In recent years, the concept of constitutive justice has emerged to theorize the various processes that fall under the rubric of transitional or historical justice. Teitel, for example, thematizes the apparently disparate mechanisms deployed to deal with the past in transitional situations (trials, truth commissions, memorials, compensation, forgiveness, lustration, and compensation) by placing in relief the contribution each makes to constituting the social and political conditions under which all members of the society will be better protected from human rights violations and arbitrary interference. Although apology has received but scant attention in the transitional/ historical justice literature as conceptualized here, it is explicated without difficulty by this model. Nevertheless, this constitutive, future-oriented role does cancel out the fact that in apologizing, contemporary political communities are taking responsibility for past wrongdoing. As we saw in the Australian debate, there was no getting away from that dimension of apology. What this means is that a comprehensive analysis of apology must do more than integrate it into an expanded conception of justice in its reparative and constitutive forms; it must also attend to the dimension of apology that is backward-looking and retains unavoidable implications of collective responsibility.

If this is the case, and we accept that in apologizing contemporary political communities are also acknowledging some form of collective responsibility, we might explain this in two ways.