The ambivalence around the WikiLeaks mission and especially its recent disclosures are understandable (see Jeff’s previous post). On the one hand, it does make us feel that we no longer have to live in a fog called the diplomatic game, that we need no longer be treated like children who for their own protection are excluded from family secrets, and that we the citizens of the world deserve not to be patronized and paternalized by our own governments, and need not concede so much discretionary power to our government officials.
On the other hand, as someone who is living at this moment in post-apartheid South Africa, and works in the archives (of which only a small part is available to the broader public), and who has studied the processes that led to the dismantling of Soviet-style autocracy in Central and Eastern Europe, an apparently widespread schadenfreude about exposing everything to everybody brings shivers. Two very different, but in both cases repressive, regimes in Poland and in South Africa, would not have ended peacefully as they did, if not for lengthy and secret conversations that laid the groundwork for the official public negotiations. Imagine that the secret meetings between Church officials, leaders of the outlawed Solidarity movement, and General Jaruzelski’s government in Poland had been exposed in 1987…….Or that the “talks about talks”, and the meetings between exiled leaders of the ANC and certain members of the ruling nationalist party, had been exposed by WikiLeaks.
Nelson Mandela in 1937
In each case, the negotiations that led to fundamental systemic change and the launching of democratic rule were preceded by an overture, made of many secret meetings. The South African overture began roughly with a meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, where most of the ANC leaders lived, and was followed by twelve clandestine gatherings in England, gradually building a fragile trust between the key enlightened Afrikaner intellectuals and ANC leaders. And it took four years !
In Poland, even during the actual negotiations there were still side-bar meetings conducted privately in rather inaccessible backstage rooms outside of Warsaw. It was there that the sharpest disagreements were softened, making possible a return to the big and public roundtable negotiations. And indeed – no matter how problematic at the time — it was these intensely private encounters, discussions, and conferences among South Africans and Poles that influenced and shifted mutual perception on both sides.
As somebody who celebrates talk in public space as the very condition for democracy to emerge and to function, I also recognize that the very important work of rebuilding trust and reopening paths of communication may have to start in private, with privacy protected.
Is it not that we are so caught up in the dynamics of the changes that Wikileaks has brought, and is bringing about, that we can’t yet see where it is all leading? Must Wikileaks be suppressed to conserve old style secret diplomacy, or must old style secret diplomacy change in order to live in a more democratically, openly informed Wikileaked world? Examples from the past (e.g., Poland, South Africa, the return of Sinai to Egypt, Zimbabwe [the recent diplomatic Wikileaks have ironically benefited Mugabe, and damaged the vulnerable Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)]) might be considered as being irrelevant now, insofar as what we need to change to is a new way of negotiating necessary current political transformations in an open, Wilkileaked world.
I don’t think that WikiLeaks should be suppressed, even when I am critical of it. There is a difference. And I also think that there is a difference between seeking to uncover duplicity and uncovering everything. The former would lead to “a more democratically, openly informed” diplomacy, as Jim and I both would want. But there is no way for deliberations to proceed between enemies, opponents and even allies without moments of confidentiality. I am convinced of this as a student of Erving Goffman, as a student of the study of social interaction. If that is so, activities such as WikiLeaks will have one of two results. It will either undermine diplomacy, or it will further deepen the level and intensity of secrecy. Targeted revelations make sense, in addressing specific injustices. I think the revelation of everything is in fact an act of nihilism.