Leslie Rogne Schumacher, Op-Ed Columnist
January 2012
As a senior in college I wrote a column for my university newspaper. Eventually I decided to withdraw it voluntarily as the editors kept making small changes that I nevertheless felt were significant at the time. As the years have passed I’ve decided that I was probably being too much of an egoist about the whole thing, and my editors undoubtedly had the right of it. As the beneficiary of many years of hard-hitting executive critique from my professors (i.e. what I must do, not what I might) on my work, I’ve learned to look forward to and indeed depend on such commentary. I write this first column with the hope that my readers take this anecdote to mean that I will do my best to convey my thoughts about the subjects I plan to explore in a way that opens the door for discussion rather than closes it. With this in mind, my column will primarily be concerned with issues of British international and diplomatic history, especially those which relate to the Victorian period. The lessons and legacies of this history as they present themselves in the present day will also be of interest, as will the theoretical and disciplinary concerns of The British Scholar Society members’ shared field of interest. I look forward to the debates that will hopefully ensue from my humble contribution to the discourse.
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The nicest rejection letter I’ve ever received was from Princeton University, who gracefully told me they had no doubt that I was wonderful but there were 400 other wonderful people who applied and they could only take 14. I felt no lasting disappointment about this and I still have the letter in a file somewhere. The second nicest rejection I received was from Foreign Policy for a commentary I sent to them early in 2011 on the Wikileaks diplomatic cables release. Though comparable to the letter from Princeton, unlike my obsolete Ivy League ambitions I still feel that the issue needs to be better addressed. Indeed, it never seems to have been given a fair and comprehensive review—something that undoubtedly has to do with the fact that, at least in the American scene in which I travel, we can only keep one foreign policy-related issue in our heads at a time, and this was just as the crowds in Tahrir Square had begun to build to a truly significant level.
So, out the window went the matter of a quarter-million confidential US State Department cables made public for anyone’s perusal. The tawdry details of the warrant for Julian Assange’s arrest issued by Sweden in relation to rape charges and the spectacle of his extradition proceedings in Britain somehow did more to cover up the release of the cables than expose it to further scrutiny. Thus go the whims of the tabloid sensationalism that still grips Anglo-American media, which soldiers on even if it might be argued that the public could be taught to care more about the core issues of any subject rather than the bits deemed most juicy. Even a venerable source of sober commentary like BBC News was not immune to the passions of Assange, as I learned from watching the story doggedly loop around again and again on the cafeteria television at the UK National Archives at Kew.
The question I had at the time and I still have is: what precisely is the matter with confidentiality in democratic society and what do we know about the history of this issue in the modern era? Can one be a firm supporter of the principle of governmental openness and still leave room for denying public access to certain kinds of data? My interest in so-called “public secrecy” in the age of enfranchisement and political news media in the mid to late Victorian period in part arises out of this apparent paradox of values and practices. What makes the Wikileaks cables release so fascinating is it posits a solution to this problem by way of imploding the whole mess, come what may and for better or for worse. That Assange, as an Australian, is a Commonwealth citizen, and moreover that his quest for radical anti-secrecy extends far beyond America, leads me to question how the subject of public secrecy figures in the British context and how the genesis of state secrecy measures may have helped inspire the destructive approach that the bleached-haired anti-hero Assange champions.
At the last conference of The British Scholar Society I gave a paper on the 1878 “Globe scandal,” in which a low-level clerk in the Translation Department of the Foreign Office, Charles Marvin, memorized a secret treaty between Britain and Russia and sold it to the Globe newspaper. This revelation was problematic for the Tory government, as it had leveraged Britain’s Russophobia to get support for Conservative foreign and imperial policies. Upon being found out, Marvin was arrested, tried, and in the end acquitted for the crime of stealing government documents. English law had no provision for the carrying away of state secrets in one’s mind rather than on one’s person, so Marvin got off free and enjoyed a fine career as an author on topics related to the Great Game. The notion that English law could not convict on the informational contents of documents whose theft constituted a crime seems absolutely ridiculous by today’s standards, but this was the first time it had come up.
