18
action and unconditional apology or forgiveness as well as taking risks.
19
In the affairs between
states apology mainly serves to help maintain the status-quo and normalize relations, thus
making apologetic acts less complete and pure.
20
The ethics of apology I propose here goes
against the grain of the theory and practice of established international relations and diplomacy
because it advocates the need to take certain risks in order to break a stalemate, shake
intransigent political positions and seek breakthroughs that jumpstart the mending of injured
relations. Ideally the offender faces the victim unmediated, takes risks of legal liability and also
risks loss of reputation. Thus in apology proper the apologizer is vulnerable in many ways,
including the risk of revenge. Contrary to an apology by proxy, the perpetrator faces the Other
with categorical vulnerability. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical “face” reinforces two important
dictates of a successful ideology – proximity and the necessity of responsibility to the Other to
reconcile and restore broken human relations.
Taming the Leviathan and Global Moral Responsibilities
The names Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and now Darfur, bring to mind violence
out of control, genocide, as well as bitter arguments about indifference and intervention. The
politics and dilemmas on why, when, and how to prevent the innocent “elsewhere“ were debated
in academic circles as they were in the halls of the seat of government. In spite of what we
remember of the turbulent years since the 1990s, we can interpret this period as the signs of a
world coming together. The end of the Cold War has actually brought renewed hope to invest the
so-called peace dividend into global human rights as in the case of Somalia, a well-intentioned
intervention turned sour. More was invested indeed in humanitarian interventions and
peacekeeping in those years reflecting a revolution of sorts in international human rights norms.
19
Jacques Derrida argues that forgiveness should be pure. He asserts, “Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal,
Normative, normalising. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it
interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.” See Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.
London: Routledge, 2001, 32.
20
Derrida admits that he is torn between the “hyperbolic ethics” he would like to follow and the pragmatism
required to make certain decisions in the process of reconciliation. Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 51.
Convention