The Perils and Promise of Global Transparency: Why the Information Revolution May Not Lead to Security, Democracy, or Peace

6. Global Implications of Growing Transparency

Chapter 6 ____________________________ Global Implications of Growing Transparency “In the context of international relations, transparency means that the chances of misinterpretation, whether deliberate or inadvertent, are reduced to a minimum.” —Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema1 “Everyone looking at everyone else. Everyone seeing something different .” —Quoted from the play, Democracy, by Michael Frayn2 This book challenges the conventional wisdom regarding transparency and argues that it is not an unmitigated good. If the trend toward greater transparency continues, it will transform international politics by reducing uncertainty, helping people know each other better, and decentralizing power—but the implications of those developments are complex. Less uncertainty can both encourage and discourage international conflict, and increase and decrease international cooperation. More information about other peoples and cultures can promote or diminish tolerance and the likelihood of violence between groups. Widely available information about foreign conflicts makes third parties either more or less likely to intervene and to stop deadly violence, depending on what transparency shows. More decentralized power gives the weak more influence over the strong and strengthens advocates of democracy but it also empowers terrorists and gives authoritarian governments new instruments of power. Transparency has a dark side. 115 Most predictions about the effects of greater transparency rely on unanalyzed assumptions, usually that transparency will reveal harmony rather than conflict, and tolerance rather than hate. Greater transparency may indeed reveal harmony and tolerance, but analysts rarely warn us that their predictions are conditional. This book disentangles predictions about greater transparency from the assumptions on which they are based and argues that the effects of greater transparency depend largely on what transparency shows, how people interpret the information they receive in a more transparent international society, and how people react to that information. They depend on who wins from greater transparency and the goals of those winners. Though this book strips predictions about transparency from value-laden assumptions, values and ideas are critical to predicting the effects of greater transparency. Ideas and values influence where people seek information and how people interpret and act on that information. They influence whom people view as a friend or enemy, whether actions seem benign or threatening, whether they feel morally obligated to protect citizens in distant countries, and whether others seem worthy of trust. They affect whether citizens find controls over information legitimate and the conditions under which they will object. Consequently, the effects of transparency will change over time because ideas and values are variables; they evolve. Greater transparency presents governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and even individuals with the opportunity to influence the relationship between people and information. Groups can marshal evidence and persuade people to change their minds. They can influence what people think is right or good and what sorts of behavior are appropriate.3 Because ideas and values are so powerful, the ability to convince others to share one’s ideas and values—what Joseph S. Nye, Jr. calls “soft power”—conveys remarkable influence. When others share your ideas and “want what you want,” they are likely to cooperate easily when they agree on an issue and tolerate disagreement without conflict when they do not.4 Achieving goals is easier and successes are more durable. Force, when exercised, is more effective and typically less necessary in the first place. In an age of transparency, any organization or individual that can command broad attention and support has the potential to acquire soft power. Nonetheless, governments, especially legitimate governments that speak for their people, retain an advantage and legitimate governments that are also strong will find that the combination of soft and hard power—the ability to persuade the many and force the few—gives them extraordinary influence over world events. 116 The Perils and Promise of Global Transparency What Transparency Reveals The effects of transparency depend on what it reveals. That point seems obvious, but it is one frequently missed by a wide spectrum of scholars, analysts, and politicians. As just indicated, the idea that transparency can solve a host of global problems is based largely on unspoken assumptions that transparency will illuminate cooperation, friendship, and support for democratic ideals and, when it does not, offenders will readily change their behaviors in shame. However, as indicated throughout this book, transparency will not always illuminate positive information or encourage desirable behavior. This conclusion has many implications. For instance, an important area of political science scholarship argues that uncertainty about the intentions of other governments leads...