Daniele Archibugi: Wilson, Trotsky, Assange: lessons from the history of diplomatic transparency
[Daniele Archibugi is a director at the Italian National Research Council (CNR), and professor of innovation, governance and public policy at Birkbeck College.]
On the 7th of November 1917, just after the revolution, Lev Trotsky took office at the Russian Foreign Ministry and started reading the correspondence between his predecessors and the ministers of the other countries. The new People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs discovered many secret treaties with old Europe's powers aimed at exchanging rights over colonies and re-drawing national boundaries. Official documents revealed what the Bolsheviks had claimed since the beginning of the war: it was not fought for patriotic reasons. From the Russian archives came strong evidence that there was an agreement among the hegemonic classes against thousands of Russian peasants enlisted in the army. Those sent to die for the glory of Holy Mother Russia were actually sold by their Tsar to the highest bidder. In a word, it confirmed the validity of one of Lenin’s simplest demands: a peace treaty had to be signed as soon as possible and without annexations or reparations.
Trotsky, a polyglot intellectual who was already widely traveled did not hesitate in deciding what to do: the Foreign Ministry's archives had to be made public in order to make the whole world aware that the war in Europe was fought by the hegemonic classes against their own peoples. Secret diplomacy was just the make-up needed to hide this fact: “Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests”, declared Trotsky, only two weeks after the conquest of the Winter Palace.
Thanks also to the megaphone of political forces sympathizing with the new Bolshevik government the secret documents had a remarkable distribution thoughout Europe. Nevertheless, the major impact occurred in the United States. American President Woodrow Wilson became somehow an early Trotskyist by repeating in the first of his Fourteen points, released just two months after the Russian revolution, the principle of diplomatic activities' publicity: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view”. The communist and atheist Trotsky together with the liberal and Presbyterian Wilson managed to dramatically change dramatically practice: from that day, the majority of international treaties have not been secret.
It is true that liberal thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant, had already at the end of the XVIII century, called for much more than publicity of the treaties. Bentham, for example, stated that the all practice of secret diplomacy should be abolished: “The Foreign Department is the Department of all others in which the strongest checks are needful. At the same time, thanks to the rules of secrecy of all the Departments, this is the only one in which there are no checks at all. I will say, then, the conclusion is demonstrated. The principle which throws a veil of secrecy of the proceeding of the Foreign Department of the Cabinet is pernicious in the highest degree, pregnant with mischiefs superior to everything to which the most perfect absence of all concealment could possibly give rise”.# Trotsky himself just repeated the point made much earlier by Bentham when he argued that “the abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy”.
Today history is repeating itself...
Read entire article at openDemocracy (UK)
On the 7th of November 1917, just after the revolution, Lev Trotsky took office at the Russian Foreign Ministry and started reading the correspondence between his predecessors and the ministers of the other countries. The new People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs discovered many secret treaties with old Europe's powers aimed at exchanging rights over colonies and re-drawing national boundaries. Official documents revealed what the Bolsheviks had claimed since the beginning of the war: it was not fought for patriotic reasons. From the Russian archives came strong evidence that there was an agreement among the hegemonic classes against thousands of Russian peasants enlisted in the army. Those sent to die for the glory of Holy Mother Russia were actually sold by their Tsar to the highest bidder. In a word, it confirmed the validity of one of Lenin’s simplest demands: a peace treaty had to be signed as soon as possible and without annexations or reparations.
Trotsky, a polyglot intellectual who was already widely traveled did not hesitate in deciding what to do: the Foreign Ministry's archives had to be made public in order to make the whole world aware that the war in Europe was fought by the hegemonic classes against their own peoples. Secret diplomacy was just the make-up needed to hide this fact: “Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests”, declared Trotsky, only two weeks after the conquest of the Winter Palace.
Thanks also to the megaphone of political forces sympathizing with the new Bolshevik government the secret documents had a remarkable distribution thoughout Europe. Nevertheless, the major impact occurred in the United States. American President Woodrow Wilson became somehow an early Trotskyist by repeating in the first of his Fourteen points, released just two months after the Russian revolution, the principle of diplomatic activities' publicity: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view”. The communist and atheist Trotsky together with the liberal and Presbyterian Wilson managed to dramatically change dramatically practice: from that day, the majority of international treaties have not been secret.
It is true that liberal thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant, had already at the end of the XVIII century, called for much more than publicity of the treaties. Bentham, for example, stated that the all practice of secret diplomacy should be abolished: “The Foreign Department is the Department of all others in which the strongest checks are needful. At the same time, thanks to the rules of secrecy of all the Departments, this is the only one in which there are no checks at all. I will say, then, the conclusion is demonstrated. The principle which throws a veil of secrecy of the proceeding of the Foreign Department of the Cabinet is pernicious in the highest degree, pregnant with mischiefs superior to everything to which the most perfect absence of all concealment could possibly give rise”.# Trotsky himself just repeated the point made much earlier by Bentham when he argued that “the abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy”.
Today history is repeating itself...