Progress on trial: how national timescapes shape postcolonial reconciliation

This thesis argues that it is our very idea of progress, codified in law, which obstructs real progress when it comes to postcolonial reconciliation. This affects three discourses: (1) the academic debate on the rectification of historical injustice; (2) legal theory and practice in the fields of constitutional law, international criminal law and international human rights law; (3) the intensifying activist struggle for recognition of historically marginalised groups. Drawing on the methods of archival research, legal analysis and normative critique, I establish a comparative analysis of how different countries deal with their colonial past to find out why full historical reconciliation is so difficult to achieve. Part I searches for the origins of the globally dominant conception of progress and locates them firmly within the history of the West. Chapter 1 argues that the historical injustice debate is stuck because both proponents and opponents of redress rely on the same conception of time: Liberal Time. Chapter 2 traces the emergence of inherently progressive Liberal Time back to the impact which Christianity, the French Revolution and industrialisation had on European intellectual history. Chapter 3 shows how Liberal Time spread worldwide when it became a justification and tool for European imperial expansion. The conclusion of part I is thus that the conception of time that built Empire also impedes its dissolution. Part II engages in a comparative discourse analysis of three major trials in which the liberal Western ideal of progress was challenged. The trials reveal a shared imaginary of progress, but also differences in how national timescapes shape historical reconciliation. Chapter 4 shows that Britain’s cult of continuity makes the public acknowledgement of colonial wrongs comparatively easy. Chapter 5 posits that France’s foundational revolutionary rupture makes a productive dialogue about the past virtually impossible. Chapter 6 suggests that the US offers a synthesis between rupture and continuity, when measuring American progress against the ideals of the American Revolution. Chapter 7 distils these findings into the following predicament: the Western promise of progress cannot be fulfilled so long as our institutions defend an idea of progress which is itself oppressive and exclusionary.