Public opinion and interest

What would politics in a world of absolute transparency look like? What if every move and thought of our elected leaders were a matter of the public record? Would such a quintessentially democratic world represent the ultimate common good?
 
Against the backdrop of Wikileaks and the ongoing uprisings in North Africa, a recent Munk School panel explored this hypothesized world. On the up side, citizens would have access to all evidence required to judge whether their governments are, in fact, translating their public statements into action. There would be no discrepancy between why Canadians think Canada is in Afghanistan and why Canada is really in Afghanistan; economic recovery would not be stated as a priority unless it actually were a priority. Who would not want to live in a world in which public opinion determined public interest?
 
All four panelists — and probably just about everyone else, except perhaps Julian Assange. Consider the negative side of Wikileaks: in this supreme act of transparency, the names of innumerable human rights activists were either exposed or intimated, their lives put in danger as a result.
 
Our safety, too, was arguably jeopardized as terrorists were given access to the names of essential infrastructure and facilities. “The second casualty” of Wikileaks (after American foreign policy), according to panelist Daryl Copeland, “may be the public interest.”
 
One of the leaked cables revealed American Ambassador to Tunisia Robert F. Godec’s impressions of his host country: “Corruption,” he wrote, “is the problem everyone knows about, but no one can publicly acknowledge” (he went on to compare the ruling’s family’s caged, live tiger to Uday Hussein’s lion cage).
 
Given what has happened in Tunisia, what continues to occur in Egypt and what seems to beckon in Jordan and Lebanon, one can imagine how transparency — and the accountability it demands — suits the public interest. And this has certainly been the line put forward by the media, as reporters convey a narrative of democracy emerging, at long last, out of the exasperation of young, Arab men. The common good, according to this account, is best served by due process, namely the existence of systems through which citizens can directly communicate with their governments, and be heard. So long as the proper course of action is followed, the desirable outcome will result.
 
History, however, is a grim reminder: too often, when the focus is on means instead of ends, the public interest suffers. Bush’s push for democratic process in Gaza led to Hamas; the Cedar Revolution helped Hezbollah gain power; the current government in Iran can be traced to the 1979 ousting of the Shah; and what about those Bolsheviks? Due process, the record suggests, does not unerringly serve the common good.
 
Excluding the imminent probability that democratically-inspired anarchism will destabilize the entire Middle East, there exist several threats to the public interest. Those asserting their democratic right, it would appear, share no unifying principles beyond the goal of upsetting the status quo. It is increasingly possible that Islamists will lead both countries into the future, paving the way for Shiite minorities to gain power, and thus giving Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a platform through which to disseminate the antagonistic Iranian worldview.
 
In the umpth.0 world of globalization, democratic process does not always guarantee the common good. The relationship between secrecy and power is not unfailingly linear, nor is that between power and corruption. Wikileaks and the upheaval in North Africa remind us that the public interest is the product of ends as much as means, and that public opinion only sometimes recognizes its own interest. Opinion may be the currency of our age, but it too can corrupt.
 
Anouk Dey is completing her MPhil at Oxford and is the founder of Reclaim Childhood, a non-profit based in Jordan.