A Davos question: Can diplomacy

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.

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