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 22351, at p. 242. For discussion, see Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person
Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
58
Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, p. 140.
274 STEPHEN WINTER

is threatened only by the claims that legitimacy is theoretically impossible in the

sense that respect for persons is incompatible with political authority.
The connection between state wrongdoing and legitimacy provides the
substance of the institutional account. The fundamental argument is as follows:
if public institutions possess political authority when they serve legitimating
reasons, and politically authorised wrongdoing constitutes an institutional failing
to serve the relevant reasons, then that failure undercuts the institutions
legitimacy and, thereby, its authority.59 As Jeff Spinner-Halev argues, injustice
matters because it calls the authority of the liberal state in to question.60 In the
Canadian residential schools, political authority exposed indigenous Canadians
to systemic abuse, connived at the forcible removal of children, and aimed to
exterminate indigenous ways of life. Those acts of injustice burden Canadian
institutions.
Political legitimacy is a scalar property. States have reason to optimise their
legitimacy because doing so is to serve those political reasons service to which
constitutes their authority. More specifically, a political institution is more
legitimate when it satisfies responsibilities it owes to its citizenry. Offenders (can)
owe apologies to those whom they wrong. If an apology discharges an obligation
(serving an agent-relative reason) and if states are more legitimate when they
discharge their obligations to citizens, then, conversely, an unapologetic state
may be less legitimate just because it has not remedied the wrong. Satisfying the
remedial obligation by apologising improves institutional legitimacy. Although
state wrongdoing might call for more than an apology, the account helps explain
why political apologies tend to be concerned with state wrongdoing. Political
apologies address wrongful acts of state because those acts burden the legitimacy
of those institutions.
One of the consequences of the institutional accounts concern with politically
authorised wrongdoings is that the relevant injuries must be acts of statedone
by the law either directly or through negligence. It is an interesting point that the
account thereby excludes apologies for wrongdoings that are often the focus of
collectivist accounts. For the collectivist, the habits and norms that constitute
the political community (along with the benefits of belonging) are, if wrongful,
productive of injuries for which nations can apologise. In contrast, the
institutionalist focus on political legitimacy restricts the constative content of a
political apology to acts of state. The account thereby imposes strictures on
apologetic content that are narrower than is sometimes recognised.
Political apologies augment political legitimacy by enacting respect for
persons. In the first instance, apologies reflexively affirm the binding character of

59
Stephen Winter, Transitional Justice in Established Democracies: A Political Theory (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 10918. Pablo De Greiff, Theorizing transitional justice, Nomos LI:
Transitional Justice, eds. Jon Elster, Rosemary Nagy, and Melissa Williams (New York: New York
University Press, 2012), pp. 3177.
60
Spinner-Halev, Enduring Injustice, p. 129.
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 275

the violated norm(s) upon the institution. But affirmation is not apology. The
apology transaction involves conveying acknowledgement of culpability to
the survivor. As Margaret Urban Walker argues, taking responsibility for
wrongdoing is how offenders respond to the claims of the injured party.61 The
apology responds to the survivors claim. Walkers point positions the discharge
of the offenders remedial obligation as owed to the survivor. The communication
of culpability-acknowledgement both enacts institutional respect for persons and
realises the transactional character of the apology. That is why political apologies
are conveyed to those who have been injured (and not the population as a whole).
The account also explains the apologys public character. When states act
wrongfully, an apology can publicly enact equal treatment. Insofar as the apology
responds to an obligation of the state grounded by the survivors claim, it can be
an appropriate means of publicly recognising survivors as having the standing to
demand accountability from the state. In other words, political apologies treat
survivors as citizens. This account provides a way to understand the important
qualitative condition that the political apology is offered in a public forum with
significant pomp and ceremony. That public character reflects the demand
that the state is dealing with injuries that corrode the political system itself.
The remedy works, in part, by offering equal regard to survivors within civic
institutions. Furthermore, the account explains the liberal democracies
comparative propensity to apologise. If these polities are more susceptible to
legitimating demands than their authoritarian or theocratic counterparts are,
then they should be comparatively more likely to apologise.
To summarise, the account describes political apologies as satisfying the three
existence conditions in the following way. The political apology concerns
wrongful acts of state. Culpability is attributed to the political institution, or the
assemblage of institutions that compose the state. The participants in the apology
represent the institutions that tender the apology to survivors or their
representatives. There is no sense that the apology is solipsistic and legitimacy
theory provides an account of how political institutions bear moral responsibility.

