Authors

Tadeusz Wojtych¹;  ¹ Western University, Canada

Discussion

Central Europe and Canada have both witnessed the introduction of new history textbooks over the past decade. These textbooks and teaching materials are written with the pronounced aim of achieving reconciliation between, respectively, Poles and Germans (after WW2) and white Canadians and the Indigenous people (following centuries of settler colonialism). The noble goals of both reconciliation-oriented initiatives obscure the fact that transitional justice rhetoric is used in cases where no recent transition (from dictatorship/war to democracy/peace) took place. This paper explains this paradox by exploring how and why policymakers, educators, and academics employ transitional justice rhetoric in two unobvious cases.

Negotiations between Polish and German educators, which date back to 1972, initially drew on the rhetoric of reconciliation and transitional justice in an era dominated by lived memory of WW2. However, as the war – and, subsequently, the communist era – grew more distant in time, this rhetoric continued, and perhaps even intensified. I argue that in the Polish-German case, a push for reconciliation from both sides acted as a stimulus for change in the hostile political climate of the Cold War (pre-1989) and repeated Polish-German political tensions (post-1989). Defying political animosity, the Polish-German Textbook Commission has not only been ridding history textbooks from prejudice and propaganda, but also – in the early 70s – provided the only official platform for communication between Poland and West Germany.

Against the backdrop of more established reconciliation processes between Poles and Germans, I analyse reconciliation in Canada – a new concept, which entered the mainstream public debate only in the 1990s, thanks to the actions of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. It was only the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2007-2015), however, that stimulated changes to the history curriculum. Canadian educators debate the real extent of those changes. Some (Henderson and Wakeham 2013, Schaefli, Godlewska and Lamb 2019) argue that by confining Indigenous content to history classes and by drawing on transitional justice rhetoric, Canadian policymakers create a false impression of a transition and assign Indigenous people to the past – which obscures present-day injustices and the continued legacy of settler colonialism in Canada.

Previous research has explored how history textbooks should (and should not) be used for reconciliation in “real” transitional societies. This paper, based on an analysis of history textbooks from Canada, Poland and Germany, complements the existing literature by showing the opportunities and the dangers of deploying transitional justice mechanisms in contexts that are not conventionally described as transitional.