Cablegate word-cloud: Fast Company
When the revolutionary Bolshevik government of USSR chose to publish secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Russian Tsarist and governments of the first seven months of revolution, Leo Trotsky, in a notable Statement of November 22 1917 said: “The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy.” At the same time, Woodrow Wilson asserted as the prime of his January 18 1918 14 Points speech: "...there will surely be no private international action or rulings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
Unfortunately, things didn't work that way and the justified post-Great War idealism ran short of its breath in the coming years. Most of us now presume that every democratic society, being imperfect as it is, needs some balance between democracy and efficiency in foreign politics. Democratic societies show (among other things) tendencies to either act as a clam – to close in its internal world and ignore the outside – or rush into external crusades for the values or interests they deem imperative. There is always a need for stabilizing effect of diplomacy, and for the effective diplomacy that requires a level of confidentiality. There can be no open diplomacy.
The 19 century secretive, aristocratic, shadowy world of diplomacy that caused the menaces of the Great War is gone and the public and democratic control of executive government has become a standard to be guided upon. The benchmark of what we expect of our governments and foreign politics has become pretty high, especially in small states such as Serbia which depend on the outside world much more than other, more self-reliant units. Yet giving diplomacy no operational space, if that is considered by ‘transparency’ is limiting diplomatic capabilities in relative terms, compared to other states. The pushing of expectations and capabilities to opposite extremes would ultimately make foreign politics ‘inefficient but democratic’.
However, there’s a huge but. Under the diplomatic/security mantle, there is a steady flow of the abuses of efficiency principle. It’s unavoidable, but there has to be a balancing principle of culpability for it, and exposing the wrongs must be the first step. The 1971 Pentagon Papers leak is a clear case for this - the society had a right to know of its government involvement in the war. On the other hand I’d say the biggest problem with WikiLeaks Cablegate is that they are not willing to appreciate this balance. There is no absolute right to know, as they, or many before them would claim as legitimate. There is though a right to know of the abuses of diplomacy and they just didn’t make that difference clear enough.
WikiLeaks won't change the way diplomacy works in democratic societies. Mohandas Gandhi famously said that if your roof is leaking, you don’t abandon the house but fix the leaking roof. The US diplomatic information system will certainly be structurally changed, but the rules of the game will remain just the same. Yes, they will make life more uncomfortable for many active diplomats, and amuse the public for a week or two. But, the public and media are becoming already fatigued. Amazingly enough, after only two weeks, Cablegate is old news. WikiLeaks failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Is there anything good to it? I’d say yes. Just as USSR opening of secret diplomatic archives, or Post-Cold War opening of Russian archives enabled researchers to understand the politics of the age better, the WikiLeaks is an opportunity to improve the understanding of contemporary international politics. Claiming that it isn’t so suggests scholars have better, more accurate and prompt information at their disposal, but that seems very hard to achieve. In general, Cablegate is a mixed blessing but in the end it’s what you make of it. If it can help in understanding the background of contemporary politics, it should be used, as long as one is willing to accept its authenticity but also its limits. Cablegate offers only one aspect of the events. Whats missing is the opposite views - other countries MFA's but also compatible sources from other US foreign policy makers (Drezner would argue exactly this is making the Leak bad for scholars).
In any case, local journalists are taking too little effort to browse the records themselves and are actually mostly relying on agency news and heavy filtering they carry along. Besides that, they mostly lack the understanding of the framework needed to separate important from trivial. And much of it actually is. Hearsay that has a 'secret' stamp on it does not make it any more reliable.
So, in future posts on this blog I will regularly post abstracts of cables that are important for Serbia’s domestic and foreign politics and I will also try to give short comments on more important dispatches. The cables will be posted every seven to ten days, arranged by theme and period they cover, and the individual cables will be identified by their WikiLeaks ID. The cable will be easy to locate on various mirror sites by web searching for the ID. No links will be provided, since the domain names tend to be 'occasionally changed'.
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