Reparations Politics

The work of Sociology Professor John Torpey

In the latter half of the 20th century, various campaigns to right the wrongs of the past--from the Holocaust, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to the even older wrongs of slavery in the US--have sought "reparations." The term has come to mean a type of compensation that is owed the victims of a historical injustice. But what exactly are reparations, and how do they work? According to John Torpey, a professor in the Ph.D. Program in Sociology, who has studied the cultural and intellectual evolution of reparations, the meaning of the term is by no means fixed.

"What's interesting about the term is how it can be used by so many different groups for their own political ends," says Torpey, whose book on the topic, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in January, 2006. "The book is really about the various campaigns for reparations, and more broadly, it's trying to answer the question, 'Why has the past become so important in contemporary politics?'" he says.

The answers to this question are complex; however, one reason why the past plays such a major role in contemporary politics is the looming presence of the Holocaust, according to Torpey. It is impossible to think about reparations, or concepts of historical justice, without looking back at it.

"The Holocaust came to be seen as a central tenet of thinking about the past," he says. By the 1960s, "it became the major prism through which we view 20th-century history, which was increasingly seen as the history of disaster and catastrophe."

After World War II, Jews and the state of Israel received what were called reparations from Germany. These payments are viewed by most as the price that Germany had to pay to its victims. However, before World War II, the term reparations meant specifically a fine among states. "The winner said that the loser started it all, and they were going to pay for the damages that were incurred in the countries of the winners," he says. After the Holocaust, the definition of reparations begins to change and evolve.

"Non-state entities come to be seen as potential beneficiaries of reparations. It's no longer a state to state transaction," says Torpey. In addition, by the 1960s, the idea of the Holocaust as the primary evil of the 20th century becomes an accepted notion (this was not the case immediately after the war) with books such as Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem playing an influential role.

Meanwhile, in the US, other race and ethnicity movements had developed. Not only Jews, but blacks in the Civil Rights movement, Japanese Americans, the Chicano-Latino power movement, Native Americans, and others began to draw on this notion of reparations, using the terminology of the Holocaust to describe their own situations and demands.

"At this point, the term reparations was still undergoing a transformation, which doesn't emerge full-blown until the mid-90s, when people use this to mean compensation to those who have been oppressed rather than a state to state transaction during war time," says Torpey. By nature, this new definition is at once more expansive and more vague, and every claim for reparations will come with its own particular complexities and problems.

In order to understand these attempts to fix the past, Torpey's research takes a wide historical scope--tracing the anatomy of the idea of reparations politics from before the twentieth century through the intricacies and special cases of current debates, including the demands for post-Apartheid reparations in South Africa and Namibia. He seeks to illuminate the concept--to look at what people are doing with reparations, and what legal and political means they are using--rather than evaluating who deserves compensation.

In the case of US reparations for slavery, an idea which has long been discussed and recently gained prominence with the book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks by Randall Robinson, the idea is complicated by the fact that there are no slaves who are still alive. "Who would get the reparations?" Torpey asks. Or are the reparations not for slavery but for segregation--or for the legacy of economic disadvantage as a result of slavery? If it is for economic disadvantage--which there is no denying--then who would be the universe of beneficiaries, and who would have to pay? "It is possible to make an argument based on economic disadvantage, but it's a more difficult case to make than one based on human rights violations suffered by the people who would receive reparations--as in the Japanese American case."

"One of the things I'm trying to show is how this is a very legalistic kind of politics, because, with regard to blacks in the US, it's one thing to demand reparations for slavery," says Torpey. "It's another thing to figure out who ought to get them."

Also out of the milieu of the 60s, there developed a vigorous discussion among Japanese Americans about incarceration in World War II. By the late 1970s political organizations were formed around the issue and congressional hearings were held. The congressional commission looked at the circumstantial causes of the executive order by President Roosevelt that made Japanese internment possible and concluded that it was unjustified. The result was the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Reagan, which involved a $20,000 payment to each person who had been incarcerated, and a presidential apology.

While this was seen as a victory for Japanese Americans, Torpey points out that it was, like any form of reparations, a gesture with limitations, achieved through political negotiation. For instance, the name of the act said nothing about pain and suffering to Japanese Americans. Instead, it was framed as a violation of the constitution, for which an apology could be seen as less controversial and even patriotic. It traded on the language of the Civil Rights movement, and it used the term "redress" rather than reparations--which was thought by strategists more difficult to achieve.

Torpey's research shows that the idea of reparations is a malleable concept, but one that has great appeal due to the prominence of the Holocaust in our contemporary thinking of the past. "It gets people thinking about the moral foundations of your claim...What happened to you?" he says. And while he finds that the concept can be used and understood in many ways for many different purposes, one theme that runs through his analysis is this: "talking about reparations claims is a way of doing politics."

"Fixing the past has become, in many ways, de rigueur, and I would say that's because fixing the present has been very difficult," says Torpey. "People are looking to the past as an arena where they can effect change."