Polish prisoners during World War II, Britain apologized to the Irish, Indians, and Maori, and the Vatican apologized for its role in the Wars of Religion, the persecution of Jews, the slave trade, and the oppression of women. Figure 8–6 shows how political apologies are a sign of our times.
FIGURE 8–6. Apologies by political and religious leaders, 1900–2004
Sources: Data from Dodds, 2003b, and Dodds, 2005.
Do apologies and other conciliatory gestures in the human social repertoire actually avert cycles of revenge? The political scientists William Long and Peter Brecke took up the question in their 2003 book War and Reconciliation: Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution. Brecke is the scholar who assembled the Conflict Catalog which I relied upon in chapter 5, and he and Long addressed the question with numbers. They selected 114 pairs of countries that fought an interstate war from 1888 to 1991, together with 430 civil wars. They then looked for reconciliation events—ceremonies or rituals that brought the leaders of the warring factions together—and compared the number of militarized disputes (incidents of saber-rattling or fighting) over several decades before and after the event to see if the rituals made any difference. They generated hypotheses and interpreted their findings using both rational actor theory and evolutionary psychology.
When it came to international disputes, emotional gestures made little difference. Long and Brecke identified 21 international reconciliation events and compared the ones that clearly cooled down the belligerents with the ones that left them as disputatious as ever. The successes depended not on symbolic gestures but on costly signaling. The leader of one or both countries made a novel, voluntary, risky, vulnerable, and irrevocable move toward peace that reassured his adversary that he was unlikely to resume hostilities. Anwar Sadat’s 1977 speech to the Israeli parliament is the prototype. The gesture was a shocker, and it was unmistakably expensive, later costing Sadat his life. But it led to a peace treaty that has lasted to this day. There were few touchy-feely rituals, and today the two countries are hardly on good terms, but they are at peace. Long and Brecke note that sometimes pairs of countries that looked daggers at each for centuries can turn into good buddies—England and France, England and the United States, Germany and Poland, Germany and France—but the amity comes after decades of coexistence rather than as the immediate outcome of conciliatory gestures.
The psychology of forgiveness, recall, works best when the perpetrator and victim are already bound by kinship, friendship, alliance, or mutual dependence. It is not surprising, then, that conciliatory gestures are more effective in ending civil wars than international ones. The adversaries in a civil war are, at the very least, stuck with each other inside national boundaries, and they have a flag and a soccer team that put them in a fictive coalition. Often the ties run deeper. They may share a language or religion, may work together, and may be related by webs of marriage. In many rebellions and warlord conflicts the fighters may literally be sons, nephews, and neighborhood kids, and communities may have to welcome back the perpetrators of horrible atrocities against them if they are ever to knit their communities together. These and other ties that bind can prepare the way for gestures of apology and reconciliation. These gestures are more effective than the mechanism that leads to peace between states, namely the costly signaling of benevolent intentions, because in civil conflicts the two sides are not cleanly separated entities, and so cannot each speak with one voice, exchange messages in safety, and resume the status quo if an initiative fails.
Long and Brecke studied 11 reconciliation events since 1957 that symbolically terminated a civil conflict. With 7 of them (64 percent) there was no return to violence. That figure is impressive: among conflicts that did not have a reconciliation event, only 9 percent saw a cessation of violence. The common denominator to the success stories, they found, was a set of conciliation rituals that implemented a symbolic and incomplete justice rather than perfect justice or none at all. Just as a microphone near a loudspeaker can amplify its own output and create an earsplitting howl, retributive justice that visits new harm on the perpetrators can stoke the desire for retaliation in a spiral of competitive victimhood. Conversely, just as the feedback from a microphone can be squelched if the gain is turned down, cycles of communal violence can be squelched if the severity of retributive justice is modulated. A damping