When States Pay Up: How Reparations Can Help States Regain Citizens’ Trust

• In Event: Pluralistic Justice: Citizen/State Relationships After Human Rights Abuses

Abstract

Recent events have highlighted the fact that, in order for democracy to function, citizens must trust the state. However, in the wake of state-sanctioned or state-sponsored human rights abuses, it is exceedingly difficult to rebuild these broken bonds of trust. While much of the dialogue around repairing the citizen/state relationship is focused on how to get citizens to trust the state, I flip this framing of the issue by arguing that, in order for citizens to trust the state, the state must first trust its citizens. I support this claim about the importance of sequencing state trust before citizen trust by presenting evidence from two case studies: that of the reparations that reunified Germany paid to former East German political prisoners, and the reparations that West Germany paid to Jewish and Romani German genocide survivors. Using qualitative data that I collected in interviews with former East German political prisoners, as well as German human rights activists, bureaucrats, historians, and politicians, and from primary documents consulted in visits to German archives, I show that, when a formerly-abusive state demands that survivors to prove their trustworthiness before entrusting them with reparations, survivors remain distrustful of the state. Conversely, when states entrust survivors with reparations without attaching strings to those reparations —perhaps by dropping requirements for proof of disability, restrictions on what the reparations can be used for, or the need to submit receipts after spending reparations money— survivors’ perceptions of the state improve. Thus, rebuilding trust between a state and its citizens should not be seen as a process that must be initiated by citizens, but rather as something that the state has the duty —and the ability— to start.

Author

• Claire Greenstein, University of Alabama, Birmingham