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Reconciliation and political legitimacy: the old Australia and the new South Africa.

Article Excerpt
In both Australia and South Africa a state-sponsored discourse of reconciliation has been deployed as a tool of national integration and state building. This usage has tended to encourage a politics of selective memory that runs contrary to the spirit of reconciliation as recognition of different views of the nation. This article seeks to recover (and promote) a more positive concept of reconciliation by treating it as a discursive, democratic space in which different versions of the national story can be acknowledged and negotiated. The cases of Australia and South Africa are used in a mutually illuminating way to explore what "telling the truth" about the past might mean and how such "truth-telling" might help restore legitimacy to liberal states confronted with a "broken moral order".

"We can no longer devise ways out of the new reality: the moment of our accountability to history has arrived" *

"Talking is the tool of reconciliation" **

I: Divided Memories

In recent years (and for historically specific reasons in each case), struggles have broken out in nominally postcolonial states like Australia and South Africa over the national heritage. In both cases, the conventional and generally triumphalist story of the nation has been thrown into question by the emergence of alternative (and far less celebratory) perspectives on history. Post-Mabo Australia and post-apartheid South Africa can be seen to be analogous to the extent that the hegemony the ruling (white) culture once exercised over the past has now given way to a process of disruption and pluralisation in which different versions of the national story--invasion vs. settlement, development vs. exploitation--struggle for recognition. This decolonisation of the past has provoked something of a crisis of identity for Australians and South Africans alike. Unable to hold the different story lines together in the same narrative, they have found it increasingly difficult to mould and fire a coherent sense of self. (1) Both countries could now be said to be afflicted with what Heribert Adam has described as the problem of "divided memories"--the breakdown of national unity that occurs "when sizeable groups within the same state simultaneously attribute different meaning to the same history". (2)

The prevailing view (exemplified here by Adam) that divided memories represent a "problem" rather than a moment of liberation reflects a certain investment within liberal thought in creating continuity between state and nation. Historically speaking, concerns about disintegration, which are never far from the surface of liberal thinking, have tended to manifest themselves in the desire to establish congruence between political boundaries and national ones. (3) While various forms of ethnic and religious pluralism can be tolerated, national diversity is deemed to overstretch the elasticity of the communal bond. The tendency in liberal thought towards the psychologisation of the nation is both an index of this assumed relation between state and nation and a means of policing transgressions against it. By treating the nation-state as an analogue of the human psyche, liberalism makes divisions and fragmentations tantamount to a form of psychosis that requires remedial treatment. Within the terms of this metaphor, a single state comprised of two or more nations becomes a "perpetually irritated anomaly" (4) that must be resolved through one of two means. Either the state tears apart along the seams marked out by the struggle for national self-determination or it forges a new identity by mobilising strategies of assimilation.

It is this structuring of the "problem of the nation" which lies behind the anxiety of many (usually conservative) intellectuals and politicians in the face of emergent national divisions in contemporary liberal states. (5) Although it is theoretically possible for nationalist movements to be accommodated through constitutional reform (as exemplified by the Canadian case), the devastating implosions of the post-Cold War period have ensured that the question of secession is now overwhelming viewed in terms of state failure and the threat of Balkanisation. The disintegration of Yugoslavia has even come to function as something of a cautionary tale--a story of barbarism and violence that can be invoked in all contexts to justify regressive forms of national integration. (6) Needless to say, such claims represent an unfortunate (and generally politically motivated) overstatement of the centrifugal forces at work in most contemporary postcolonial liberal states. Without wishing to diminish the tragedy of the "blood and belonging" (7) conflicts that have horrified the international community in recent years, it is unreasonable to assume that they area genuine possibility everywhere. Not all states are in danger of collapsing into a Hobbesian state of nature once splinters and cracks in the national imaginary begin to reach the level of public consciousness. At the very least, some account needs to be taken of the unique historical circumstances of each case. (8)

By the same token, it would be foolish to regard the nation (as some multiculturalists tend to) as if it was nothing more than a mythological form shadowing the state that can be dismantled without any deleterious effects. While fears of disintegration are generally misplaced (even in exceptional cases like South Africa), the breakdown of national history has nevertheless become an increasingly pressing problem. At the very moment when state power has become a crucial commodity in resisting the disruptive effects of globalisation, (9) challenges to the dominant holding narrative have made it more and more difficult to secure allegiance from citizens. What has become increasingly evident where the ghosts of the past have started to rattle their chains is the extent to which history, or rather the story of the nation, creates the background consensus against which political decisions are made and assessed for their legitimacy. As Michael Oakeshott has suggested: "Every society, by the underlinings it makes in the book of its history, constructs a legend of its own fortunes which it keeps up to date and in which is hidden its own understandings of its politics". (10) To challenge that book of history is thus not only to threaten an established sense of self, but to disrupt the underlying moral consensus that makes the smooth running of liberal democratic politics possible.

The origins of this problem can be traced back to the frequently unacknowledged connection between liberalism and nationalism. It is now widely argued that political liberalism is too institutionally thin to sustain levels of social integration on its own. Although the liberal state is customarily represented as a civic vision of the political community, it is nourished by cultural forms of identification that stand outside its own rational procedures. (11) These pump blood into the empty veins of the polity and ensure allegiance to its formal institutions and abstract principles. At the time of their inception, liberal states were sustained in this regard by the afterglow of the Christian worldview. As the power of religion to underwrite social obedience waned, however, nationalism emerged as the pre-eminent means of sustaining allegiance to the state. At that point, as Eric Hobsbawm has suggested: "[t]he state not only made the nation, but needed to make the nation". (12) In order to secure support, the state was forced to reach into the heart of its subjects, into the territory of their everyday life, and install a new civic religion. It is, of course, Rousseau who recognises this problem most clearly and recommends the creation of a corporate identity as a means of generating mutual trust and undergirding consent. (13)

Since the nineteenth century, the burden of constructing a "corporate identity" within liberal states has been intimately tied up with the discipline of history. Given the liberal antipathy to exclusionary nationalism based upon racial or religious signifiers, history has become the principal means of constructing a shared set of core values of national traditions. Although ostensibly objective, these historical narratives have served to constitute, rather than simply describe, the national identity. Often constructed around genetic metaphors based upon the life-history of the individual--birth, growth, maturity--they selectively organise events in a relation of continuity with a contemporary subject, thereby creating the sense of a unified nation grounded in a shared past. (14) The critical feature of all of these histories is the fact that there is frequently little to hold them together except the territory that they narrativise. Thus, even where there is no...