Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, has leaked his recordings of the Eurogroup Meetings in which he participated during his time in office in 2015. In this video, he explains the reasons for “Euroleaks”:
I have not yet had the time to look at these materials in detail, but I think, for meeting researchers (and not only them) this is quite a unique and very valuable data set (comparable, perhaps, to the recordings mad by President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis about which @dgibson1 wrote his book “Talk at the brink”). In the present case, the book about the recordings (“Adults in the Room”, pulished in 2017) became available before the publication of the recordings: Varoufakis wrote it himself and I highly recommend it.
But just like @dgibson1 was not the first to analyze Kennedy’s recordings and found some flaws in earlier studies that did not rely on conversation analytic transcription, I wonder what kind of insights a more detailed (and perhaps more distanced) analysis of the Euroleaks recordings might be able to contribute.
This mostly seems to be a story of coercion and the attempt to keep that a secret. As Varoufakis says, the actual decision was made in another room. I believe that’s different from the Cuban missile crisis, though some historians have argued that Kennedy knew what he wanted all along and only went through the motions of deliberating.
I’m interested that Varoufakis puts such stock in minutes as a way to keep everyone accountable, given that those are almost necessarily selective and are subject to post-meeting editing. So there are some strong assumptions about the integrity of the minute-taking process (which I hope are warranted).
I thought the same. My interpretation is that he is (consciously) exaggerating the accountability function of minutes in order to make the point that having some minutes is still better than no minutes at all.
Of course, given how the Eurogroup apparently worked (his descriptions in the book are mind-boggling), it doesn’t seem so far fetched to say that if they had had minutes, they would have been entirely controlled by the president or other powerful actors that are not Varoufakis or Greece. I guess in that scenario, the point of the leaks would have been to prove the bias of the official minutes.
But out of painful personal experience, I quite agree that keeping minutes increases accountability. As chair of a board, I have seen people denying things that happened at a meeting in ways that I previously hadn’t deemed possible. That such people then also blatantly try to manipulate the minutes is unfortunately also true, but at least you’re then discussing the minutes and not the matter itself.
If you’re into audio books, this one is very good. Leighton Pugh is an excellent narrator. He has the ability of adding a nuance of a French, Italian, German etc accent to the people’s direct speech that I find fascinating because it is so subtle that you almost don’t notice it, yet it gives you a sense of being im the situation when it happened.
Oh, glad to hear that! I’m very curious about the findings. I’m personally struggling with a secretary in our housing association who basically writes the minutes as it suits her. She writes notes a decision where there was just a discussion but no formal decision and she even refuses to note decisions that were made. She is not even following rules such as that when there was a vote, the outcome of the vote has to be minuted. It’s crazy, but noone else cares enough to speak up while some just follow her unconditionally.
When I looked into the legal side of this, I learned that, legally, the decision made is the decision that was actually made at the meeting. Sounds trivial, but it means that the minutes themselves can’t be legally challenged. They are just a piece of evidence in case there is a dispute about what was decided. In such a dispute, it might turn out that the minutes where wrong (based on some other evidence), but, as I understand it, the minutes will usually have to be regarded as reflecting the real decision as long as there is no contradictory evidence.
So, according to my anecdotal evidence, I would say that the power of the secretary is somewhat more complex that we usually think, when we think about hom/her as being able to able to ad some spin to minutes. Especially in smaller, less formal associations, the secretary can pretty much write anything as long as a majority doesn’t care, due to a culture of informality. In this way, minutes (an element of formal organization) becomes a tool to maintain informal structures because whenever the legitimacy of those informal structures is challenged, the secretary can pull out the minutes and claim that “it’s right there in the minutes”. To then claim that the minutes are wrong or inaccurate is quite a challenge cause it looks like you’re denying the obvious.
Is this anything you recognise from your research?
Minute-takers of the world, unite! I admire your secretary for flexing her secretarial muscle. My minute takers did a range of things, from omitting tiny details no one would care about to reconstituting (and sometimes fabricating) information they left out of their notes in order to make their job easier to systematically hiding embarrassing details. The minutes were disseminated so that non-attendees would know what was decided but decisions came to them through other routes as well and I don’t the minutes were so much the official version of events so much as one person’s take on things, though that then became the official historical record.