V. DEVELOPING THE INSTITUTIONAL ACCOUNT

Having finished with taxonomy, this last section develops the institutional
account by considering four criticisms drawn from the literature and suggesting
lines of response. These criticisms concern the impersonal character of the state,
the attribution of persistent remedial responsibility, the top-down nature of the
account, and the reported inability of political apologies to realise societies that
are more legitimate.

61
Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 191. See also, Christopher Bennett, The Apology Ritual:
A Philosophical Theory of Punishment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 68.
276 STEPHEN WINTER

I begin with the challenge that political institutions are impersonal agents that
are unable to sorrow, regret, or be sincere. In interpersonal ethics, an apologys
affective components reveal the private intentions of offenders. But political
institutions have no private character to reveal. If worthwhile apologies must
involve displays of emotion or sincerity, then the institutional failure to meet
those conditions runs contrary to interpersonal practice. Richard Vernon rightly
observes how in political apologies, much is done to convey the appearance of
sincerity and notes that these appearances influence the apologys reception.62
States cannot be sincere, they can only appear so; therefore, Vernon argues that
the point of these affective displays is to record a political commitment to the
principles involved. Emotive expression conveys the seriousness of the states
ameliorative commitment(s). Mathias Thaler concurs and suggests that because
the criteria of sincerity cannot apply to political expression, observers must
instead judge the seriousness of political apologies by the policy consequences
they trigger.63 Because the political construal of affective content differs so
fundamentally from that of the personal, Vernon suggests there is no real
connection at all between personal and political apologies.64
I think that this line of argument is misguided. Judgements regarding policy
consequences are judgements about public policy, not the political apologyI
return to that point below. For the moment, it is important to emphasise how one
of the drivers pushing that consideration, the divergence between personal and
political apologies, is less compelling if an apologys existence conditions do not
include affective elements. As indicated above, insincerity and remorselessness
might make a personal apology bad. But bad apologies are still apologies. Since
qualitative conditions differ in different contexts, it may be unnecessary to look
for conditions analogous to interpersonal ethics to explain why politicians use
emotive language when offering a political apology. I think the affective elements
of the practice are social conventions in which expressions of sorrow are like
the gravity of a judge during sentencing or the solemnity of a priest during the
Eucharist: a demeanour conventionally accepted as appropriate to the context.
Judges need not be grave, but they should seem so during sentencing. The same
is true of apologising officials.
A second set of criticisms concern responsibility. I begin by discussing a
problem of persistence. David Miller notes how wrongs committed within one
state structure are often apologised for within another.65 This appears to create a
problem of standing for the institutional account because political apologies can
appear to involve different wrongdoing and apologising agents. For example, it

62
Vernon, Historical Redress, p. 82, authors emphasis.
63
Mathias Thaler, Just pretending: political apologies for historical injustice and vices tribute to
virtue, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 15 (2012), 25978, at
p. 267.
64
Vernon, Historical Redress, p. 86.
65
Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, p. 141.
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 277

might appear difficult for the institutional approach to endorse the apologies for
slavery and Jim Crow offered by the American Congress in 2008 and 2009. With
respect to slavery, it may seem that the present United States shares little
with ante-bellum America. To illustrate the point, reasonable observers could
not imagine the present Supreme Court endorsing Dred Scott (1857), in part,
because such a decision would fail to fit the operative principles and institutional
framework that constitute the present United States.66 And, of course, no
survivors of slavery received the 2008/9 apology. Assuming that dead people bear
no claims, then no present agent suffered American slavery directly and,
consequently, no slavery claims burden the states legitimacy.
I think it is possible to avoid the difficulties with persistence that Miller
perceives. His definition of the problem presumes the collectivist concern with
identity. However, the institutional account begins not with the identity of
the state but with facts that are relevant to the practice of legitimate political
authority. The relevant questions concern practice. Is there a continuity of
institutional prerogatives and commitments? Does the institution operate as
a continuous agent? The Congresses of 2008 and 2009 were the 110th and 111th
American Congresses, respectively. They were characterised by a significant
degree of institutional continuity with their 19th century incarnations. They were
treated as, and behaved as, possessing the same authority as previous Congresses
(in part, the legislative authority created by Article 1 of the Constitution). And if
institutions, such as Congress, embody a continuous practice of authority, they
may be liable to give apologies when past wrongdoing burdens that authority. It
is unnecessary to posit a national ghost in the political machinery to explain
responsibilitys persistence. Institutions are persons by virtue of their historical
practice.
The institutional approach solves the problem of persistence by working from
facts relevant to legitimacy to a responsibility for apologising. If Congress is
culpable for slavery, and if the resulting injuries burden political legitimacy, then
the institutional account encompasses the slavery apologies. Is slavery presently
injurious? Investigating that question would take me too far afield, but it seems
plausible that (some) present day African Americans are injured by slavery.67 If
there are injuries that burden Congressional legitimacy, the slavery apology could
fall within the remit of the account. However, it is worth noting that the demand
for apology will fade in strength as the salience of historical wrongdoing for
present legitimacy diminishes. This is an advantage of the institutional account.
By discriminating between warranted and unwarranted apologies, the account

