In Defence of Ambiguity

A few years ago, in his weekly New York Times column on language, William Safire provided exalted status to the word “transparency.” Widely used in the “diplolingo” of arms control, financial crises, etc., etc., it has also become an icon of civil society. So a book dedicated to diminishing this exalted status and ennobling ambiguity is very intriguing indeed.

Before getting to the theme of Jacqueline Best’s The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance—which is the merits of ambiguity—it is useful to explore the history of the concept of transparency in an international context. Safire traces its rise to prominence in that context back to the 1970s and especially to the arms control discussions, but in fact its origin goes back to the 1940s and the creation of the post-war architecture of international economic cooperation. Transparency was a founding principle of the trading system, embedded in the General...