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* I would like to thank Alexander Spencer, Christopher Daase, Rainer Hülsse, Julia Serdarov, Axel Keber, the research seminar of the Department for International Relations at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute, and the anonymous reviewers of the Review of International Studies for their insightful comments and suggestions. This article was written in the context of the research project Apologies and Reconciliation in International Relations, funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research.
Introduction
Apologizing. A very desperate habit, one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast-Table
If the only foreseeable effect of an apology was the disclosure of one's secret faults and shortcomings, nobody would apologise. People do apologise however and in the last couple of years we have witnessed an unseen popularity of apologies particularly in the public sphere. Politicians, managers and clergymen have been eager to apologise and atone for the wrong-doings of their countries or institutions and social scientists have been similarly keen to turn this trend into an issue on their research agenda. The scientific inquiry into the meaning and effects of public apologies has thereby been accompanied by optimism, as most scholars are convinced that the trend to public apologies reflects a desire for and a contribution to a more peaceful, harmonic and morally integrated international environment. As a consequence, much of the latest research has focused on the conflict solving capacities of public apologies and discussed the issue in the broader context of transitional justice or public diplomacy.
Empirical research on several cases, such as the public apologies issued between Japan and Korea or the Czech Republic and Germany, suggests, however, that apologies do not necessarily contribute to the containment of conflict and the end of the difficult debate on the past but that they perform in rather unexpected ways. In this article I contend that the focus on conflict resolution and reconciliation is not unproblematic as it has too high expectations of apologies and prevents apology research from theoretically accounting for the variety of unexpected and maybe problematic effects public apologies can...