Colonial victimization and colonial contrition: their place in "democratic regression"

Current diagnoses of "democratic regression" (Schäfer/Zürn 2021) in European Union member states play out before the backdrop of national historical narratives. Compared to the status quo ante, regressive developments signal a loss of democratic quality, which is why they seem puzzling from a normative point of view – especially in countries in which liberal democracy is a hard-won achievement after a history of manifest injustice. One way to make sense of regressive developments is to look at them from the perspective of the historical self-understanding of overcoming injustice. With David Art (2006), we can distinguish "cultures of victimization" from "cultures of contrition", but this distinction has so far only been applied to the politics of memory of domestic injustice, not to the legacy of the colonial past. Similarly, M. Rainer Lepsius proposed to look at "internalising" and "externalising" strategies in the politics of memory. I explore whether the two distinctions can usefully be applied to recent controversies among European nations about relating to past colonial injustice.