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Ann Florini
The peaceful end to the Cold War left a powerful norm entrenched around the globe: transparency works. Disclosing information about one's own military plans, policies, capabilities, and operations allows even the most powerful to reassure others they need not fear. Where transparency is the expected norm, those with malevolent intentions find themselves constrained as the possibility of successful surprise is removed.
The norm of transparency is proving effective in the post Cold War world as well. Well-established transparency procedures enabled Libya to come in out of the WMD cold and gave the international community an effective way to respond to specific allegations about Iran's clandestine nuclear programme. And in a world of highly decentralised threats, security necessarily depends on highly decentralised information flows.
But there are new questions about the future of transparency. The Bush administration seems schizophrenic on the subject, demanding that adversaries reveal all, but unwilling to expose itself to similar scrutiny. And the case of Iraq stands the usual logic of transparency on its head. Nearly everyone in the US defence and intelligence community, no matter what their position on the war, believed that Iraqi intransigence on international inspections flowed from Saddam's desire to hide at least a significant attempt at acquiring WMD. Now it turns out that what Saddam was hiding was that he had nothing to hide, fearing above all to reveal himself as a paper tiger to his many enemies at home and abroad.
The idea that disclosing military information can add to security and should be the norm, subject only to carefully delimited exceptions, is a relatively new and still controversial notion. The first significant proposals for military transparency met a chilly response. The Treaty of Versailles, at the insistence of the French, contained provisions for regular and detailed inspections of Germany. But aside from the French, even the victors found the notion of requiring transparency disturbing. The Americans argued that a Peace Treaty that returned sovereignty to Germany could not simultaneously undermine that sovereignty with disclosure requirements.1 The British objected on pragmatic grounds that intrusive requirements such as inspections would more likely provoke conflict than bolster the cause of peace.2 The end result was a compromise between the French desire for a permanent monitoring commission and the British and American preference for reliance solely on the reports of their military attaches regarding Germany's compliance with its disarmament obligations. Under Articles 203 and 204 of the Treaty of Versailles, three Inter-Allied Control Commissions were established to monitor German compliance, and Article 205 gave the Commissions the authority to inspect any site in German territory at any time.
The system did not last long largely because the concept of expecting transparency from a sovereign state remained anathema to so many. By 1922, Germany was openly defying the obligatory inspections. Despite strident French protests, German intransigence went unpunished, and in January 1927 the last of the Control Commissions was dissolved, even though the Allies recognised that German noncompliance with its disarmament obligations remained significant.3
The contrast with Iraq could hardly be sharper. Following the first Gulf War in 1991, revelations about Saddam's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme led to UN Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to dismantle those programmes, subject to sweepingly intrusive monitoring by the IAEA and a United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM).
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the degree to which transparency had become normal in international relations was the unanimity with which the international community agreed to impose the most stringent monitoring conditions possible, not only on the Iraqi disarmament process, but on Iraq for the foreseeable future. To verify that Iraq's ability to make weapons of mass destruction was eliminated, the UN Security Council imposed extraordinarily intrusive transparency measures.4 To carry out these measures, UNSCOM was vested with virtually unlimited authority to go anywhere in Iraq and see anything in order to uncover and dismantle the biological, chemical, and ballistic missile programmes. Security Council Resolution 687 also extended to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) an enhanced inspection and monitoring mandate. Both the IAEA and UNSCOM were charged with ensuring that existing systems and production facilities were destroyed and with establishing and implementing a long-term monitoring plan to guard against any revival of the programmes.
In all the intense international controversy over how best to deal with Iraq, Iraqi complaints that the inspections constituted an affront to its national sovereignty fell on deaf ears. This was in sharp contrast to the post-Versailles experience of Germany. With the exception of China, which consistently abstained from UN votes regarding inspections in Iraq, no country objected to the idea of enforced monitoring. Even more indicative of the cultural shift in attitudes towards transparency in recent decades, a vast number of countries have agreed to open themselves up to scrutiny far more willingly than did Iraq. In arms control agreements from the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, to say nothing of the whole range of heavily verified East-West treaties from the 1980s, governments have agreed to allow others to come on to their territory and check up on them.
In short, it is clear that sovereignty, whatever it may mean in the era of globalisation, no longer automatically includes the right to withhold information from the international community - or, increasingly, from ordinary citizens. This new norm of transparency now extends well beyond exchanges of security information among governments. Freedom of information laws, which require government bureaucracies to provide information to citizens, are becoming something of a fad. Since the early 1990s, some forty countries adopted laws, regulations, or constitutional provisions to increase the flow of government information, and many others are debating whether to do so. Many of the laws have serious flaws or are not fully implemented, but it is remarkable that so many countries have them at all.
The pace of change in the economic field is particularly remarkable. Until recently, few countries released much information about their economies; many treated such information as state secrets. Now, scores of countries post details on international web sites. In the environmental field, transparency is becoming the leading choice among regulatory tools; as governments require corporations to admit publicly what pollutants they are dumping on their surroundings, public opinion can often be left to do the rest.
