Party Competition between Unequals: Strategies and Electoral Fortunes in Western Europe. By Bonnie M. Meguid. (Cambridge University Press, 2008.)

therefore to underpin and sustain, the Canadian state’s commitment to Aboriginal self-government. This reviewer, although a supporter of political apology, has some doubts about the book’s relatively straightforward linkage between apologies and groupconscious responses to injustice. Concerning Canada, for example, a skeptic could argue that whatever positive state action on Aboriginal claims there has been reflects the combined impact of disruptive collective action and particular court rulings favoring Aboriginal plaintiffs. Nobles is careful to stress the modest role of apology as one factor among many. Still, one wonders whether more might have been done here to disentangle the impact of apology from that of other factors. Nobles provides evidence indicating broad Canadian support for the 1998 apology and an apparent ensuing societal willingness to bear some of the costs of historical reckoning. However, subsequent events not only suggest such support may be fleeting but, more importantly for Nobles’ thesis, that, with the growing normalization of political apology, the incidence of manipulative or cynical apologies may increase. For example, in June 2008 (after The Politics of Official Apologies was written), Canada’s newly elected Conservative government issued a new residential schools apology to Aboriginal peoples, one far more fulsome than the 1998 instance discussed by Nobles. Yet the same government had also just scrapped the $5 billion CAN Kelowna Accord, a ‘‘Marshall plan’’ agreement for Aboriginal social policy reached three years earlier by the Liberals. The point is not to fault Nobles for lacking clairvoyance. It is rather that the Conservative apology may reflect a phenomenon noted by social memory scholar Jeffrey K. Olick (States of Memory [Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003]): the skilful use of ritually correct apologetic performances by rightwing regimes that have learned the limitations of nakedly reactionary styles and rhetoric. As it stands, the membership theory of apologies seems insufficiently attuned to this possibility. It would also seem important to distinguish between the robustness of various instances of apology. If one counts equally all admissions of past wrongdoing as ‘‘apologies’’—as this book seems to do— then what is there to say when a group dissatisfied by some minimalist gesture of pseudo-contrition gets portrayed as insatiably radical? More theoretically speaking, the membership theory would surely be strengthened if it could show a positive relationship between the robustness of a given apology and the extent to which the subsequent relevant policies are group conscious and injustice responsive. Alternatively, it would seem advisable in an expanded or amended theory to address the sort of phenomenon that we appear to see in the contemporary Canadian case: increased apologetic robustness coupled with diminished responsiveness to injustice. Finally, because the book focuses so heavily on apologies to Indigenous peoples, The Politics of Official Apologies might have done more to address the political specificity of apologies in Indigenous-settler contexts. If, as Nobles cogently argues, apologies are sought to alter the terms of national membership, then Indigenous visions of membership would seem pertinent. For example, do groups in full confrontation with settler-state citizenship display a correspondingly negligible interest in apologies, or do groups seeking to revise the terms of membership value apologies no matter the nature of the desired revisions? The book’s relatively brief discussions of African Americans and (non)apologies might have asked similarly whether apology is a more important objective for organizations with integrationist as opposed to nationalist agendas. The point is that thinking about apologies and membership requires thinking about the membership visions of particular apology-seeking groups. The Politics of Official Apologies is an excellent book that stakes out important ground. The criticisms outlined here are themselves testimony to the fruitfulness of Nobles’ membership framework, emerging ‘‘from it,’’ rather than ‘‘against it’’ as it were. The book is careful and nonpolemical; it does an excellent job of situating the phenomenon of apology in the wider field of redress politics; and it navigates admirably and sensitively through the specific details and histories of the relevant cases. Sophisticated and scholarly, but also suitable for course use with graduate students and senior undergraduates, it should be on the bookshelves of every researcher working on questions of historic injustice.