Since the early 1980s the world has witnessed a dramatic political transformation of many Third World authoritarian governments and former Soviet-controlled communist regimes into representative democracies. The replacement of these dictatorial regimes with constitutional governments has resulted in a major dilemma--namely, how to reconcile the legacy of widespread human-rights abuses and massive structural injustices with the consolidation of democratic institutions. Is a comprehensive accounting of the sordid history of political oppression necessary to overcome the hurt and hate resulting from totalitarian party rule? If truth-telling is necessary, is it also sufficient to overcome the legacy of oppression and injustice, or must political crimes and state-sponsored abuses be punished and victims given restitution? Finally, what role can repentance and forgiveness play in promoting national reconciliation?

Recent history suggests that there is no simple way to overcome a regime's past oppression and injustice. Consider the following:

--After democracy returned to Uruguay in 1985, the new government released political prisoners and pardoned all crimes committed by state security forces during the 1970s, when leftist terrorists were embarked in an urban guerrilla war. Although the amnesty decision was bitterly denounced by human-rights groups, a national referendum inned quest for truth and justice for human-rights abuses carried out during the 1976-83 era of military rule.

A national truth commission issued a comprehensive report (50,000 pages) on the major human-rights abuses of the late 1970s when more than 9,000 persons disappeared, while civilian courts began prosecuting the top military leaders responsible for the major crimes of the "dirty war." Although Argentine society was supportive of these trials, the continuing prosecution of former military leaders resulted in several military disturbances that threatened Argentina's fragile demo-cratic order. As a result, soon after taking office in 1989, President Carlos Menem halted the justice process by pardoning virtually all military men and leftist subversives accused of human-rights crimes.

--After Chilean President Gen. Augusto Pinochet turned power over to Patricio Aylwin in March 1990, ending 17 years of military rule, the new democratic government embarked principally on a truth-telling program. A presidential commission issued an exhaustive human-rights report in 1991 that described the execution or disappearance of more than 2,200 persons, most of them at the hands of government security forces. The government, however, was unable to prosecute crimes because an amnesty law had exempted all crimes and terrorist acts committed in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 coup.

--In 1991, the Czech and Slovak National Assembly passed the Lustration (purification) Law, barring former Communist leaders and state officials from serving in the new government for five years. The law, which was estimated to have affected over a half-million persons, required that job applicants for government positions produce an official document declaring that their background was "clean." Since people's political history affected not only their prospect for governmental employment but also their civic reputation, the law's application was politically divisive and strongly contested, resulting in numerous alleged injustices toward innocent persons.

--In 1995, South African President Nelson Mandela signed the National Unity and Reconciliation Act, which established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC, which began functioning in early 1996, seeks to lift the veil on the untold story of South Africa's own "dirty war." Its aim is to provide a comprehensive accounting of the human-rights abuses perpetuated by police and military authorities, as well as by anti-government forces, such as the African National Congress (ANC) guerrillas. The goal is not to apportion blame but to provide an accounting of the political crimes and human-rights abuses committed during the apartheid era. To encourage truth-telling, the TRC is empowered to grant amnesty to individuals who testify about their role in politically motivated atrocities committed from 1960 until 1993, when the interim democratic constitution took effect. To date, more than 3,000 persons have applied for amnesty. The aim of South Africa's TRC is thus similar to that of most Latin American and Central European truth commissions--trading justice for truth-telling.

This brief sketch of selected countries' efforts to confront the legacy of state-sponsored crimes suggests that there is no simple strategy for resolving the tension between the pursuit of justice and the consolidation of democratic institutions, between the moral demands for restitution and the quest for national reconciliation. Given the widespread societal complicity in past injustices and the political frailty of the new governments, prosecution and restitution are unlikely, if not impossible, for all but a small portion of the crimes and abuses committed under previous regimes. Moreover, since the quest for restitution would undoubtedly foster continuing debate over the relative culpability of individuals and groups, widespread prosecutions could threaten and even impede national reconciliation.

Historically, forgiveness has been regarded as a spiritual doctrine, applicable chiefly to an individual's relationship to God and secondarily to interpersonal relationships. Little attention has been given to the role of forgiveness in the life of collective entities such as the state. To the extent that Western political philosophers have addressed political ethics, they have done so primarily through the prism of public justice, not the process of reconciliation through forgiveness. Even major Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas emphasized the role of law and government in restraining evil and fostering a just order, but they neglected the political implications of the notion of forgiveness. Similarly, Reinhold Niebuhr, this century's pre-eminent Christian political ethicist, argued that justice, not love and forgiveness, was the highest ethical virtue in politics.

