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Reconciliation and Political Legitimacy: The Old Australia and the New South Africa

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Reconciliation and Political Legitimacy: The Old Australia and the New South Africa
Author(s)Muldoon, Paul
AbstractIn both Australia and South Africa a state-sponsored discourse of reconciliation has been deployed as a tool of national integration and state building. This usage has tended to encourage a politics of selective memory that runs contrary to the spirit of reconciliation as recognition of different views of the nation. This article seeks to recover (and promote) a more positive concept of reconciliation by treating it as a discursive, democratic space in which different versions of the national story can be acknowledged and negotiated. The cases of Australia and South Africa are used in a mutually illuminating way to explore what “telling the truth” about the past might mean and how such “truth-telling” might help restore legitimacy to liberal states confronted with a “broken moral order”.
IssueNo2
Pages182-196
ArticleAccess to Article
SourceAustralian Journal of Politics and History
VolumeNo49
PubDate 2003
ISBN_ISSN0004-9522


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