SYMPATHY AND POLITICAL RECONCILIATION

In a series of recent writings, I have offered an account of political reconciliation as the process combining the resolution of formal questions between adversaries (e.g. who has a right to what) with the inculcation of sympathetic attitudes. I use ‘sympathy’ in its philosophical signification, as the ability to imaginatively switch places with others and view the world from their perspective. This definition is arrived at by way of elimination. There is surely more to reconciliation than the cessation of hostilities. After all, no one would claim that the fighting factions in Iraq have reconciled just because they stopped shooting at each other for a while. There is also more to reconciliation than two or more enemies reaching a fair agreement on how to settle their claims and how to distribute disputed resources. Israel and Egypt reached such an agreement rather quickly in the late 70’s. The Sinai peninsula was returned to the Egyptians, prisoners were exchanged, the war dead exhumed and shipped back home. Since then Israelis and Egyptian have had few claims against each other. They have also wanted nothing to do with each other. Can this state of affairs count as political reconciliation?

Reconciliation, then, involves more than the cessation of hostilities and more than the fair settlement of mutual claims. But what more is needed? Is forgiveness the missing element? I have argued elsewhere that it is not. Since this volume centers on the idea of political or “public” forgiveness, let me reiterate the contours of that argument.

It has become fashionable of late to speak about the importance of forgiveness in politics. The most prevalent argument in favor of political forgiveness concerns its potential to release victims and wrongdoers from the effects of vindictiveness. A desire for revenge, so the argument goes, can generate a never-ending violent cycle, trapping both sides in a dynamic of blow and response, eventually destroying all those involved. As Ghandi famously put it, “an eye for an eye canmake the whole world blind”. The argument is intuitively compelling, but forgiveness is not the only way to quell the desire for revenge.