Marquardt, APSA 2005 (Aug. 23, 2005)
clear, the practice of military transparency – even among its most strident proponents
and in the most favorable security environments, such as much of Europe today – has
Juxtaposed against the emerging norm of military transparency,
which says that states are obliged to be more forthcoming with one another about their
internal affairs, states remain steadfast in their regulation of what they disclose about
themselves.
Open Skies, like other efforts at promoting international openness, is the product
of its times and the geo-political realities that shape the national security policies of
states. During the early years of the Cold War, Open Skies was overwhelmed by the
competition for security between the United States and the Soviet Union.
As the Cold
War drew to a close, however, Open Skies breathed new life, and the negotiations that
led up to the signing of the treaty, as well as the ratification process that followed, were
shaped – largely for the better – by a vastly improved international environment.
Likewise, the future of Open Skies depends on the international political circumstances
1
Institutionalist Ronald Mitchell captures this paradox nicely. “[R]egimes can increase
transparency by enhancing the incentives and capacity actors have to contribute to a particular
regime’s transparency,” he writes, but “the necessity for transparency has not been the mother of
invention.” He continues: [F]or all its nominal importance to regime success, many regimes fail to
induce adequate transparency...[G]overnments regularly fail to provide the timely and accurate
reports mandated by most security, human rights, and environmental treaties. Nor do
governments usually allow international organizations or other actors to collect independent
information on treaty-relevant behavior.” Ronald Mitchell, “Sources of Transparency: Information
Systems in International Regimes,” International Studies Quarterly Vol. 42 (1998), pp. 109-110.
2
Ann M. Florini considers transparency an emerging and consequential norm of international
relations. She attributes its prevalence and social power in the international system to the
presence of “norm entrepreneurs,” namely, individuals or organizations that draw the attention of
national policy elites to certain ideas and in a sense exercise the power of persuasion to affect
policy change. The success of norms like transparency also depend on the “normative climate”
of the international system, by which Florini means how a particular norm fits into the existing
normative structure or the social relationships between states at any given moment in time.
Transparency, she asserts, is replacing sovereignty as a dominant norm in international politics
today. See “Transparency: A New Norm of International Relations,” Ph.D. dissertation, University
of California, Los Angeles, 1996; “The Evolution of International Norms,” International Studies
Quarterly Vol. 40 (1996), pp. 381-86; “The End of Secrecy,” Foreign Policy No. 111 (Summer
1998), pp. 50-63, and The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World
(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003), especially pp. 32-40.
3
The origins of Open Skies and its place in America’s Cold War national security policy is the
subject of my article “Transparency and Security Competition: Open Skies: Open Skies and
America’s Cold War Statecraft, 1948-60,” Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming).
3
Convention