Jennifer Dixon has a written a closely argued, well-researched, and extremely informative study of the politics of history in Japan and Turkey. Guiding her inquiry are three questions that are central to the growing literature on this topic. First, why do some countries have such difficulty addressing the darker chapters in their past? Specifically, why did Japan and Turkey, despite the enormously brutal and well-documented atrocities that they had committed in the past—the vastly destructive invasion and occupation of much of East Asia and the Armenian genocide, respectively— evade admitting any responsibility for decades? Second, why do some countries choose to adopt an official narrative that is more open to recognizing and making amends for their past transgressions? With respect to Japan and Turkey, why did both countries over time became more open to recognizing and offering at least limited apologies for the past? Third and finally, what accounts for the variation between cases? Why did Japan arrive at a penitent official narrative at an earlier point in time than Turkey did, and why was it more willing than Turkey ever was to offer a limited but nonetheless quite far-reaching apology?

To address these questions Dixon offers an analytical framework that incorporates two sets of independent variables, international pressures and domestic politics, to explain her dependent variable: the politics of history. Among the international variables she lists such factors as pressures from victim states and the role of third-party states (e.g., the United States), international organizations, and transnational nongovernmental organizations. The domestic set of variables is similarly broad and varied, including material concerns (especially the costs of an apology), legitimacy and national identity, electoral political calculations, and, finally, domestic societal actors. This is a familiar cast of suspects in the literature on the politics of history; indeed, it is so broad that it opens her up to the charge of including so much that almost nothing is excluded. Nonetheless, Dixon uses her framework effectively to trace the evolution of the dependent variable, the politics of history, in her two case studies.

Dixon makes innovative use of her dependent variable, offering an interesting scale of official postures regarding the past ranging from outright denial of past atrocities, through grudging acknowledgment, to offering apologies, compensation, and dutiful commemoration. Importantly, Dixon recognizes that, at any given period of time, a range of official responses may exist in contradiction with one another. Political leaders may offer more or less sincere apologies for past transgressions even while in other areas—for instance, the kinds of textbooks approved for use in public schools—a more revisionist or less penitent narrative is adopted. This allows Dixon to depict the official narrative graphically in a chart that shows the range of responses at any given period and how it fluctuates over time. This is useful both for tracing the evolution over time of the official narrative in a specific case, here Japan and Turkey, and for comparing them with one another. Although of course there is considerable room for interpretation (or coding, if one is inclined to use that vocabulary), at least as a rough gauge of the degree of penitence of the official narrative, this is a welcome innovation that could easily be adopted for use with other cases.

The central argument that Dixon makes is that the level of international pressure on a country determines the probability of it becoming more apologetic. However, it is domestic political considerations that determine how it responds. She applies this insight to the Japanese and Turkish cases. Dixon argues that, for many years after the Armenian genocide and Japan’s brutal invasion and occupation of China, neither country evinced much remorse because the international environment did not create much pressure for them to do so. Only much later, as international pressure mounted beginning in the 1980s, did the two countries’ governments begin to adopt a more penitent official narrative.

Dixon goes on to contend that the reason that Japan was willing to go much further than Turkey in the direction of apologizing and atoning for the past is because the pressures that it faced were much stronger—China was able to exert far more pressure than Armenia—and because the potential costs of acknowledging past wrongdoing were far greater in the Turkish case than the Japanese. The territorial disputes between China and Japan are over relatively minor, uninhabited islands, whereas there is a potential for Armenia to lay claims to vast swatches of territory in Eastern Anatolia. In addition, she adds, the level of domestic contestation over historical issues was much greater and began earlier in Japan than in Turkey, aided by the fact that Japan has had a democratic system since the 1940s, whereas Turkey has had an authoritarian government for much of the period since 1918.

This is on the whole a persuasive argument, and Dixon buttresses it with a wealth of empirical evidence drawn from both primary and secondary sources. Her work on Turkey will be of particular interest to many readers, because this case has been covered much less thoroughly in the international relations and political science literature than has Japan. As an expert on Turkey, she is able to make ample use of Turkish-language sources. Although she does not make use of Japanese written materials, she has a thorough grasp of the secondary literature and has done fieldwork in Japan, conducting many valuable interviews. Along the way, Dixon also makes many interesting observations both about the Japanese and Turkish cases and about the nature of the politics of memory in general.

There are places where the book could be criticized. The theoretical framework is in many respects too broad to be useful beyond serving as a taxonomy of the different variables at play. Likewise, the proposed division of labor between international pressure and domestic politics is not wholly convincing, especially if we were to expand the range of cases. For instance, if we were to include France’s agonized debate over the legacy of Vichy, the primary drivers toward apology would seem to have been primarily domestic rather than international. Finally, although Dixon quite rightly resists the temptation to postulate an irresistible march toward anguished apology, she frequently lapses into language that suggests that the truth will eventually come out or that it is something that can easily be determined objectively, belying the epistemological complexities that are attendant on historical inquiry as an enterprise.

This having been said, Dixon has made an extremely valuable contribution to the growing and vibrant literature on the politics of memory and apology. Dark Pasts deserves to be widely read in the scholarly community and is sure to find use in graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses.