Author: Nick Parfait Momengoh

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13:

In January 1919, in the Paris Peace Conference, US President Woodrow Wilson stated that diplomacy ought to be: "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." Due to the idea that diplomatic and foreign policy intrigues had led to the Great War of 1914-18, the call for transparency seemed the ultimate solution. Since then, secret diplomacy has been the object of controversy and a contradiction to the principles of liberal democracy. As the title indicates, this dissertation will focus on the practice of secret diplomacy by liberal democracies. This is a practice that has been condemned, and this dissertation is designed to use illustrations and analysis of secret diplomatic documents in order to investigate the following questions. Do liberal democracies still practice secret diplomacy? And, if they do, is such a practice justified in a democracy? Why is secret diplomacy still an object of debate for democracies? And, can secret diplomacy survive in this Information Age? Most of the illustrations will be drawn from two Western liberal democracies: France and the United States. The main challenge facing an academic researcher in studying secret diplomacy is the fact that a lot of diplomatic documents are not necessarily available or classified. Facing this challenge, this study will investigate how much evidence can be found by exploring the released documents and diplomatic archives. The significance of this study is two-fold. First, the plan is to redefine the concept of secret diplomacy within the parameters of international relations. It is important for the understanding of international relations and global governance to explore the practice of secret diplomacy. Then, the study will explore secret diplomatic cases from different point in time to provide the answers to the above questions. Another value of this investigation is based on the fact that the analysis brings Anglo/American/French studies into one place, and provides evidence to fill the gaps in the official story of those events. One needs to understand that open diplomacy only represents the "tip of the diplomatic iceberg." The other side of the diplomatic iceberg is beneath the surface and under the "waters of international relations."