The Myth of the Politics of Regret
| Author | Mano Toth |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829814555942 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2015, Vol. 43(2) 551 –566
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829814555942
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
1. Duncan Bell, ‘Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Memory’, Constellations 15, no. 1
(2008): 148.
2. Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud and Niklaus Steiner, eds, The
Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
3. Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 137.
4. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 26.
The Myth of the Politics
of Regret
Mano Toth
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
This article argues for the need to think about the politics of regret more critically, within academia
and beyond. The politics of regret here refers to the process through which the representation of
past events comes to be dominated by apologetic voices in the public discourse. A brief overview
of the most prominent previous attempts to make sense of the phenomenon shows why it is
vital to strengthen the critical perspective on the issue. I assume that, in practice, the politics of
regret almost always makes use of simplified representations of historical events that constitute
images of the self and of wider society; as such, it should be properly understood as mythical.
For this reason, I argue that the critical (scholarly and social) approach to the politics of regret
should be based on a more general ethical framework with regard to myths that simultaneously
acknowledges the right to existence of all interpretations of the past (including political regret)
and challenges the exclusionary characteristics of mythologies.
Keywords
critical scholarship, memory politics, political mythology, politics of regret, public apology
Our times are sometimes described as a ‘mnemonic age’,1 an ‘age of apology’,2 an ‘age of
shattered time’.3 For good or ill, the ‘cultural obsession’ with memory4 has indeed become
a factor to count with in several societies, and memory studies is considered by many as an
Corresponding author:
Mano Toth, University of Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT, UK.
Email: mgt36@cam.ac.uk
555942MIL0010.1177/0305829814555942Millennium: Journal of International StudiesToth
research-article2014
Article
552 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(2)
5. Henry L. Roediger and James V. Wertsch, ‘Creating a New Discipline of Memory Studies’,
Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 9–22.
6. Olick, Politics of Regret.
7. Nenad Dimitrijevic, Duty to Respond: Mass Crime, Denial, and Collective Responsibility
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011); Trudy Govier, ‘A Dialectic of
Acknowledgement’, in Reconciliation(s): Transitional Justice in Postconflict Societies, ed.
Joanna R. Quinn (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 36–50; Linda Radzik,
Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009).
8. Jon Elster, Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
9. Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn, eds, Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and
Reconciliation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Nick Smith, I Was Wrong:
The Meanings of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
10. Aaron Lazare, On Apology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
emerging academic field in its own right.5 Particular attention has been paid to how wrongs
committed in the past are commemorated. Among others, official apologies, remembrance
days, reparations to victims and memorials have become widely used policy measures,
often presented as attempts to ‘come to terms’ with the traumatic experience of mass crimes
committed in the past.
This phenomenon, termed the ‘politics of regret’ by Jeffrey Olick,6 has attracted the
attention of many scholars in recent years from a wide array of disciplines. Several works
have explored the trend from a variety of angles: the moral necessity of remembering (or
of forgetting) past wrongs,7 the desirability or undesirability of the politics of regret in the
light of its social implications,8 the meaning and genuineness of apology,9 its psychologi-
cal assessment,10 etc. The aim of this article is to outline the framework of a critical
engagement with the politics of regret. After dealing with some fundamental conceptual
issues, I present a critique of the most prominent previous approaches to this phenomenon
(namely the transitology, the historical sociology and the moral philosophy approaches).
Building on these observations, I attempt to explain the possibility and the importance of
thinking about the politics of regret more critically, within academia and beyond. I assume
that many (indeed most) instances of the politics of regret should be properly understood
as mythical; therefore, many conceptual and analytical considerations developed in the
literature on political mythologies are relevant to its study. Drawing on different scholarly
attitudes to myths, I discuss what a critical scholarly engagement with the politics of
regret can be.
Critical scholarship is understood in this article in a broad sense. It is certainly inspired
by the Critical Social Theory of the Frankfurt School but it does not necessarily accept
its Marxist underpinnings. It is useful to think about the critical approach that I am about
to develop in terms of Robert Cox’s distinction between problem-solving and critical
thinking. Problem-solving thinking, which I believe most of the previous approaches to
the politics of regret follow, considers the importance of solving the problem at hand
almost self-evident. It ‘takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power
relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework
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