Below, Scott Burchill responds to Rory Medcalf's post. Scott has assisted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's legal team with political advice and the translation of Swedish court documents:
The cables are NOT private correspondence. They are not even owned by their authors. In democracies, they are owned by the people. Trainee diplomats are told at the very beginning of their careers to expect their utterances to be read in the future by researchers, archivists and the public via FOI requests. Diplomatic communications are for official not private correspondence, all of which is paid for by the citizens.
We should assess the appropriate levels of diplomatic transparency primarily against our own standards of public accountability, rather than what may or may not favour other, authoritarian states. There is a strong argument that greater openness from us will help our rivals and competitors understand us better, avoiding confusion and misunderstandings of our motives and behaviour. There is a lot of zero-sum, binary thinking in conclusions which imply we shouldn't do anything decent if it confers advantage on other states.
WikiLeaks is a consequence of an absence of 'complex global relationships of trust and transaction', not a cause of their demise. Without existing levels of mistrust and suspicion surrounding government, WikiLeaks would have no market.
WikiLeaks will only be 'bad for freedom of information' if we allow people who work for us to conceal information from us. The assumption here is of an unaccountable state we have little or no influence over. We had better behave or they won't tell us anything! This is the picture of an authoritarian state, not a liberal democracy. We set the rules governing the transparency of our bureaucracies. If they aren't working properly we can change them.
Frankly, if our diplomats come to rely more heavily on open sources, we will be much better off. Having said that, the suggestions that diplomatic communications will collapse after WikiLeaks and that diplomats will no longer trade in gossip, are risible. Remarkably little will change.
Before it can be claimed that WikiLeaks is bad for peacemaking and would have stymied settlements such as the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s, an a priori question should be posed. How many intractable conflicts in the world have been prolonged by an absence of diplomatic transparency? Many, including the 'Irish problem', one would suspect. Diplomacy is used to perpetuate conflicts and to resolve them. Any cost-benefit analysis of WikiLeaks must consider both sides of this argument, not just the peacemaking angle.
If mainstream journalism is being marginalised by WikiLeaks – and I'd suggest it is – this is because it hasn't been doing it's job well enough. The old cosy relationship between journalists and the state has not served us well, even though they are actually helping WikiLeaks in this instance. Why is the status quo so good? Why must it be protected from competition?
People shouldn't put 'faith' in political leaders. That's just infantile. Judge them by their actions. If these revelations are good for the right or left, so be it. Let the public decide in light of the fullest possible disclosure of information. If the cables reveal discord between the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, we should know now, instead of finding out in a decade when Paul Kelly publishes his next 'insiders' tome.
There is an underlying fear of the public in these conclusions, as if they can't be trusted with information about their own government. Not very democratic in sentiment.
