Memory and Politics: Three Theories of Justice in Regime Transitions

Source: (2004) Presented as part of the Transnational Seminar Series, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 5 November. Downloaded 2 February 2005.

In his essay, “The Contest of the Facultiesâ€?, published in 1798, Immanuel Kant presents an intriguing reflection on the French Revolution. The moral significance of the revolution, he suggests, is to be found, not in any event directly connected to it, but in the reaction of “disinterested sympathyâ€? towards the revolutionary cause on the part of
onlookers. Because this response was potentially hazardous and had nothing to do with selfinterest,
Kant sees it as the result of a “moral disposition within the human raceâ€?, and thus
as a moral phenomenon that can never be forgotten. Presumably for Kant, this serves as
grounds for hope of moral progress in the form of movement towards a global “federal
union� of independent republics, a union that would secure universal peace.
Though I am no latter-day Kant, my central aim in this paper is to identify a novel
moral phenomenon that is surely as significant, though considerably less exhilarating, than
the circumstances noted by Kant in 1798. I am referring here to the remarkable rise of a
series of practices and institutions operating at both the national and global level, designed to
respond to war crimes, atrocities, human rights abuses, and grave injustices committed by
states or political movements against minorities and individuals. Arguably, this is a
development that takes its inception in the Nuremberg Trials and the passage of the United
Nations Genocide Convention in 1948. The Eichmann Trial of 1961 also played an
important role in alerting people to the idea that past human rights abuses require a response
in the present; indeed, most of the manifestations of memory politics that concern me here
have occurred since this trial. (excerpt)