Web Diplomacy 2.0: Opportunities, Threats and Challenges in Exporting Democracy on Line
Web Diplomacy 2.0: Opportunities, Threats and Challenges in Exporting Democracy On Line
2011 International Affairs Conference: ‘Democratisation and New Media’
The Royal Irish Academy
Sarah Oates
University of Glasgow
The communicative potential of the internet subverts or transcends the traditional understanding of how states can promote or control their ideals abroad. The online sphere has rendered the elaborate efforts of propaganda targeted at foreign audiences obsolete. How do nation-states forge public diplomacy in the 21st century in an era of shifting global actors as well as communication technology that evolve at great speed? In order to meet these challenges, this paper suggests that states should use the online sphere not to broadcast views, but to both collect and respond meaningfully to the ideas expressed by foreign audiences. This is particularly demanding for states that have had little opportunity (or perhaps desire) to receive in-depth data on the views held by foreign audiences. This creates both an unprecedented opportunity for nations to learn about citizens in other countries, as well as immense challenges in how to react to the formation of public opinion in foreign countries. This calls for the application of analytical tools for statecraft in new ways, as well as innovative ways of thinking about how to harness the immense data stream in the online sphere. At the heart of this issue for governments are two significant challenges: how to find relevant information in a sea of data as well as how to react in a timely and useful manner to the frenetic pace of online interaction. This paper suggests an approach that draws on traditional tools of analysis in political communication; more innovative and cross-disciplinary ways to tackle internet analysis; as well as a better sense of a shared mission of the promotion of democracy between academics and policy-makers alike.
How does the internet change political communication? The internet creates a horizontal communication system that has a low-cost (or even virtually no-cost) ability to distribute information to a broad global audience. The internet allows for potential freedom from editorial filters and limits; relative freedom from national media control; as well as the ability to build an international audience. At the same time, the online sphere provides an interactive environment in which people can easily cross from being news consumers to news producers. The online sphere can consolidate or even create social networks.
All of these features have attracted an enormous amount of attention from social scientists. Many of them are convinced that the internet can significantly aid democratization, by enhancing it in free states and introducing it into non-free states. More recently, however, more analysts are joining early cyber-pessimists, who feared that the internet was more of a trivializing distraction than a type of enhanced ‘public sphere’ as envisioned by German scholarJürgenHabermas. Rather than a place in which citizens could exchange and develop better ways to formulate society, cyber-pessimists argue that it serves as a way of further fragmenting people by allowing them to pursue narrow interests at the expense of contributing to broader society. Even worse, the internet can bring together society’s discontents and misfits in order to challenge state stability, through protest or even terrorism. A new wave of writers, such as those who wrote the most recent OpenNet report on the global state of internet governance, argue that more state are learning to harness the communicative power of the internet to consolidate state power at the expense of democracy.
We are left with some fundamental questions. To what extent can the internet challenge authoritarian regimes?To whom does the internet grant more power – states or citizens? In the wake of the Arab Spring, can citizens expect to bring about significant political change with the help of ICTs? Or, more worryingly, can citizens expect a greater degree of control and repression as the Arab Spring demonstrates the power of the internet to drive both national and international opinion. The 2011 Freedom on the Net by Freedom House warned that countries had become measurably more repressive toward online freedom between 2009 and 2011, in particular by targeting online social entrepreneurs such as bloggers for arrest and imprisonment. Reporting on Egypt on the eve of the 2011 revolution, Freedom House noted that Egyptian officials left more freedom in the online sphere than in the off-line, traditional mass media in Egypt. This may be a lesson that other repressive regimes have since noted and started to correct.
