Political reconciliation at the level of global governance¹

1 I would like to thank the participants of the conference on ‘Global Justice’ in Hangzhou and the workshop on ‘World Government or Else?’ in Zurich and Konstanz for helpful hints and comments. I am also grateful to the critical review process and the constructive comments by the guest editor of this special section, Attila Tanyi.

ABSTRACT

This article applies the idea of political reconciliation to current debates on the role and legitimacy of global governance. My underlying thesis is that the idea of reconciliation fits better with the non-ideal circumstances of global injustice. To this end, I will first of all develop a three-tiered model of political reconciliation and introduce the related concept of restorative justice. I will then look at some of the most obvious forms of international and global injustice – historical injustice, economic exploitation, and political domination – and argue that a normative theory of political reconciliation provides better proposals for feasible global governance reforms than do theories of corrective, retributive, or distributive justice. Finally, I will make a few comments on the role of political philosophy as a medium of ‘narrative reconciliation’.

KEYWORDS:

• Political reconciliation
• narrative reconciliation
• global justice
• restorative justice
• role of political philosophy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I would like to thank the participants of the conference on ‘Global Justice’ in Hangzhou and the workshop on ‘World Government or Else?’ in Zurich and Konstanz for helpful hints and comments. I am also grateful to the critical review process and the constructive comments by the guest editor of this special section, Attila Tanyi.

2 A realistic utopia in the Rawlsian sense roughly means a politically feasible ideal of a just society (Rawls 1999, §1). Even if the question of political reconciliation arises under unfavorable conditions, such problems of non-ideal theory must be discussed in the light of the ideal of a feasible political order and hence as a question of transitional justice.

3 Needless to say, this working definition hides a number of controversial aspects and should not be seen as a final definition, but rather as a framework within which I will outline my own position.

4 They do so, either because political reconciliation in the sense of agreement proves infeasible, or because the required processes of forgiveness, amnesties, or public truth-telling would betray the victims (Murphy 2010).

5 The work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was inspired by the idea that the restoration of civic trust, unity, and friendship requires a public process of truth-telling and forgiveness which cannot be achieved by lawful amnesties, democratization, and reparations alone (Howse and Llewellyn 1999).

6 According to Rawls, true stability does not simply require a peace agreement based on deterrence or power relations, but an agreement that each party confirms on the basis of its own conception (and sense) of justice (Rawls 1999, § 5).

7 Needless to say, of course, that these three stages of reconciliation often coincide. Reformist measures such as truth-telling may be established right in the aftermath of a conflict and before democratic reforms have been passed. However, the idea of political reconciliation seems to differ from realistic, liberal, or deliberative approaches in that it is ultimately concerned with the healing of social relations, with the restoration of a group’s agency in order to jointly master common tasks for the future.

8 Take, for example, the reconciliation process in Europe after the Second World War. Beyond the question of guilt and reparations, the European reconciliation process was guided by a forward-looking narrative which contrasted the historical danger of expansive nation-states with the political vision of a united Europe.

9 This view is further discussed on the following pages (Philpott 2012, 53–73).

10 To be utterly clear about this: in many cases, we will be able to trace global or international wrongs back to an agent’s intentions and deeds. It makes perfect sense to blame the US for misusing their veto power in the Security Council, or Germany for retarding reparations. All too often, however, global injustices are structural in that they place some groups or states into a position that enables them to either dominate or exploit others and to ignore their justified claims. In this context, Lu (2015) distinguishes between relational reconciliation, which reacts to harmful interactions, and structural reconciliation, which is aimed at institutional and political background structures. According to Lu, both kinds of political reconciliation can also be found in the international and ultimately global arena.

11 Germany, for example, is working with Israel to achieve reconciliation generations after the Holocaust through a series of measures. There are monetary as well as symbolic reparations, commemorative days, memorials, and documentation centers, exchanges of parliamentarians and students, public meetings of witnesses and survivors, atonement services, curricular focuses in school, and so forth.

12 Enrique Sanchez, Sylvia Rognvik: Building Just Societies: Reconciliation in Transitional Settings. (United Nations Workshop Report; http://www.un.org/en/peacebuilding/pbso/pdf/12-58492_feb13.pdf (30 October 2017).

13 With a view to colonial injustice, Lu (forthcoming) argues that post-colonial structures are still anchored on the global political map. Political responsibility to structural reconciliation would then not only be bilateral, but would also affect the global order as a whole, in which post-colonial power asymmetries still prevail.

14 As Rawls has put it in his theory of international justice:

While realization is, of course, not unimportant, I believe that the very possibility of such a social order can itself reconcile us to the social world […] For so long as we believe for good reasons that a self-sustaining and reasonably just political and social order both at home and abroad is possible, we can reasonably hope that we or others will someday, somewhere, achieve it; and we can then do something toward this achievement. (Rawls 1999, 128)