Book Review: The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices

Elazer Barkan’s book, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (2000), gives an excellent historical understanding of the modern development of the concept of international justice between aggressors and victims. This understanding of justice has made significant strides away from the view that might always makes right and that the aggressor owes nothing to his victims. Less hopeful, however, is the adjudication of ancient offenses and wrongs. Barkan’s approach to these longstanding grievances, while similar to the more successful approach taken toward modern grievances, lacks a full understanding of the vastly different circumstances surrounding them, both when they were committed and today.

Barkan spends the first half of his book discussing the various restitution efforts stemming from World War II. Much of the discussion naturally involves the victims of the Holocaust, primarily Jewish victims. Also discussed are the sex slaves abused by the Japanese army and the abuses and looting enacted upon Eastern Europe by the Soviets. What all these attempts at restitution have in common is the recent nature of the abuse. Since the abuses happened within the last seventy years and many of those directly affected are still alive, restitution is possible and, in many cases, is being effected.

The second half of the book involves a different category of abuses; Barkan labels them “Colonialism and Its Aftermath.” In this section he discusses the attempts at restitution made by modern day descendents of Native American, Native Hawaiians, Maoris, and African slaves. These cases are distinguished from the others by the fact that neither the aggressors nor those directly victimized are still living. In most cases they have been dead for a long time. Additional problems result from the nature of the demands.

While those demands resulting from World War II and Soviet occupation abuses are primarily financial or for the return of specific artifacts, demands made by these victim of colonization are much more complex. Some Native American tribes demand the “return” of the entire Black Hills area as a religious site to be protected from tourists and hikers; Aborigines in Australia make similar demands for their holy sites. Groups of these indigenous peoples have claimed that they and they alone are the owners of designs and styles of artworks, paintings, and fabrics and that no one but them ought to be allowed to use them. Claims are made by their descendents on billions of dollars they believe are owed them in restitution from the descendants of their oppressors. This is especially true in the case of the descendents of African slaves.

What Barkan and the makers of such claims ignore, however, is that the designation of victim and oppressor when separated by so much time from the actual events themselves becomes completely unclear. Why must the entire population of the United States be guilty for the immoral behavior of white slaveowners? Even if those who did not own slaves were somehow complicit in the slaveowners guilt, what of abolitionists, what of those who immigrated after the Civil War? There are no clear oppressors anymore; to force restitution from the guiltless it to become an oppressor oneself. The question of the designs and styles of works of art is equally problematic. One is forced to ask, why now? and why with only these styles and designs? Is Greece owed restitution because the U.S. Capitol building uses designs incorporated from ancient Grecian buildings? Such an argument is an absurdity. Barkan’s book contains an excellent description of developments in restitution; his analysis on the justice of the various claims, however, leaves much to be desired.