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A rather loose phrase encapsulating the democratic doctrine that both in the making of foreign policy and the negotiation and ratification of agreements in its pursuit, the public – universally peace-loving – should be as fully involved as possible. Though the doctrine itself has been traced to Kant, the slogan is associated especially with the name of US president, Woodrow Wilson, who led the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War. It is to be found in the first of his famous Fourteen Points, which had been presented to Congress on 8 January 1918 as a propaganda counter-offensive to the recent Bolshevik revelation of the secret treaties negotiated during the conflict. Here, Wilson stated his belief that the programme for world peace must include ‘Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view’.
There is no doubt that Wilson, formerly an academician, was temperamentally as well as morally uncomfortable with diplomacy conceived as negotiation, and that it is right to regard him as the prophet of ‘open diplomacy’. It is worth noting, however, that Wilson was not so naive as to believe that all negotiations could be successfully conducted under comprehensive and intimate public scrutiny (nor did he try to do this in Paris). Though the statement that covenants should be ‘openly arrived at’ certainly fostered this interpretation, it was an exaggeration for propaganda purposes which was soon corrected, though neither quickly nor publicly. On 12 March 1918, in a letter written to his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, Wilson stated that ‘when I pronounced for open diplomacy I meant not that there should be no private discussions of delicate matters, but that no secret agreement of any sort should be entered into and that all international relations, when fixed, should be open, aboveboard, and explicit’. This was transmitted to Congress and included in the Congressional Record for 12 June. The same correction was included in the commentary on the Fourteen Points drafted by Frank Cobb and Walter Lippmann, approved by Wilson, and presented to the Allied Supreme War Council by Colonel House, the president\'s highly influential personal emissary, in October 1918. It was repeated by Wilson himself at a secret session of the Council of Ten on 13 January 1919. See also parliamentary diplomacy; secret diplomacy. |
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