The fact is, however, that the market for such information was fueled by the growth of Britain’s literacy rate, media saturation, and voting rights. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, “those who knew” information about Britain’s conduct in the international sphere constituted the bulk of those who cared. As time went on, though, the British people, newly-empowered with their letters and votes, increasingly saw detailed coverage of British foreign affairs as a quotidian expectation to be consumed alongside the train wrecks, murders, and other goings-on that were packed into the pages of the era’s enormous broadsheets. The higher-ups might say that the danger of secret data made public was all about avoiding international tension and confrontation, but there is no doubt that attendant with the rise of interest in the guild-like mysteries of foreign policy and diplomacy was the birth of a fear that domestic society would learn of actions on the government’s part which might be considered untoward or even unethical.
Thus emerged the difficult question of how one could get a voting, informed public on the side of a policy of keeping secrets from the same voting, informed public. We certainly can comprehend under present circumstances how this might happen; the US’s Patriot Act comes to mind, as do the detention provisions of the UK’s Prevention of Terrorism Act. Indeed, democratically produced limitations of the freedoms enjoyed under a democracy are as old as democracy itself, from the Alien and Sedition Acts on. In the 1880s it was the 1889 Official Secrets Act that fit this description. That it had been Salisbury, as Benjamin Disraeli’s Foreign Secretary, who had signed the secret Anglo-Russian treaty in 1878 and a decade later, still in possession of the Foreign Secretary’s portfolio, championed the cause of a comprehensive law making actions such as Marvin’s illegal is no coincidence. Salisbury, like Joseph Chamberlain, understood that populism had become a necessity of British politics. So, if restrictions on public access to government information were to be passed, people had to be convinced that it was either for their own good or for the purpose of checkmating nebulous machinations emanating from the shady foreign sector of the British worldview.
Such pro-public secrecy forces were successful, and the general model of the original Official Secrets Act has been sustained in four subsequent revisions and expansions, in 1911, 1920, 1939, and 1989. Public secrecy is a vital aspect of British culture, probably accounting in some way for Britain’s obsession with spy stories or tales of government corruption kept from the eye of the public by some shady politico who knows all the rules, like Michael Dobbs’ Francis Urquhart. Yet how could such a culture of suspicion and intrigue—not just in Britain’s perfidious foreign maneuvers but in blessed Albion itself—possibly be tenable in the long term? Democratic society can fool itself for a very long time that its government has the people’s best interests at heart, but there is a breaking point. Certainly the omission of the public interest defense, from the 1989 Official Secrets Act—which allows a person to disclose confidential information if it can prove to be in the best interest of the public—increased the chance that a radical reaction, like that of Wikileaks, would appear just around the corner.
There is perhaps a line one crosses in the guarding of state secrets: on one side it is considered logical to keep information safe from possibly nefarious prying eyes, while on the other people begin to question if political elites are attempting to do the business of democratic governance without interference from the pesky voters who put them there. At the same time, secrecy laws exist for a reason: to allow government officials who are tasked with solving difficult problems to talk over the issue, make observations, and float ideas. Many of the details of these conversations are embarrassing, such as a prominent example from the Wikileaks cable release in which an American diplomat characterized then-Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi as “feckless” and “vain.” Of course this statement is a basic truth, but it was embarrassing to Italy to have it known that American officials had not shown restraint in discussing the Italian leader’s foibles.
Should all the thoughts of actors in international relations be made known to the global populace? Is it undemocratic to bar people from knowing the full scope of policy formulation? If we are to be truly thoughtful about it we cannot be sure, but I would assert that comments like those on Berlusconi’s vanity tell us nothing about the shape of American hegemony as posited by Assange & Co., let alone the broader “Western” hegemony his group invokes in their larger anti-secrecy goals. To me it’s simple talk, no more and no less. Of course, when the state can be proved to be acting privately in direct opposition to what they profess publicly, this is another matter entirely. It is thus uncomfortable to consider that the genesis of state secrecy laws in Britain begins with Charles Marvin, whose revelation of the secret 1878 Anglo-Russian treaty actually did reveal evidence that the government had misled the public. How can we reconcile this with the fact that laws regarding state secrecy, generally thought acceptable in principle, were motivated by an inauspicious attempt by the government to cover up their malfeasance? As in much of history, perhaps there is no reconciliation.
