![]()
The concept of “transparency” has long become ubiquitous in public debates on democracy, mass media and development. Similarly, across various academic disciplines, transparency is often referred to as “one of the key concepts of contemporary politics” or governance.1 Despite its social position as an ostensibly influential and powerful idea, its exact meaning and range of application is often seemingly the subject of inflation. In certain circles, transparency appears to have expanded into a kind of new, secular “religion,” in which “the all-seeing eye of God has been replaced by public eyes.”2 Against this backdrop, transparency has been treated as a key constituent of a global ideoscape – a set of “ideas, terms, and images that can be condensed into key words and be exported to new contexts” – that “conveys notions fundamental to the operative logic of globalizing economic and political institutions.”3
In recent years, media outlets and political agents, including non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements, have made ever louder demands for “more transparency” and for making information available and freely accessible. These agents appear to have coalesced into “an international transparency lobby,” perceived “as a civil society powerhouse” playing a vital role in the political balance of society.4 Within that framework, transparency demands are most often directed upwards at state institutions, public services, associations and political agents, but also at corporations, educational, cultural, sporting and health care institutions and even entire economic sectors, and as well as religious organisations. At the same time, transparency demands and expectations have also been implemented from the top down – in the form of laws, regulations, negotiated agreements and codes of conduct.5
As a result of the rise and development of new digital information and communication technologies, a new kind of “machine” for making everything transparent has emerged, which – in theory – makes everything available to everyone and enables, through the algorithmic deployment of digital mass data, the modern invention of the self-exposing individual.6 Social networks, despite being a relatively recent invention compared to more traditional technologies for self-expression and self-exposure, have forced the establishment of a wide range of novel transparency practices but also allowed for new forms of “post-panoptic,” “liquid” surveillance. In so doing, social networks challenge not only the concept of “the private” but also that of “the secret,”7 while remaining to a large extent untransparent themselves, protected by their status as corporate entities in a global legal and regulatory landscape that has yet to truly reckon with the advent of the digital age.8 Under these conditions of rapid digitalisation, traditional and digital-native media outlets have increasingly become the object of demands for greater transparency, as they, and other nongovernmental agents, make those same claims for transparency in other organisations and structures.9
Considering the mounting importance of transparency and “transparency imperatives,”10 the omnipresence of the discourse on transparency in political and public life, as well as in the (digital) press, the beginning of the twenty-first century seems to have augured in an “age of transparency,”11 defined by vocal and sustained calls for institutional and social transparency, the disclosure of and unimpeded access to information, the revelation of secret dealings and public oversight over political life and the economy. Arriving in the wake of a planetary “transparency explosion”12 that, akin to the Cambrian revolution, will reconstruct all of human life in its wake, or a more mundane “transparency revolution”13 brought about by the end of the Cold War and the bipolar system, the rise of electoral democracies, greater standards and international ranking systems, and cost-effective digital information-sharing, this glittering age of transparency presents considerable challenges for both state and society.
Within this context, the specific ambivalences of the transparency discourse become evident: On the one hand, objects, issues and processes of transparency, despite quite clear inherent differences, are described by means of one and the same – highly normative – term. On the other hand, the term’s deontological properties14 allowed it to be linked to different, even contrary political goals and demands.15 Demands for transparency (and their often manifold implications, both latent and obvious) are often characterised by imprecision and vagueness, which reflect both the term’s ambiguity and its often conflicting, “troubling,”16 contested and frequently ideological usage.17 In this respect, some scholars have begun to understand transparency as an “ideograph,” namely “something nobody can be opposed to but that is conceptually empty and can be filled in different strategic ways”18 or to critique the more inflationary uses of the term by problematising the notion of a coming “transparentocene.”19
In light of these multiple ambivalences, transparency often appears in the public debate as a source both of hope and of danger, as an instrument of democratisation and participation and of surveillance and oppression, as an extension of freedom and as an end to privacy. For some, it represents the solution to numerous social problems and the panacea against abuses of political and economic power, financial and corporate crises and corruption.20 Others, however, warn of the “tyranny” or “dictatorship” of transparency,21 in particular the increased possibilities for social control and surveillance, the erosion of individuality, social trust, freedom and democracy – and, ultimately, the establishment of an integrated, panoptic “hell of sameness, [where] humans are nothing but remote-controlled puppets.”22 Nonetheless, the possibility of a mediating position remains when considering the notion from a more functional perspective: With the appropriate dosage, transparency can work like a “pharmacon” – in so far as an inappropriate application or the use of excessive quantities might be wholly ineffectual – or worse – might act like a “poison.”23