One of the few thinkers to recognize the potential role of forgiveness in public life was the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition, Arendt identifies two major requirements for the maintenance of human community--forgiveness and promise-keeping. According to Arendt, the faculty of forgiveness allows individuals to "undo" past deeds, while the faculty of promise-keeping provides the basis for stable, predictable relationships. While Arendt credits Jesus with the "discovery" of forgiveness, she believes that its religious origins should not impede the doctrine's application to the secular, political milieu.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has also called attention to the importance of repentance and forgiveness in political life. In an essay in From Under the Rubble, he argues that the only way to overcome the anger and injustice of the past is through repentance. Repentance, especially mutual repentance, is the only basis, he suggests, "from which we can go forward not to fresh hatreds but to concord." Indeed, he notes that the survival of humankind depends upon the capacity to develop individual and collective contrition, coupled with the development of individual self-control and collective "self-limitation."

Despite contributions from writers such as Arendt and Solzhenitsyn, the notion of forgiveness is rarely applied to contemporary public life. As a result, Donald Shriver, president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary and past president of the Society for Christian Ethics, has written An Ethic for Enemies to show the potential contribution this concept can make to the development of stable and just political relationships at both domestic and international levels.

Shriver's book is divided into two major parts. The first, chapters 1-3, is a theoretical and conceptual exploration of the ethic of forgiveness. The second, chapters 4-6, involves analysis of three case studies to illustrate the nature and role of political forgiveness. Shriver's central thesis is that the development of a more just and humane political world requires that individuals, groups, and governments establish stronger social and political bonds by overcoming the alienation and pain perpetuated by prior wrongs.

"I have written this book," Shriver explains, "chiefly to address the frame of mind which resists dealing with the leftover debris of national pasts that continue to clog the relationships of diverse groups of humans around the world. The debris will never get cleaned up and animosity will never drain away until forgiveness enters these relationships in some political form."

There can be little doubt that human beings have a natural inclination to rectify historic political injustices through revenge. But as Shriver also notes, revenge not only corrupts politics but tends to destroy the possibility of political community itself. The challenge, then, is to establish structures and policies that advance social and political justice while also creating bonds of human solidarity.

Shriver suggests that we can identify four core elements that are generally involved in the practice of forgiveness: remembrance and moral judgment, forbearance from revenge, empathy, and renewal of fractured relationships. Of these goals, the most difficult to fulfill, both in individual and collective life, is the first, since it requires truth-telling and an admission of wrongdoing. "Absent a preliminary agreement between two or more parties that there is something from the past to be forgiven," writes Shriver, "forgiveness stalls at the starting gate."

But Shriver's second element--forbearance from revenge--is also very challenging. If the cycle of violence between enemies is to be broken, punishment and restitution must be carried out in such a way that communal solidarity is affirmed. A moral and fair retribution must balance the claims of "justice-as-punishment" with those of "justice-as-restoration." According to Shriver, balancing the claims of wrongdoers with those of wrong-sufferers can "make room for punishment while making wider room yet for the repair of damages and renewal of relations between enemies."

If forgiveness is to foster domestic and international political reconciliation, leaders and citizens must understand the doctrine's nature and its potential role in public life. While Shriver contributes to this understanding and makes a strong case for the importance of an ethic of forgiveness in politics, his study suffers from two important limitations: first, his formulation and application of political forgiveness deviates significantly from the commonly accepted notion of forgiveness; and second, the book's three case studies fail to illuminate how the doctrine can be put into practice in the political realm.

In his conceptual formulation, Shriver makes reparation and restitution an important part of political forgiveness. Forgiveness is thus joined to another key virtue--justice. Shriver argues that after enemies have recognized past wrongs, restitution can be imposed on the offender. Forgiveness does not require, he writes, the abandonment of punishment and reparation; rather, "apology and reparation need to go hand in hand."

But the joining of forgiveness with justice is problematic, reflecting a significant departure from the New Testament understanding of the doctrine and unnecessarily qualifying the doctrine's unique contribution to the renewal of communal life. Biblically, God forgives human beings for their sins through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The chief requirement for divine pardon is repentance, which involves the expression of sorrow and contrition for prior sins, and the acceptance of that pardon offered in Christ. Forgiveness is thus a gift, bestowed by the forgiver, as a result of a person's confession of wrongdoing. Since forgiveness involves the cancellation of debts and the forgoing of reparations, it is not an instrument of justice per se. Rather, forgiveness is a means of overcoming past wrongs and injustices through repentance and the pardoning of those deeds. As theologian Lewis Smedes observes, forgiveness is "an outrage against straight-line dues-paying morality."

Since forgiveness's unique feature is that it clears the debris of injustice through penitence, it is unclear why Shriver joins forgiveness and justice. A preferable and surely more useful conceptualization of political forgiveness is one that emphasizes repentance and pardon, thereby qualifying, or even setting aside, claims of restitution and punishment. It is important to stress, as Solzhenitsyn has, that since social and political evils and injustices are seldom one-sided, reconciliation will ordinarily involve mutual repentance. Moreover, since authentic political repentance is expressed not only in verbal apologies but in private and public actions, individuals and governmental institutions can manifest their contrition in a variety of ways, including tangible restitution for prior wrongs. But such restitution, carried out as an expression of authentic contrition, should not be confused with the reparations and punishment that are part of political justice in the settling of disputes. Thus, while forgiveness allows for the possibility of restitution, political justice normally requires reparations and punishment.

