Modes of repair: Reparations and citizenship at the dawn of the new millennium

Abstract

The late twentieth-century spread of interest in the notion of “reparations” cannot be understood apart from the semantic meanings of the word itself. The term is one of the “re-words” that Charles Maier has identified as the object of rising interest among various groups in recent years.⁶ The first thing that must be said is that the word came to be transformed, sometime after World War II, from its earlier connotation of “war reparations” into something much broader. Before the Second World War, the use of “war” as a modifier here would have been nearly redundant; in that era, it went without saying that “reparations” were an outgrowth of war. The paradigmatic case of reparations, perhaps, was that mandated by the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I and imposed heavy obligations on the Germans to compensate the Allies for their wartime losses. In cases such as this, the term was synonymous with “indemnities”; again, the use of “war” to modify the main term would have been largely superfluous. It went without saying – in English at least – that “reparations” was an exaction imposed by the winners of a war on the losers, who were said to have been responsible for the damage caused by the conflict.⁷

Citation

Torpey, J. (2006), "Modes of repair: Reparations and citizenship at the dawn of the new millennium", Davis, D.E. (Ed.) Political Power and Social Theory (Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 18), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 207-226. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0198-8719(06)18006-0