All told, transparency has become an essential factor in social and cultural transformations. In its ambivalence and ambiguity, it plays a notable role not only in democracies, but also in the development of non-democratic systems and societies in transition – consider, for example, the democratisation of Spain and countries in Latin America over the course of the twentieth century, as well as in dictatorships such as the Soviet Union and China, demonstrating the dynamic complexity and inner tension of the concept. In all those settings, social movements have also invariably been involved in processes of social and political change, and have often foregrounded their demands for transparency in their political and social actions.24 This phenomenon can be traced back to the labour movements of the nineteenth century, which were, by and large (to follow Geoff Eley), movements for the introduction of greater democracy, and thus demanded more transparency regarding decision-making, in the political, economic and social sphere.25
Other examples include the 1968 student movement and the new social movements that emerged in the 1970s, including the environmental movement, which consistently put their demands for greater political and corporate transparency centre stage.26 Sabrina Zajak and Christian Scheper have demonstrated the role of transparency in the struggles between global corporations and social movements – including NGOs and trade unions – and their interventions in global production networks.27 Social movements not only demand transparency from others, but they also expect to organise themselves transparently. Consider the example of the nascent West German Green Party, which initially decided to hold all party and parliamentary party meetings in public – a policy that was quickly abandoned.28 As social movements coalesce and bureaucratise, maintaining the same standards within their own organisations that they expected of corporate and state actors (and other members of civil society) often comes with greater challenges than anticipated.
Research on transparency
The global environmental movement is but one example of the transnational dimensions inherent to many transparency discourses. In the United States, such discourses emerged in concert with broader social movements, as the early twentieth-century muckrakers (reform minded investigative journalists) – including Upton Sinclair’s “undercover journalism” in Chicago’s meatpacking industry – gained large audiences and forced numerous changes in legal and corporate structures. By the early 1970s, Ralph Nader’s campaigns advocating for consumers’ “right to know” had a similar impact, contributing to the passage of several pieces of major consumer protection legislation.29 While the United States has often provided the blueprint for transparency discourses elsewhere, research into the transnational aspects of the concept of transparency, as well as the transnational ties within transparency campaigns, is still in its infancy.30
While the concept of transparency was only truly labelled as such in the twentieth century, the political problems and governance issues it raises – about state conformity to particular rules of government, the accountability and controllability of power, and the state monopoly on violence – are considerably older.31 Going back even further, a number of scholars have shown the deep semantic roots of the idea of transparency in Europe during antiquity and the medieval period.32 Nonetheless, an active intellectual engagement with the problems of transparency in the context of comprehensive, philosophical and anthropological political theories did not begin until the Enlightenment, as the third estate – the rising middle class – began to struggle against the absolutist state with its previously largely unquestioned claims to secrecy (arcana imperii) and its monopoly on knowledge.33 Unfortunately, the bulk of the research on the historical roots of transparency has thus far focused on Europe, leaving the extra-European origins of and global perspective on transparency discourses to be explored.34
The transparency boom experienced in recent decades has primarily been reflected in the spread and intensification of a predominantly social- and cultural-oriented perspective on transparency, the research output of which has established itself as an international, multidisciplinary and rapidly growing field and has made “transparency” an operational concept.35 While the political and social sciences foreground the meaning of transparency for governance, the functioning of political systems, institutions and organisations, in particular institutional and organisational transparency,36 media and communication studies highlight a different aspect, considering media transparency from a much more self-reflective perspective.37 In the humanities, much of which is historically oriented, the emphasis is firmly on the origins of the “transparency dream,” its (counter-)utopian dimensions and the semantic, cultural and metaphorical implications of transparency,38 whereas intellectual history focuses its gaze upon the history of political ideas and the specific philosophical–epistemological dimensions of transparency.39 The intensification of transparency discourses – as a counter-model to increased complexity and opaqueness in political life – at the turn of the twentieth century also plays a substantial role in the research on the rise of (anti-)corruption. Here, transparency appears to function as a link between...
