The Road towards Atonement in International Relations: How to enable official apologies and reparations between states

“Atonement” is one of many possibilities for a perpetrator state regarding its historical legacy. As a state practice, it comprises an official, political apology and the offer of reparation payments to former victim states. While in today’s world, such a package holds almost immediate normative appeal, it nevertheless was practiced only once on the bilateral level, between West Germany and Israel, initiated by the Reparations Agreement signed in 1952. To understand why and how atonement emerges as a state practice, this paper inquires into its origins in international politics. With this, the paper departs from existing explanations that either view atonement as a domestic political strategy or a normative choice on the part of incumbent politicians. Instead, this paper locates the initial spark for and interest in atonement in international incentive structures and the bilateral inter-agency between a former perpetrator state and its victim. To illustrate the plausibility of these claims, the paper empirically analyses the beginnings of the West German interest in atonement, highlighting the international factors that formed the idea of reparation payments to Israel into a strategic political decision in 1952. Finally, and to showcase the paper’s contribution, the West German study is compared with two examples of “non-atonement”: post-war Austria and Japan. Altogether, the findings then tell us why atonement comes about as a state practice, and how – irrespective of whether it is morally desired by political leaders – atonement can constitute a country’s best strategic option within its international relations.