Empires of Remorse: Narrative, postcolonialism and apologies for colonial atrocity

216 Pages·2016·1.44 MB·English

by  Tom Bentley

Empires of Remorse
Deep into the twentieth century, empire remained a source of pride for European states and
their politicians. The twenty-first century, however, has seen the unexpected emergence of
European states apologising to their former colonies. Analysing apologies from Germany,
Belgium, Britain and Italy, this book explores the shifting ways in which these countries
represent their colonial pasts and investigates what this reveals about contemporary
international politics, particularly relations between (former) coloniser and colonised. It is
argued that, far from renouncing colonialism in its entirety, the apologies are replete with
discourses that are reminiscent of the core legitimising tenets of empire. Specifically, the book
traces how the apologies both illuminate and recycle many of the inequalities, mind-sets and
ambivalences that circulated at the height of empire.
This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of peace and post-conflict
resolution studies, memory studies, colonial studies and postcolonial theory. More broadly, it
will be of interest to those studying political science, International Relations, sociology and
development.
Tom Bentley is Teaching Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the University of
Aberdeen.
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9 Empires of Remorse
Narrative, postcolonialism and apologies for colonial atrocity
Tom Bentley
Empires of Remorse
Narrative, postcolonialism and apologies for colonial atrocity
Tom Bentley
First published 2016
by Routledge
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© 2016 Tom Bentley
The right of Tom Bentley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bentley, Tom.
Empires of remorse : narrative, postcolonialism and apologies for colonial atrocity / Tom
Bentley.
pages cm
1. Postcolonialism—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Europe—Colonies. 3. Apologizing—Political
aspects. 4. Reparations for historical injustices. I. Title.
JV51.B43 2016
325'.32094—dc23
2015012722
ISBN: 978-1-138-81538-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-74672-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times
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Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint
material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who
is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future
editions of this book.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 On apology
2 Collective memory, postcolonialism and the (in)glorious past
3 The German apology for the Herero genocide
4 The Belgian apology for involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba
5 The British apology for Bloody Sunday
6 The Italian apology for colonialism in Libya
Conclusion
Index
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Anna Stavrianakis for being so encouraging about this project when it
was still at an early stage. I would also like to thank Beate Jahn and Rebecca Adler-Nissen for
being so encouraging about the project when it was at a somewhat later stage. Sincere thanks
are also owed to Charlotte Endersby for all the help in preparing this book.
This book is dedicated to Stefan Elbe and Zdenek Kavan. Both have offered consistently
excellent advice and fantastic support over the years.
Introduction
A few years ago, a bourgeois — and colonialist — commentator could find nothing better to defend the West than this:
'We are not angels. But at least we feel remorse.' What an admission! In the past, our continent had other devices to keep
it afloat: the Parthenon, Chartres, the Rights of Man, the swastika. We now know what they are worth: and now the
only thing they claim can save us from shipwreck is the very Christian sentiment of our guilt. This is the end, as you can
see: Europe is taking in water everywhere.1
Jean-Paul Sartre — Preface to Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
The locomotive of colonialism is, of course, violence. In this respect, the acquisition of other
peoples' territories has always entailed dispossession, enslavement and killing. However, as
Joseph Conrad (1995: 20) recognised as long ago as the nineteenth century, this is redeemed
somehow by an 'idea at the back of it'. That is, adjacent, even integral, to the physical violence
and patterns of domination are stories that absolve it, make it intelligible, perversely desirable.
As Edward Said (1994: xii xiii) wrote in Culture and Imperialism, 'the main battle in
imperialism is over land, [. . .] but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to
settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future —
these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative'. The discourses
of colonial domination have garnered much academic attention and are familiar. Colonial
projects were replete with the grandiose, the heroic, the epic; they valorised masculinised
notions of adventure, discovery and bravery. Equally, they situated the plunder in altruistic
terms, emphasising the gifts of civilisation, Christianity, science and so forth.
Yet while contemporary global patterns of domination and inequality resemble those of the
colonial period, the mechanics that underlie it have changed. Today's geopolitics of haves and
have-nots is not sustained in formal empires, but located in market economies, corporate
sweatshops, immigration visas and the like. And just as the mechanics of domination have
shifted and altered, so too have the scripts. Western elites may speak of 'development', 'failed
states' and 'humanitarian warfare', but who today would speak of 'savages', 'Christianising' or
'racial superiority'? This shifting etiquette of discourse seems to be causing some rather vexing
dilemmas for elites of the once colonising states. In particular, the heroic plotlines by which
politicians reflexively cloak their 'imagined communities' (Anderson 1983), especially in
regards to the colonial past, seem to be rather misplaced, even vulgar, in the liberal world.
This book addresses exactly this dilemma; it constitutes an interrogation of the under-
conceptualised, shifting ways in which European elites narrate the colonial past, and how this
both sheds light on and reconfigures contemporary colonial/post-colonial relations.
Representing the past: a new 'grammar'