Official apologies have met with academic interest in fields such as international law, human rights, political science, philosophy, public relations, and crisis communication. While some scholars (such as Smith and Lind) have expressed reservations about the moral and political meaningfulness of such apologies by proxy, others (such as Nobles and Thompson) have argued in support of their ethical and political significance. A common theme across various disciplinary approaches to official apologies is their fragile credibility. To some, official apologies represent a genre of public discourse struggling to find an ethically responsible form. To others, they are at best meaningless, at worst calculated verbiage. From scholars, too, they often receive ambivalent – even ironic – treatment. Political apologies’ balancing act on a knife’s edge between being ‘pure’ and being ‘strategic’ was aptly captured in the title of Olick’s book The Politics of Regret and is something they have in common with rhetoric. Yet, in spite of all the attention to this delicate balance, it is remarkable how the recent ‘rhetorical turn’ in apology studies actually has yielded sparse attention to textual analysis at the levels of the actual apology texts and the accompanying political debates. I argue that a rhetorical approach to official, political apologies promises to supplement existing scholarship theoretically and analytically. In the second part of the paper, I offer a close reading of a recent refusal by the Danish government to offer an official apology. Theoretical-methodical argument: Rhetorical studies have something to offer in the theoretical development of research into and critical analysis of official apologies. Two concepts in particular seem relevant: epideictic rhetoric and rhetorical citizenship. Both question how official apologies may be meaningful from a perspective of political discourse in the widest sense: concerned with communal values and as a format for political action. 1) As defined by Aristotle, epideictic is the rhetoric of praise and blame. In contemporary rhetorical theory epideictic serves purposes of creating, maintaining, or questioning communal values (Oravec, Hauser, Beale). Epideictic rhetoric offers a way to understand the meaningfulness of official apologies: As a rhetoric of both censure (when it condemns certain behaviour and its underlying value judgements) and of praise (when it presents the norms and values guiding the future course). 2) Being a citizen and performing one’s citizenship includes much more than voting and paying taxes. It has a discursive element where identities, positions and civic connections are articulated and developed in interaction with others, sometimes across conflict. Official apologies seen from a perspective of rhetorical citizenship invites us to examine them as potential sites of civic invention and redefinition. By explicating, possibly reformulating, a normative groundwork for a collective such as a nations state, the official apology can mark a symbolic transfer from one understanding of the collective self to another (Kiss, Nobles, Villadsen). Thinking of political apologies in terms of rhetorical citizenship allows us to regard them as sites of (re)defining a civic identity, a rhetorical form that (re)frames societal values for a domestic audience and sends a message about that to others. Rhetorical criticism: Denmark has seen very few official political apologies compared to countries that Denmark often compares itself with. Sweden and Norway have seen a steep increase in governmental apologies in the last decade. Even in cases where there seems to be clear parallel instances abroad, Danish authorities have refrained from apologizing. A case in point concerns cases where mistreatment of children who were in government-run care have led to official apologies, e.g. former Australian Prime Minster Rudd’s 2008 apology to the “Stolen Generations” and former British Prime Minister Brown’s 2010 apology to migrant children sent abroad. In 2006 the Norwegian parliament, the government, and King Harald apologized for abusive treatment of children in Norwegian orphanages. Most recently, an “atonement” ceremony was held in Stockholm on Nov. 21, 2011 in the presence of officials and Queen Silvia in response to a government sponsored investigation of mistreatment of children in state-run institutions. In Denmark a report documenting mistreatment of children in Danish state-supervised orphanages from 1945 to 1976 was published in May 2011. In response, the Secretary of Social Affairs did not offer the official apology demanded by the claimants, but did express her regret over their suffering. The Secretary was subsequently summoned for an open hearing in Parliament’s Commission on Social Affairs about her refusal to apologize. The Secretary’s prepared statement and her answers during the hearing present a rare opportunity to study the reasoning behind the Government’s stance. I offer a rhetorical criticism (close textual analysis, interpretation, and evaluation) of the hearing. In particular, I analyze the Secretary’s argumentation and carefully calibrated word choice. Here I draw primarily on work by Cunningham, Smith, Lazare and Govier and Verwoerd. I then place the case in a theoretical frame where I draw on work by Harvey, Thompson and Nobles in a discussion of the rhetorical implications of the apparent reluctance in Danish authorities to offer official apologies. I argue that the Secretary’s argumentation for her refusal to apologize is problematic both on a theoretical and a factual level. For example, her initial reason for not apologizing was that “it happened so long ago” and that the legislation then was different (which is irrelevant since the abuses recounted in the report were all clearly illegal at the time). She also places her own emotions at the centre when she expresses regret that the claimants are focused “on a single word” [i.e. apologize] because it “shifts the focus from what [she finds] more important”, namely helping children today. By characterizing the claimants’ request as about “a word”, the secretary empties the concept of apology of its symbolic value and makes the claimants out to be single-minded and stubborn. To conclude, I discuss the role official apologies (or the lack thereof) can have on a community’s sense of common values to be upheld (epideictic) and serve as a site of rearticulating the ethos of a community and giving it a voice (rhetorical citizenship). (998 words) References: Beale, Walter H. “Rhetorical Performative Discourse: A New Theory of Epideictic” Philosophy and Rhetoric 11 (1978): 221-246. Cunningham, Michael. ”Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology” The Political Quarterly 70 (1999): 285-293. Gibney, Mark, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud & Niklaus Steiner. The Age of Apology. Facing up to the Past. Philadelphia: University of Penn State Press, 2008. Govier, Trudy and Wilhelm Verwoerd. “The Promise and Pitfalls of Apology” Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002): 67-82. 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