Questioning the moral attachment to transparency Clare Birchall, University of Kent, UK 1. The Revolution will not be transparent We are told today that transparency can solve all our problems. It is entrusted with the task of fostering accountability and strengthening participatory democracy. It is expected to weed out and prevent corruption or, to invoke the early twentieth century U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous phrase, disinfect public life (1913). More specifically, it has been called upon to: prevent the undue influence of lobbyists on U.S. representatives (see OpenSecrets.org); thwart the abuse of UK MPs’ expenses (Brooke, 2010); foster economic growth 1 ; pave the way for financial recovery (Roth, 2009); democratize aid (Barder, 2010); and even help tackle global warming. 2 The etymology of transparency, as Christopher Hood writes, moves from ‘perviousness to light’ to connote a doctrine of governance that includes ‘decisions governed by clearly established and published rules and procedures rather than by ad hoc judgments or processes; methods of accounting or public reporting that clarify who gains from and who pays for any public measure; and governance that is intelligible and accessible to the “general public”’ (Hood, 2006a: 5). Drawing on the allure of such ideals, both Barack Obama in the U.S. and David Cameron in the UK campaigned on the promise of transparency in government and have taken a number of steps in this direction. Obama has implemented wide-reaching initiatives including a shift in governmental attitude towards Freedom of Information requests, and the introduction of the Open Government Directive which requires all government agencies to implement transparent strategies. When agreeing its policies, the UK Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition also committed itself to greater transparency, pledging in its ‘Programme for Government’ to publish the salaries of highly paid civil servants online, create a new ‘right to data’, introduce protections for whistleblowers, and ensure the availability of data-sets in open and standardized formats. The coalition have since established a new Public Sector Transparency Board intended to ensure that all Whitehall departments meet the new deadlines for releasing key public datasets.
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Questioning the moral attachment to transparency Clare Birchall, University of Kent, UK 1. The Revolution will not be transparent
We are told today that transparency can solve all our problems. It is entrusted with the
task of fostering accountability and strengthening participatory democracy. It is
expected to weed out and prevent corruption or, to invoke the early twentieth century
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous phrase, disinfect public life (1913).
More specifically, it has been called upon to: prevent the undue influence of lobbyists on
U.S. representatives (see OpenSecrets.org); thwart the abuse of UK MPs’ expenses
(Brooke, 2010); foster economic growth1; pave the way for financial recovery (Roth,
2009); democratize aid (Barder, 2010); and even help tackle global warming.2
The etymology of transparency, as Christopher Hood writes, moves from ‘perviousness
to light’ to connote a doctrine of governance that includes ‘decisions governed by clearly
established and published rules and procedures rather than by ad hoc judgments or
processes; methods of accounting or public reporting that clarify who gains from and
who pays for any public measure; and governance that is intelligible and accessible to
the “general public”’ (Hood, 2006a: 5). Drawing on the allure of such ideals, both Barack
Obama in the U.S. and David Cameron in the UK campaigned on the promise of
transparency in government and have taken a number of steps in this direction. Obama
has implemented wide-reaching initiatives including a shift in governmental attitude
towards Freedom of Information requests, and the introduction of the Open
Government Directive which requires all government agencies to implement
transparent strategies. When agreeing its policies, the UK Conservative/Liberal
Democrat coalition also committed itself to greater transparency, pledging in its
‘Programme for Government’ to publish the salaries of highly paid civil servants online,
create a new ‘right to data’, introduce protections for whistleblowers, and ensure the
availability of data-sets in open and standardized formats. The coalition have since
established a new Public Sector Transparency Board intended to ensure that all
Whitehall departments meet the new deadlines for releasing key public datasets.
The ideal of open government, as one context for transparency, and the public’s right to
‘scrutinize and participate in government dates back at least to the Enlightenment’
(Lathrop & Ruma, 2010: xix), but in recent years transparency has been given a modish
inflection through its association with and dependence on e-technologies, as well as its
invocation in the U.S. by Obama who has been called ‘America’s first hip president’
(Fullwood, 2009). Moreover, it is the object of a whole movement that has recruited
some of the best and brightest young campaigners. To go against transparency in the
‘west’ today is to be opposed to progress (conservative in the general sense); corrupt (if
there is nothing to hide, why fear transparency?); or anti-democratic (the link between
transparency and democracy has become unassailable).
