Tech plays growing role in political unrest
DAVOS, Switzerland — The turmoil in Egypt and Tunisia provides a stark illustration of how the digital revolution can empower individuals on a grand scale — but some members of the world's elite at Davos say it also can stifle diplomacy and give radicals the loudest voice.
Young protesters using Facebook and Twitter have organized massive anti-government protests in those two countries, and public outrage over corruption in Tunisia was fueled by WikiLeaks' disclosures that American diplomats were also repulsed by that government's greed.
In the United States, meanwhile, officialdom has been burned by the massive exposure of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, working with The New York Times and several top European papers.
"Secrecy is often an important dimension in negotiations and diplomacy," Richard Haass, a former top U.S. diplomat who heads the Council on Foreign Relations, said Friday at the annual World Economic Forum in this Swiss mountain resort.
"On one hand, it spreads information around and that can be a good thing — (but) it'll probably discourage people from putting things on paper, which is a bad thing — because, in my experience, people think more systematically on paper," Haass said.
The question of transparency in the digital age took on added piquancy this week, when the Palestinian leadership was badly embarrassed by the Al-Jazeera TV network's exposure of alleged negotiating sessions in which they made concessions to Israel — flexibility for which they had not prepared the public.
The conclusion, said one diplomat, was that officials should beware of saying one thing in public and another in private.
The Al-Jazeera report suggested that midway through ultimately fruitless 2008 negotiations Palestinian officials compromised on sharing Jerusalem and on the demand for refugees to return to Israel. The Palestinians say the reports were distorted — but they are still hunting for the leakers.
Would it have been better to precipitate the offers with a potentially destructive public debate? Should the offers — which might have brought a historic peace deal closer — not have otherwise been made?
There were no easy answers at the Davos session, which was itself mostly off the record.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said he was now operating under the assumption that no discussion can be assumed to be forever private — an effect he said was stifling.
He said it reminded him of an old communist joke: "First, don't think. If you have to think, don't speak. ... And if you think, speak, write it down and sign it — don't be surprised!"
Many participants tackled the question of how responsive officials — including diplomats — needed to be. But social media doesn't always improve political discourse, Haass said.
"The voices that are empowered by (social media), many of them that bring the greatest intensity to it, are not always the most moderate or reasonable voices," he said. "It makes it a little bit harder to create and carry out policies that are 'centrist.'"
The participants representing the world of diplomacy — perhaps more so than their counterparts from academia and media at the session — seemed mostly to agree.
"Let me tell you why I do not use Twitter," Sikorski said. "Matters in foreign affairs are often very complicated and cannot be explained in 140 (characters). And a lot of the opinions — particularly anonymous ones — that you're flooded with on the Internet are just useless, aggressive."
Haass said the digital revolution "raises all sorts of interesting questions" for diplomats.
"In many ways the embassy, this classic large platform, has become something of an endangered species," he said. "Why do you need hundreds of people in capitals? Why can't you just have all sorts of political and other officers running around cities with their little cameras and BlackBerrys?"