Given that states are learning (although perhaps not as fast as dissidents) how to respond to online intelligence, what opportunities are there for exporting democracy on line? Rebecca MacKinnon[1] gives a persuasive argument for avoiding the electronic ‘Trojan Horse’ by citing the case of China. With the largest number of people on line and a national political system that directly challenges liberal capitalism, China is a particularly large target for online public diplomacy. But Chinese netizens aren’t interested in foreign websites preaching an alien political philosophy; rather, they are interested in the lively and meaningful internal debates that resonate with their needs and understanding within their native political culture. As a result, it’s not as simple as putting up a website and waiting for people to appreciate your ideals. It is about finding and participating in the meaningful debates within the national context. Nor is the idea of finding useful native-speakers to ‘plant’ ideas or attempt to steer conversations on forums or other platforms likely to have much success, as MacKinnon points out that online ‘astro-turfing’ is generally detected easily by citizens.
Thus, how can the internet challenge authoritarianism globally, working as a voice for democracy rather than as a tool for repression? We need to consider three central issues as challenges to public diplomacy in the 21st century:
Message. What role do nations choose to play in a post Cold War, post-9/11 world?
Reach. How do states project ‘soft power’ in a sphere in which communication is increasingly personalized and atomized?
Cost. In a complex, multi-polar world states find it difficult to sustain traditional funding and presence to showcase their nation.
Message
The sphere of propaganda – what is more gently called public diplomacy – was dominated by the West’s anti-communism campaign in the second half of the 20th century. The end of the Cold War and the rise of a multi-polar world have allowed a multitude of different state messages and identities to emerge (although some, such as Noam Chomsky, would argue that the George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ effectively replaced anti-Soviet propaganda as a central frame). The end of the Cold War coincided with the rapid rise of the communicative potential of the online sphere. States need to learn modern political communication, acknowledging that the traditional division between elite, closed conversations and open, public messages are over (as Wikileaks showed). While the online sphere gives even relatively small states the ability to project images that Joseph Nye describes as critical to security in his theories of ‘soft power’, they must learn to do so in effective ways in the online sphere. This means not only a consistent message that is shared by politicians and the public alike, but alsoone that is communicated via the appropriate web platforms.
Reach
How do you reach the audience in a fragmented information sphere? The upside to this is that we can know more about audiences than ever before. The constant interaction between user and content on line – through search, social networking, blogging, micro-blogging, geo-location, etc. – gives us exponentially more data than traditional social-science methods of audience research such as surveys, focus-groups, interviews, participant observation, etc. We can know instantly how audiences – here or abroad – react to political statements, economic crises, terrorist attacks, elections and other extreme events in society. We can target messages at particular populations and we can deliver these messages very quickly over a range of platforms. At the heart of the ability to communicate and generate influence via ‘soft’ power, however, is the need to have strong, consistent and compelling messages. Thus, the internet does not replace a government communication strategy. It actually puts more pressure on it, as the need to respond shrinks from days to hours to even minutes.
Cost
There are investment costs in learning how to collect data, analyse information and respond in the online sphere. Yet, there is no question that governments can do much more with less, with the additional benefit of being able to switch focus from different areas quickly.
Example: What can we learn about Russians on line?
All of this sounds promising, but what does it mean in practice?Here, I will discuss briefly the case study of Russia in order to reflect on the value of understanding citizens via the online sphere. The conundrum in Russia is that a relatively diverse media since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has not let to more media freedom. Rather, as my earlier studies have found, the state domination of the media – particularly the prime television channel – has undermined the development of robust political parties and free elections. Futhermore, investigations into online discourse linked to political parties and groups has yielded little of promise in terms of democratic dialogue.
However, there is political discourse going on in the online sphere in Russia if you examine controversies surrounding the provision of health care. For example, a group of dialysis patients successfully used an ongoing forum on dialysis health issues to successfully organise resistance in 2010 to government plans to shut their dialysis ward in Rostov-on-the-Don (a move that would have effectively sentenced them to death as they could not get proper dialysis elsewhere). Parents of children suffering from a rare genetic condition were able to organize on line to convince the Russian government to provide new, extremely expensive medicine to treat their children. The same group successfully petitioned the Russian Union of Journalists in 2010 to uphold a complaint against a tabloid journalist who suggested that children born with disabilities should be euthanized at birth. What is noteworthy is that these Russians, who have shown their commitment to principles relating to human rights, do not talk online about these issues in a way readily recognized by a Western, liberal discourse. Rather, they place the debate within the framework of entitlements and benefits within a society dominated by a state bureaucracy. Thus, an attempt to engage Russians with the idea of personal liberty would probably not be very successful. However, a discussion of rights and fairness as they relate to state benefits would find resonance, suggesting that messages about the value of democracy should relate to benefits rather than rights.