I want to try to open up a more nuanced debate in this paper. And so, after examining
transparency’s ascendance, I will be asking whether a moral attachment to
transparency is obfuscating ethical decisions in this realm. In light of this, I argue that
the socialist and radical Left, so often with no choice but to support liberal tenets, might
be better off thinking about how it can appropriate the secret from the processes of
(in)securitization that became a feature of the Bush administration, rather than
investing wholly in transparency.
As I see it, the problem is not that America ‘has forgotten how to keep a secret’ as
Donald Rumsfeld claimed in 2004, but that the Left has forgotten to think through and
with the secret; it has abandoned secrecy and its productive possibilities. The lessons
and strategies of secrecy have been obscured, that is, by a moral attachment to
disclosure. Recognizing this could open up a new public discourse: one that does not
presume the political and moral alignments of concealment and disclosure.
2. Articulations of/to transparency
To take an influential context in relation to transparency in government, the American
twentieth century has been punctuated by a series of important legislative measures to
demonstrate commitment to open government. As ‘the daily compendium of almost all
activities of the executive branch agencies, but also a principal mechanism for
permitting citizens to know about and participate in agency decision making in a timely,
uniform manner’ (Feinberg, 2001: 359), the Federal Register of 1935 was arguably the
first. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 required federal officials to publish
information about their operations and can be seen as a direct progenitor of both the
disclosure requirements of World Trade Organization agreements and the Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA), implemented in 1966 in the U.S. and strengthened following the
resignation of President Richard Nixon (see Roberts 2006a: 13-14). Though it is
possible that in practice some FOIA initiatives have resulted in tighter central
management of information (see Roberts, 2006b), the FOIA affirms that government
documents belong to citizens. After the Cold War, principles of the FOIA spread around
the globe. Thomas Blanton calls the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the
collapse of the twin towers the ‘Decade of Openness’, and writes about the 26 countries
that enacted statutes to ensure citizens’ rights to government information (2002: 50).
Against the support for transparency embedded in legislative apparatus, the presidency
of George W. Bush (2001-2009) ‘created an extended period of retrenchment in public
access to government information, driven both by national security concerns and by
politics and bureaucratic instincts’ (Fung, Graham & Weil, 2007: 27). Indeed, the Bush
administration reversed a trend set by President Clinton and his Executive Order of
1995 which ‘initiated one of the largest declassification efforts in modern history,
releasing millions of formerly classified documents’ (Bailey, 2004: 188). Instead of
declassification, Bush was more intent on keeping information out of the public domain:
‘In fiscal years 2001 to 2003, the average number of original decisions to classify
information increased 50% over the average for the previous five fiscal years’ (Barone,
2006: xii-xiii). It would be easy to attribute this penchant for secrecy to the increased
security concerns after September 11, but even before the terrorist attack, ‘the 260, 978
classified documents in the executive branch represented an increase of 18 per cent
over the previous year’ (Bailey, 2004: 188). And the official advice for FOIA officers
changed from support for disclosure to withholding (see Sassen, 2006: 183). By 2004, J.
William Leonard, the official responsible for oversight of classification, complained that
war was being used ‘as an excuse to disregard the basics of the security classification
system.’
With the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, a commitment to open and transparent
government was expressed with a moral urgency to match that of Woodrow Wilson in
the early Twentieth Century who claimed ‘Government ought to be all outside and no
inside… Secrecy means impropriety’ (1913/2008: 70). On his first day in office, Obama
issued a memorandum setting a new tone for Washington D.C.:
My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness
in Government… Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote
efficiency and effectiveness in Government. (White House, 2009a)
At the end of that first year, the subsequent Open Government Directive (White House,
2009b) sought to institutionalize a culture of transparency in all government agencies.
