On the (im)possibility of state apologies for the colonial past in French and German memory politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
State apologies and the related expression of emotions, such as guilt and repentance, are seen as an essential part of dealing with atrocious pasts. Against this view, the article analyzes from a postcolonial perspective the impact of emotions in the negotiation of state apologies in postcolonial memory politics. In a transnational comparative discourse analysis, I examine the conditions of the (im)possibility under which state apologies are discussed in public and media debates in 2021, focusing on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in France and the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide (1904–1908) in Germany. In France, public opinion rejects apologies as an act of “repentance.” In Germany, the planned apology becomes impossible because the government equals the “historical and moral responsibility” with development cooperation. Through a transnational comparison that analyzes the structuring effects of emotional discourses in memory politics, the article shows that dealing with the colonial past primarily follows the interests of the European nation-states, thus leaving the postcolonial power imbalances intact.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".