What hangs in the balance for Russia and the rest of us? On the one hand, the internet can provide us with unprecedented access to the thoughts and feelings of citizens in a wide range of countries. On the other hand, there is a rising understanding of how to harness the internet through ‘third-generation’ controls (OpenNet Institute, see In the 2010 OpenNet report Access Controlled, it is warned that “the center of gravity of practices aimed at managing cyberspace has shifted subtly from policies and practices aimed at denying access to content to methods that seek to normalize control and the exercise of power in cyberspace through a variety of means” (p. 6, emphasis in original). This third generation of Internet control allows states to deploy the internet in a carefully choreographed manner that simultaneously promotes state interests through propaganda; discredits opponents via information campaigns or strategic takedowns of internet sites at critical political moments; and selectively intimidates or arrests of cyber-dissidents. At the same time, repressive states set up systems to coerce or encourage citizens to stay within national domains or types of websites in the online world, further promoting the distortion of information while they harvest online interactions to gain nuanced information on political actions and orientations of individuals. MacKinnon describes a similar phenomenon, which she calls ‘networked authoritarianism’, in China.
Yet, at the same time there is hope for the citizens to benefit from the online sphere even as states craft better ways of using the internet for the monitoring and detection of rebellion. Citizens are generally more nimble and creative than states. Networks can be very resilient. Once a public sphere is created, it will migrate among platforms, as it did in Egypt. And in his recent book,The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Philip N. Howard presents compelling evidence that the internet can deliver a double benefit: It can work to bring down dictatorships through citizen-centered online movements and it can consolidate young democracies with E-governance.
Arab Spring or Arab Season?
Ultimately, we can ask ourselves whether the internet can provide the best opportunity for change through evolution or revolution. Freedom House did not see Egypt as poised on the brink of an ICT-led revolution; rather, the organization noted that online control by the state had increased from 2009 to 2011. Yet, the Egyptian state failed to understand how the internet fostered political change through both the dissemination of alternative information to the state-controlled traditional media as well as the creation of robust networks of protest. Most tellingly, the Egyptian state spectacularly failed to understand that switching the network off was no longer an option, particularly as it translated protest from online to on the street. The rise of the internet as a tool of political communication may signal the ‘end of history’ in a way completely different from the idea envisioned by Francis Fukuyama that the end of the Cold War signaled the triumph of liberal democracy. Rather, the online sphere could signal the ‘end of history’ as written by states and the ‘beginning of history’ as written by the citizens. States will need to learn to listen, rather than to broadcast. Political leaders will need to find ways in which their messages can resonate with national or even sub-national populations.
Challenges
The challenge of understanding the online sphere calls for ways of working for academics and policymakers. A culture of narrow, elite discussions and the stately pace of scholarly publication will not bring about timely understanding of the social potential of the internet. Rather, academics should work in cross-disciplinary, collaborative teams to apply the most useful theories and ideas to understanding the internet. At the same time, this gives academics an opportunity to help to develop tools to process the massive data about society from the online sphere to provide unparalled understanding of the political beliefs and motivations across a broad range of cultures. Policymakers need to be more open to using these ideas, from both traditional understandings of audience studies as well as new online tools of research and communication. Surely, with this understanding, we could craft a more promising and inclusive global society.
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[1]See MacKinnon, R. (2011) China’s ‘Networked Authoritarianism’. Journal of Democracy 22 (2): 32-46.