While we could question whether this is an ethics or performance of transparency (civil
rights campaigners have complained, for example, about Obama’s continued use of the
State Secrets Privilege, and the administration’s response to the WikiLeaks’ diplomatic
cable disclosures, also poses a serious challenge to Obama’s credibility on this issue),
what is pertinent here is that Obama’s rhetoric and strategies confirm that transparent
and open government has (once again) become a legitimate mainstream concern with
moral and political force.
Despite (or because of) the Bush administration’s investment in state secrecy, the drive
for (and rhetoric of) transparency has reached new heights. Transparency has become a
ubiquitous rallying cry – its realization greatly facilitated by the reduced cost of data
storage and delivery made possible by e-technologies. More than a political doctrine,
transparency has taken on the identity of a political movement with moral imperatives.
Law professor, Patrick Birkinshaw, has gone so far as to claim that transparency
constitutes a human right (2006: 47-57).
As part of this movement, the Sunlight Foundation is probably the most visible online
project in Washington at present (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/). Its aim is to
‘make government more accountable and transparent’ through the use of ‘cutting-edge
technologies and ideas’, and its website calls on citizens to become a part of the
transparency movement. Other groups and web projects that fall under the banner of
the transparency movement include OpenSecrets.org, which charts the relationship
between financial interests and public policy; Transparency International: USA, which is
committed to combating corruption and promoting transparency and integrity in
government, business and development assistance; and MAPLight.org, which is a
database highlighting the links between campaign donations and legislative votes. On
the guerilla fringes of the transparency movement, WikiLeaks has posed the biggest
challenge to traditional classification systems and closed government. Despite differing
strategies, all of these groups or projects are acting on the assumption, as Mark Schmitt
puts it, that ‘publicity prevents the corruption that is almost inevitable in closed
processes…; information allows citizens to participate in democratic decision-making;
and this knowledge makes people better “consumers” of both public and private goods
and allows voters more effectively to hold politicians accountable’ (Schmitt, 2010).
But the ‘transparency’ of this movement is not stable. It is notoriously ill-defined in
everyday invocations (Hood writes: ‘Like many other notions of a quasi-religious
nature, transparency is more often preached than practiced, more often invoked than
defined’ (2006a: 3)). It might therefore be best to think of transparency as a ‘floating
signifier’. And what the celebratory rhetoric of Julian Assange might miss is that
transparency, like all floating signifiers according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
are subject to an ongoing contestation over meaning and can be articulated to radically
different political projects (1985: 113).
Indeed, although transparency is mostly associated with liberal democracy, open and
transparent government, along with free speech, has become the cause around which
groups from a range of political positions can cluster. A representative of the libertarian
CATO Institute explains the widespread appeal: ‘Transparency is a pan-ideological good.
Libertarians and conservatives want more transparency to reduce demand for
government. Liberals see opportunity to validate government and root-out corruption’
(quoted in Triplett, 2010). Laclau writes, ‘the same democratic demands receive the
structural pressure of rival hegemonic projects’ (2005: 131).
Rather than interpreting transparency as a radical force ‘powerful enough’, as Assange
has put it, ‘to break the fiscal blockade’ (2010), it is also possible to read transparency
as wholly compatible with, and supportive of, neo-liberalism (as characterized by free-
market conditions and an endorsement of individualism). For, as Garsten and Montoya
write, ‘One of the prerogatives of late capitalism, it seems, is making the world
hospitable for translocal, universal forms of administration and governance and this
entails making the world legible and transparent’ (2008: 1). They also describe how
ideals of transparency fit in with a ‘certain way of organizing society that emphasizes
the individual as the basic constitutive active agent in the construction of his or her fate
and of society-at-large. In such a vision of social life, the transactions between citizens
and the state and within the economy must be open and observable in the interests of
maintaining a level playing field for all concerned’ (2008: 4).
We could add that transparency might produce information about government agencies
and private corporations in lieu, rather than as part of, regulation, facilitating free
market trading (see Swartz, 2010). Moreover, there is a very real link between