In the aftermath of World War II, both the United States and West Germany carried out official actions to express national contrition for prior evil deeds. For example, West Germany expressed its national sorrow for the evils of the Nazi regime by, among other things, making financial reparations to Jewish peoples, publishing school texts describing the evils of the Holocaust, and prosecuting some 90,000 citizens accused of wartime crimes. And U.S. public officials expressed repentance for the government's internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during the Pacific War not only through public apologies but also by abrogating in l976 the executive order authorizing the original wartime confinement and by granting in l988 monetary reparations to each of the surviving internees. In short, while political forgiveness may involve reparations as an expression of authentic repentance, its essential elements include truth-telling, confession, the avoidance of revenge, and the giving and receiving of pardon.

The second shortcoming of Shriver's study is its failure to illuminate how the forgiveness doctrine can be successfully applied in domestic or international politics. This is due, in great part, to the use of three general case studies to illustrate the ethic of forgiveness: post-World War II U.S.-Japan relations, post World War II U.S.-German relations, and racial injustice toward African Americans. Since the cases involve the collective responsibility of nations, regimes, and ethnic groups, rather than the personal responsibility of government officials, they are not very helpful in illuminating the essential steps necessary to achieve reconciliation through forgiveness.

Moreover, since forgiveness presupposes the culpability of an offender, case studies designed to illuminate the role of forgiveness in political life necessitate agreement about which party is the primary offender and which is the chief victim. But Shriver seems reluctant to locate primary culpability for political evils and injustices, preferring to view the ethic of forgiveness as a mutual and reciprocal process. The limitations of this approach are clearly evident in his analysis of the U.S.-Japan case study.

Since American and Japanese political leaders have held differing views on the origins, evolution, and termination of the Pacific War, Japan and the United States have been unwilling to apologize officially to each other. The Japanese Parliament did adopt in 1995 a resolution expressing remorse for causing "unbearable pain to people abroad" during World War II, but this resolution was concerned chiefly with Japan's impact on Asian countries, not its attack on Pearl Harbor.

Despite the parties' failure to agree on past wrongs, Shriver seeks to keep the possibility of political forgiveness alive by identifying wartime evils committed by both parties. In his view, if bilateral relations are to be strengthened and international reconciliation is to be realized, both parties must express mutual contrition. Japan should apologize for imperialism toward its neighbors and for its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and the United States should apologize for its racism toward the Japanese people and its nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

Is Shriver's assumption of mutual culpability warranted? Are the evils committed by Japan--the aggressor state--and the United States--the regime that sought to defend its interests--morally equivalent? There can be little doubt that the United States committed many unjust actions in prosecuting the war against Japan. But are not such actions morally subsidiary to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor--the action that precipitated the war--and the long-range policy of aggression in which it played a part? If forgiveness is to be relevant in a military conflict such as the Pacific War, the party initiating the hostilities must accept culpability for its aggression and be prepared to express contrition and repentance for the resulting injustice; in response, the victim nation has the opportunity to pardon wrongdoers and seek to overcome alienation and anger through reconciliation.

Given the difficulty of ascertaining collective culpability and expressing communal repentance, if the ethic of forgiveness is to become incorporated into public life, it will do so chiefly in the context of clearly delineated political evils and specific governmental and political actions. Holding the Czech Communist party, the Chilean military, or the Afrikaners' National Party responsible for past human-rights violations is difficult, if not impossible; but holding political and military officials accountable for decisions and actions is not only morally necessary but also potentially conducive to reconciliation. The great advantage of holding individuals accountable for past deeds, whether carried out in a private capacity or as part of officially sanctioned government policies, is that such a focus can illuminate culpability and provide the opportunity for repentance and pardon and thereby help establish preconditions for reconciliation among political enemies.

The importance of personal accountability is illustrated in President Reagan's decision to visit the military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, in 1985 as part of the fortieth U.S.-German commemoration of V-E Day--an action that sparked intense opposition from Jewish groups and the media because the cemetery included a number of graves of SS troops. Despite appeals from Congress and leading citizens, Reagan laid a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery, believing that he had a moral obligation to express solidarity with West German democratic leaders after four decades of repentant behavior by West Germany. Whether or not Reagan did the right thing, the Bitburg dilemma illuminated the importance of memory, contrition, and pardon, as well as the constraints in overcoming past evil.

Indeed, if forgiveness is to play a more important role in politics, the doctrine must first become part of the attitudes, rhetoric, and actions of individuals. Only when a significant portion of its citizens embodies the virtue of forgiveness in their personal lives by demanding truth-telling, practicing confession, and expressing pardon will a nation be ready to express this virtue in its collective life.

Mark Amstutz is professor of political science at Wheaton College. His article "Religion and Politics in South Africa: Christian Churches During the Apartheid Era" (Christian Scholar's Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 [Sept. 1995], pp. 8-29), received the eleventh annual Christian Scholar's Award.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.

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