66
Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1857).
67
For a recent survey of the slavery reparations literature, see Manfred Berg, Historical continuity
and counterfactual history in the debate over reparations for slavery, Historical Justice in
International Perspective, eds. Manfred Berg and Bernd Schaefer (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), pp. 6991. The possibility of such an injury is defended in Stephen Winter, Whats so
bad about slavery? Assessing the grounds for reparations, Patterns of Prejudice, 41 (2007), 37393.
278 STEPHEN WINTER

avoids the absurd consequence that all historical wrongdoing should receive
similar treatment. And as a parting point, as the Introduction implied, the
institutional account captures only part of apologetic practice. There may be
politically important apologies that do not discharge a remedial obligation. Some
apologies are simple courtesies. Others may be mistakenly offered by participants
who believe they are discharging a responsibility and, of course, it is likely that
some mistaken apologies help smooth political relationships or otherwise serve
non-rectificatory reasons.
A second concern with apologetic responsibility reflects an advantage ascribed
to personal accounts. Whereas personal accounts respond to demands for
bottom-up restorative processes, the institutional account offers a top-down
approach in which moral responsibility reposes with institutions. Individual
citizens do not have direct remedial responsibilities. Instead, individuals bear
the general duty to sustain and promote legitimate institutions. The costs they
bear for the apology are justified in the same way as the costs imposed by the
general operation of political institutions. The account does not prioritise
micro-processes of personal reconciliation and healing. A critic can, therefore,
argue that the account is all gravy and no meat because it cannot recognise the
political importance of popular endorsement for, and participation in, political
apologies.68 Indeed, returning to the Canadian example, that critic could
represent the institutional description of the political apology as describing a
hollow bureaucratic practice that serves to displace or forestall authentic
rectificatory processes.69
Institutionalists must agree that the best account of the political apology need
not include an account of how individuals discharge personal culpability.
Political apologies neither replace nor replicate individual remedial demands.
Nevertheless, there is good reason for the account to favour widespread
participation and consultation. If political apologies are assessed against
legitimating values, engendering participation in the apology is important if
political participation is a weighty legitimating good. In this approach, the
widespread demand for prior consultation with survivors over apologetic
content, form, and ceremony reflects the political values that political apologies
serve. In the political realm, consultation makes stakeholders part of the political
process and is an instance of political respect for survivors as citizens. Further,
a good political apology is likely to be only part of a larger remedial process
containing multiple opportunities for restorative engagement.
A third critical point concerns how political apologies fail to provide what
survivors deserve. The means by which apologies fail differ in different accounts.

68
This point is made by (and the metaphor borrowed from) Smith, I Was Wrong, p. 199.
69
See, for example, Matt James, Neoliberal heritage redress, Reconciling Canada: Critical
Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, eds. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 41.
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 279

Some critics contrast the equitable and just relations that apologies often promise
with the unjust and inequitable relations that survivors continue to experience
and offer those discrepancies as evidence against the meaningful character of the
apology.70 As noted above, some authors argue that ameliorative commitments
are a necessary condition of a successful apology and, consequently, a subsequent
lack of political transformation diminishes the quality of the original apology
retrospectively.71 For example, it is unlikely that indigenous Canadians currently
enjoy the new relationship envisioned in the 2008 apology and, therefore,
critics, like Thomas King argue that the apology is empty.72
A more radical version of this criticism argues that the apology is part of a
larger program of fooling survivors into pursuing evanescent forms of politics.
To use a term made popular by Nancy Fraser, apologies provide merely
affirmative remedies that do not disturb foundational structural injustices.73
These more radical critiques observe that getting states to apologise requires
time, money, human, and social capital. However, when successful, political
leaders enjoy a public media spectacle while claimant groups often continue to
suffer disadvantage in terms of social justice, race relations, and political
marginalization. As a result, these critiques describe state apologies as part of a
broader politics of distraction that deflect survivors from seeking what they
deserve.74
The institutional account can accept that profound injustices mark apologetic
states. But the institutionalist does not need states to be virtuous. Indeed, the
legitimating function of the political apology requires states to be less-than-fully
legitimate. And past injustices may not be the only basis for de-legitimation.
It is perfectly coherent to say that apologies legitimate political institutions
that remain sub-optimally legitimate. While apologies can commit offending
institutions to respecting previously violated principles, it is worth reiterating that
such a commitment is a qualitative, not an existence, condition. The absence of
a commitment might make an apology worse; however, when present, it is not
clear why a subsequent implementation failure should affect the apology. As
noted above, if a state does not fulfil ameliorative commitments, then that is a
reason to criticise both the state and its public policy, but not, therefore, a reason
relevant to judging the political apology.

