Book Review: Europe
| Published date | 01 May 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1478-9299.2007.00132_4.x |
| Date | 01 May 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
Sins of Parents: The Politics of National
Apologies in the United States by Brian A.
Weiner. Philadelphia PA: Temple University
Press, 2005. 246pp.,$19.95, ISBN 1 59213 318 5
Centering on two cases whereAmer ican courts or
Congress have faced claims for compensation for
historic injustices,Weinerinvestigates how debates
about restitution have been framed.He relates the
issues in the debates to opposed views inAmerican
history about the relevance of the past to present
obligations, as embodied in the pronouncements
of Jefferson and Lincoln. Supporting Lincoln’s
position,he argues that citizens, by being part of an
intergenerational political society, acquire a his-
torical identity and a collective responsibility for
remembering and rectifying its past wrongs.
Weiner’s main thesis is that in understanding
and dealing with historic injustices, we should
adopt a political framework,rather than a juridical,
theological or therapeutic approach. This means
that efforts to make amends should be forward
rather than backward looking.Acts of rectification
should aim to overcome the alienation of victims
or descendants, to make trust possible, to
re-establish ties sundered by the injustice or to
make it possiblefor bonds between groups to exist.
Rectification should be a political process involv-
ing public discussion and symbolic acts of national
significance. Inspired by Arendt’s writings on for-
giveness,Weiner thinks that a public apology for
past wrongs, as in the case of the apology of the
American government to Japanese-Americans
incarcerated during the Second World War, can
transform political identity.It can encourage citi-
zens to recognize the relevance of history and see
themselves as belonging to a nation that takes
responsibility for its past so that it can act more
effectively and responsibly in the future.
Weiner’sframework requires that citizens iden-
tify with their nation in a way that makes them
open to accepting responsibility for the past.
Whether they do, or should, is a matter of con-
tention,and he has to deal with the views of those
who believe that national identity means adher-
ence to present institutions, or who think that
national allegiances are disappearing, are divisive
rather than uniting or are the breeding ground of
chauvinistic attitudes.The ways in which history
is manipulated by interest groups, and often by
governments, do not augur well for a political
transformation that is supposed to unite citizens
in accepting responsibility for the past.
However, Weiner’s book is well written
and generally persuasive. It combines a well-
researched examination of debates about particu-
lar claims, along with a plausible account of how
facing up to dark episodes in a nation’s history
could transform its political life for the better.
Janna Thompson Cace
(La Trobe University)
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Europe
What’s the Beef? The Contested Gover-
nance of European Food Safety by Christo-
pher Ansell and David Vogel (eds). London:
MIT Press, 2006. 389pp., £17.95, ISBN 0 262
51192 4
This collection draws together contributions from
authors in nine countries united in agreement that
European food regulation has seen the emergence
of contested governance: ‘a more pervasive and
fundamental form of conflict, one in which con-
testation spills beyond policy outcomes to who
should make decisions and where, how, and on
what basis they should be made’(p. 10).The single
largest impetus for contested governance, they
argue, was the discovery of Bovine Spongiform
Encephalopathy (BSE), the reaction to which
embodies ‘the kinds of dilemmas in the relations
betweenscience and regulation, market promotion
and consumer protection, public authority and
public opinion that riddle contemporary gover-
nance’ (p. 3) and therefore forms the focus of this
volume.However,readers expecting an analysis of
BOOK REVIEWS 279
© 2007The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Political StudiesAssociation
Political Studies Review: 2007, 5(2)
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