The growing acceptance of transparency is one of the most hopeful signs that humanity will be able to figure out effective ways to govern itself despite the growing gulf between the global scale of its problems and the national scale of its decision-making. Where there is consensus on what governments, corporations, or others should (or should not) be doing, the glare of publicity can do a great deal to ensure socially acceptable behaviour, even in the absence of courts and prisons to enforce good behaviour.
But this powerful trend is under threat. Achieving transparency invariably entails a political struggle. Potential adversaries are rarely happy about exposing potential weakness to one another. Indeed, the sweeping verification proposals of 1980s-style arms control were probably made only because the Reagan administration never dreamed the Soviets might actually accept. Government officials would generally prefer to get on with doing the public's business without actually having to deal with the pesky public. Governments are posting all that economic information because they want to attract foreign investment or IMF loans, not because they want their own citizens holding them accountable for economic performance.
Getting information disclosed depends in large part on whether prevailing expectations demand such disclosure. Those expectations have been changing in recent decades, partly because of the spread of democracy, but also - especially in the field of international security - because of some enlightened leadership by the United States. The US Freedom of Information law, though not the world's first (that honour belongs to Sweden), is probably the most emulated. From early in the Cold War, the US, desperate to get information on its highly secretive adversary (and not averse to scoring propaganda points), promoted the idea that secretiveness equated with hostile intentions and so insisted on sweeping verification provisions in arms control accords. Additionally, the United States has pushed international organisations such as the IMF and World Bank to institute disclosure policies that would enable the public to hold the institutions (and their member governments) accountable.
By contrast, the administration of President George W. Bush has enacted a sweeping series of policies aimed at clamping down on the free flow of information. Many, but not all, have been rationalised in terms of protecting national security.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft put forward new rules for agencies that were being sued for information under the Freedom of Information Act. Previous policy had said that any agency denying a Freedom of Information Act claim would have to justify that denial by showing that demonstrable harm would result from the release of the requested information. If it could not show such harm, the Justice Department would not represent it in court. Under the new Ashcroft policy, agencies merely need to find a sound legal basis for denial, whether or not there is any reason to believe harm would result from disclosure. The policy change was in process before the attacks but became easier to accomplish in the post-9/11 atmosphere.
More restrictions on access to information have followed. Since 9/11, Pentagon officials have repeatedly warned employees and contractors against contacts with the press and against sharing "sensitive but unclassified information". A wide array of federal agencies, from Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency, has been granted new authority to classify information. Many government agencies have removed previously accessible information from their web sites. The Homeland Security Act, passed in 2002, includes a number of provisions blocking citizen access to information. Most notably, the legislation exempts from public disclosure information that private firms submit to the Department of Homeland Security about potential terrorist targets. The measure is meant to encourage firms to share information that might be useful in defending against terrorism but which, if disclosed, would likely lead to litigation or damage to the company's reputation. But there are few safeguards to protect against misuse of the legislation by companies more interested in protecting themselves against charges of serious wrong-doing than in protecting the country from terrorists.
It is certainly true that in war, information may bring not just power but victory. Each side to an armed conflict devotes considerable effort to protecting information about its own strengths, weaknesses, and plans, along with ferreting out information about the other side. The famous American World War II slogan "loose lips sink ships" reflects a widespread understanding of the perils of allowing enemies to learn one's weaknesses.
But beyond such immediate battle-related concerns, the appropriate relationship between security and disclosure proves far more complex and contentious. Within defence and intelligence circles, information is often shared on a "need to know" basis. But very often, those who hold the information are in no position to evaluate who else has a need to know. Bureaucracies reflexively respond to threats by attempting to hide vulnerabilities, but it is not always clear that security is best promoted by secrecy. Concealing vulnerabilities also removes public pressure to do something about those vulnerabilities and may be more to do with bureaucratic embarrassment than the risk of compromising national security.
Being left in ignorance prevents the public and, frequently, their democratic representatives, from being able to respond appropriately. It should be recalled that the one successful action to counter the hijackers on September 11, 2001 came not from the government but from ordinary citizens - the passengers on the fourth plane who, when informed of what the hijackers had done with the other planes, heroically thwarted the fourth attack. That is an important lesson policymakers should take to heart.
1. Richard Dean Burns and Donald Urquidi, Disarmament in Perspective: An Analysis of Selected Arms Control and Disarmament Agreements Between the Two World Wars, 1919-1939 (California State College at Los Angeles Foundation, 1968), vol. 1, p. 44.
2. Ibid.
3. Burns and Urquidi 1968, vol. I, p. 179; Neal H. Peterson, "The Versailles Treaty: Imposed Disarmament," in Richard Dean Burns, ed., Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), p. 630.
4. Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), "Iraq-Kuwait," section C.
Ann Florini is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and the author of The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World (Washington DC: Island Press, 2003), from which parts of this article are drawn. Previous publications include: The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society (Tokyo and Washington, DC: The Japan Center for International Exchange and the Carnegie Endowment, 2000); Secrets for Sale: How Commercial Satellite Imagery Will Change the World (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000) (with Yahya Dehqanzada).
© 2003 The Acronym Institute.