70
Spinner-Halev, Enduring Injustice, p. 118.
71
Smith, I Was Wrong, pp. 2335.
72
Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
(Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2013), p. 269.
73
Nancy Fraser, From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a postsocialist age,
Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates her Critics, ed. Kevin Olson (London: Verso, 2008),
pp. 1141, at p. 28.
74
Jeff Corntassel and Cindy Holder, Whos sorry now? Government apologies, truth
commissions, and indigenous self-determination in Australia, Canada, Guatemala, and Peru, Human
Rights Review, 9 (2008), 46589, at p. 472.
280 STEPHEN WINTER

Turning to the more radical critique, for the institutional account the question
as to whether or not apology politics are better or worse than any alternative is
an empirical (and qualitative) matter. Apologies are neither panaceas nor
necessities. And if apologies are not the only means of legitimating a political
order, then there may be superior alternatives available (including the creation
of a new political order). If so, then it might be better for activists to work
towards other victories. However, while political apologies can be a politics of
distraction, it is also possible that seeking and obtaining an apology is an
intrinsically valuable political process, which, of course, offers potential
condensation points for future progressive politics.75
A fourth and final problem for the institutional approach is the difference
between making institutions more legitimate and making them more politically
effective. One way of broaching this problem is to envision the space between
what apologies do (their illocutionary effects) and their reception by survivors
(a perlocutionary effect). It is possible for unhappy or abusive apologies to
encourage citizens to endorse political institutions and also possible for
acceptable apologies to be rejected. The problem concerns the role of reception in
the account. For the institutional approach, survivor-reception apparently plays
only a minor role: that the state has discharged its obligation to apologise is the
important fact. The account thereby conflicts with two plausible thoughts. First,
a successful apology is one that the aggrieved party accepts. Second, if survivors
do not accept the apology, then the apology will not promote real legitimacy
because real legitimacy concerns the habits and dispositions of citizens that
enable political institutions to command support, to precipitate action.76
In response, partisans of the institutional approach have two options. The
first notes the idealising character of all descriptive theory. Providing an account
of a normative practice requires describing its operation in favourable
conditionssituations in which participants engage with one another in good
faith, have true beliefs, and communicate easily. Such conditions will rarely
be satisfied in actual practice, but theory necessarily abstracts from practical
impediments. Imagine a survivor who rejects a perfectly good apology by
mistake. In that case, the offender has not failed to apologise; instead, the
apology has failed to engender the appropriate response. If the account adopts
this line of response, the institutional account remains unshaken by a rejected
apologys failure to effect legitimation. The apology is an apology, but it suffers
a perlocutionary failure. It is perhaps an advantage of this response that it
preserves survivor-acceptance as a relevant qualitative condition.

75
This point is made by Eric K. Yamamoto, Friend or foe or something else: social meanings of
redress and reparations, Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, 20 (19911992), 22342,
at p. 233.
76
David Runciman, What is realistic political philosophy? Metaphilosophy, 43 (2012), 5870,
at p. 66.
 THEORISING THE POLITICAL APOLOGY 281

The other option rejects the realist account of legitimacy and makes the
connection between political authority, legitimacy, and political apology in the
realm of reasons. The apology does not function by encouraging survivors to
endorse political authority, it functions by providing a reason for endorsement
(or removing a reason for resistance). This is my preferred approach, for it
enables apologies to legitimate political institutions (by enacting reasons) even
when this is not recognised by participants. Survivors may have many good
reasons not to endorse a political institution, and an apology may only concern
some of these. If the apology works in the realm of legitimating reasons, then it
need not lead to actual endorsement. Further, understanding the apology in terms
of reasons leaves room for the criticism of non-apologies and bad apologies that
survivors accept by mistake, under duress, or in bad faith. Reason provides a
critical standpoint from which to judge both states and survivors.