Foreign Policy: The End of Secrecy

Foreign Policy
Summer 1998

The End of Secrecy _*

By Ann Florini _**

Why was the world unaware that India was planning to detonate five nuclear warheads? The short answer: India didn’t want anyone to know.

In an age when spy satellites can resolve images down to a few tens of centimeters and when miniature surveillance cameras can weigh as little as two ounces, we have come to believe that we live in an Orwellian world where technology can ferret out any secret. But, as New Delhi so dramatically demonstrated, it is possible to circumvent technology: Indian nuclear technicians synchronized their activities to coincide with the orbit of U.S. spy satellites, so that when surveillance cameras passed overhead, nothing looked out of the ordinary.

Compare this scenario with what happened two years ago, when India ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). All signatories were required to declare their chemical weapons stockpile, and India revealed (to nearly everyone’s surprise) that it had, in fact, developed such an arsenal. In other words, India chose to tell the world because it believed that widespread implementation of the CWC would serve its long-term interests.

Taken together, these two events illustrate a growing trend worldwide. Advocates of transparency (the voluntary disclosure of information) are slugging it out with defenders of secrecy. Increasingly, information that was once considered private is now being made public—not because of a resigned surrender to the technologically facilitated intrusiveness of the Information Age, but as a result of globalization. As arms proliferation, trade, information flows, environmental problems, and all sorts of direct contacts between individuals continue to cut across existing political boundaries, what people do in one locale affects more and more people in other places. Strong pressures are emerging to find better ways to govern this growing number of transnational interactions. Governments and private corporations are deliberately divulging their secrets, creating a de facto system of "regulation by revelation."

India’s refusal to adhere to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty notwithstanding, the field of arms control has seen a growing acceptance of transparency that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Shocked by the extent of Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program, revealed in the wake of the Gulf War, the 127-member countries of the International Atomic Energy Agency recently agreed to make its inspections far more rigorous.

Nearly unanimous international opinion now holds that, in the aftermath of the Asian crisis, the only way to restore investor confidence is to encourage transparency throughout the region. Likewise, the environmental field is awash with examples of regulation by revelation. In the United States, the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act requires companies to disclose the quantities of a few hundred toxic chemicals released into the environment. Although the act puts no limits on emissions, merely requiring their disclosure, the results have been dramatic. As one chemical industry representative has noted, "There’s not a chief executive officer around who wants to be the biggest polluter in the state."

Despite these innovations, an irreversible global move toward transparency remains far from assured. Defenders of well-established norms such as corporate privacy and national sovereignty want to hide information from prying eyes. Countries such as India and Iraq will continue to risk isolation and resist international norms. Companies will balk at the constant demands to provide data on everything from environmental standards to labor practices.

Yet transparency most likely will prevail in its global slugfest with the forces of opacity. The reason is purely pragmatic. Governments face growing and potentially overwhelming demands on their time and resources, and transnational problems such as global warming and arms proliferation only add to that burden. Because it is so hard for governments to enforce compliance across national borders, it makes sense for them to take on a different role: that of an enforcer, not of specific rules, but of diligent transparency. For instance, nations might move away from cumbersome policies mandating specific, environmentally friendly production techniques and instead establish systems for reporting what facilities emit.

Individuals can then take that information, analyze and compile it, and disseminate it to networks of citizen groups and consumer organizations. It is already happening. The Environmental Defense Fund created a user-friendly web site, the "Chemical Scorecard," with toxic chemical emissions data that received over ten million hits during its first two months of operation. The nongovernmental organization Transparency International issues an annual Corruption Perceptions Index that publicizes which countries are home to international corporations with high incidences of graft. In other words, what we are seeing is a new kind of devolution—not from central to local government, but from government to civil society.

It made sense to cling to secrecy in a world truly divided into discrete nation-states. But in this era of global integration, transparency is the only appropriate standard.

The Entomopter Cometh

Bringing Corruption to Light . . .

. . . and Making Pollution Public