Imperfect Justice

Chair:  What are the things that make Holocaust reparations distinctive?  What are the things that other peoples who have also suffered sometimes frightful injustices can say is as valid for them as it is for the Jews of Europe?

Elazar Barkan:  I would like to start my mentioning that I am a fan of Stuart Eizenstat.  I think his work was quite magnificent and notwithstanding the shortcomings of some of the result.  But I think that the role that he himself played has helped us: a tremendous impact and really new expanses of restitution.  But really the movement for restitution did not start there.

Partially, I think we ought to look at it as very much the result of the end of the Cold War on the one hand and of the end of colonialism on the other.  Part of the affluence of the ’nineties, and I think very much restitution of the movement, started significantly notwithstanding the great achievement of reparations that were agreed in 1952 between Germany and Jews which was an isolated and independent case, the rest of the cases of restitution globally really date from the ’nineties and those years are characterised, more than anything else, by the end of the Cold War and by the rise of human rights issues.  So you have cases of restitution, as we saw in the papers, that started in Eastern  Europe.  Some of them were with regard to Jews, mostly with regard to communal property, but there were many other forms of restitution in the ex-Communist Party countries. 

The reason for that, and I think that this is the core issue of restitution as separate from other political issues, is that restitution to a large degree is based on moral claim.  Now let me try and clarify that.  Restitution is not equated with moral claim but it is based on moral claim. 

So I will rephrase the question that you are asking me: Why did the Jews receive restitution for the Holocaust, whether it was in 1952 or in the ’nineties or even after 2000, while many others who have suffered (and I am not going to go into comparative victimisation and suffering), who have suffered genocide and numerous atrocities, have not received restitution.  In fact, in the United States among African Americans, this is a question that is very poignant which is being asked. 

The answer that I would give to that question, which we can develop further, is that in addition to the moral components of restitution, what is very significant is the political movement: the political action that materialises the moral claims and turns those into effective political claims.  So it has two components: the moral and the political.  One without the other doesn’t work.  But it is not always clear, neither to activists nor to lawyers, in that regard.  The long list of law suits does not mention any law suits that actually succeeded.  The law suits were actually started way before by Japanese Americans in the ’seventies who were suing the Government in order to get compensation for their internment.  But that never panned out.  In fact, they exhausted it.   

Afterwards we have the fall of communism.  There is the end of the Cold War and then a whole host of various forms of restitution, reparations and others in Eastern Europe.  But at the same time there is a whole different family of cases that grow from colonialism.  The beneficiaries are primarily of those, our indigenous people in the United States, in New Zealand, in Australia, in Canada, more than anywhere else, and a host of claims that do not materialise.

Now, much of it has to do with personalities: who are the activists?  what are their demands? Etc.  And the list is long and if you are really interested you can read my book.  But beyond the variety of the cases, it is really those politics of a combination of affluence and morality.  It is that we are in an affluent society where we value the human rights and where we move beyond just wanting our current policies to be right and correct.  We also want our identity, namely our history, to be just.  So we are trying to buy our past, to clean our history, through paying reparations to the victims upon whom we inflicted pain or gross injustices.  Because you will notice that none of the cases that come under that category is in the nature of traditional restitution.  Traditional restitution: we are all familiar with Versailles, 1919 and the position of the winning power, the victor.

All of these cases are more or less under pressure or otherwise, but are embraced voluntarily by the descendants’ entity of the perpetrators.  Nobody forces.  Nobody forced Germany.  Germany is far too strong and really if they would say that they are not interested, nobody could do anything about it.  It was the willingness of Germany to embrace the responsibility and to recognise the guilt, that enabled them to do it.  Then it is a tortuous negotiation: exactly the sum; what kind, etc.  All that is significant, no doubt, but it is the moral aspiration to embrace a more just history that is most characteristic of reparation.

Chair:  Do you think, nevertheless, that there is a correlation between your proposition that it has been the politically organised claimants who have succeeded (Eizenstat’s book is about that) and the fact that states which had not up to that point been willing to make reparations have come across and made reparations?  In other words, that to that extent, moral influence, they have been coerced into recognising their responsibility?

Elazar Barkan:  Certainly.  I think that if we talk about moral coercion, and I wouldn’t know how to differentiate coercion from persuasion, then yes.  But I think that is the nature, and you would know much better than I do, that is the nature of human rights. The whole notion of the human rights movement that began to some degree with the civil rights movement in the United States during the ’sixties together with the anti-colonial movement, much of it is based on that combination of force, whether it is political force and sometimes it is even violent force, together with a higher moral claim that the victim deserves better.  So in that regard, yes, certainly, coercion if you will. 

But I would rather limit the use of the term ‘coercion’ to what actually happened in Versailles.  Then, they had to sign on the dotted line: so many milliards to pay for war reparation.  That is victors’ justice.  That is what has happened for ever in human history: the victor demanded loot, in one way or another. 

We are now in a different period and I think that restitution, more than any other kind of policy, is actually embedded in moral justification.  In fact, it is the powerful who are willing to embrace the responsibility.  I find that that is the most fascinating part of restitution. 

Chair:  How much of it is the straightforward posing of moral demands in response to this and how much of it is the kind of elaborate political intrigue that one is familiar with on the world stage?  I am just thinking of one vignette in Stuart Eizenstat’s book among a mass of things that he encountered.  When it was proposed initially that the Holocaust memorial should also include the Armenian victims of the Turkish massacre in 1915, Turkey threatened that it would no longer be responsible for the safety of its own Jewish community if this went ahead.  I think it was blocked as a result of this.  That is another example of how political clout comes into the question.

Elazar Barkan:  Certainly I think the title of Stuart’s book in that regard is perfect, or imperfect as the case may be, with regard to justice.  I think that what we have is that we have tension between growing aspiration and frustrated materialisation of those aspirations.  And the aspirations will continually grow and people will permanently be unsatisfied and that is a wonderful situation because I think that as we are human we want to have an improved situation.  We can’t really get there but that doesn’t mean to say that the situation itself, if you compare it just empirically, would not be an equal case.

Now to answer your question as to how much of it is political machination and how much sort of the moral high ground, I think that that is a very complex ‘puzzle’  where all those things interact, where there is a coincidence where a person holds power and decides to embrace a particular obligation, or responsibility.  I think that while those words are a definition, they are very amorphous when you come to that kind of political negotiation.

For instance, I think that Adenauer in the 1950s (or 1949) when he decided to embrace the issue of reparations and had to come to an agreement with the Jews in order, in his mind, to legitimise Germany, many critics and scholars rather presented it as a case of realpolitik, with American pressure etc.  

I beg to differ on that issue.  While there was a lot of very crass political calculation, I think that, given the Cold War, it could have been very easy for Germany to just fall in line in the same way that Japan did.  And Japan has yet to recognise even any responsibility for any of its atrocities in World War Two.  The difference is quite significant between those two countries and I do not think that it is just the culture.  I think it is also leadership.

For instance, in Australia, until 1995 when John Howard came into power, the Labour Party was very much for reconciliation with the Aborigines, for recognising the pain of colonialism.  John Howard is adamantly against it.  That is the single most important aspect in explaining the fortune of restitution in Australia.

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