Iran: Citizen Diplomacy Today

As mentioned in the Blog « Iran’s Tough Neighborhood », the current political situation after the first round of serious negotiations on one October in Geneva requires complex responses for citizen diplomacy. Iran is already an element in the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict and a ”˜player’ in the future of Iraq. Thus citizen diplomacy needs to be seen in its wider context in which large states of the region such as China, Russia, India and Turkey play a role. Although US-Iranian relations remain an important focus for on-going citizen diplomacy efforts, the wider political context needs to be considered.

Although the US-USSR Cold War (1945-1990) was of a different nature, there is some benefit to be drawn from looking at citizen diplomacy during this period. The term ”˜citizen diplomacy’ gained wide public usage by the 1956 White House Conference on Citizen Diplomacy called by President Eisenhower. At that time, the term was used to cover only a small part of a professional, government diplomat’s role ”” building a positive image of the country and its culture. The US government feared that negative or partial images of US culture and policy were gaining a foothold in Europe ”” a cowboy culture, racist, and uncaring about the fate of the poor”” and that these images could be countered by non-governmental Americans in contact with people in Europe and Asia by showing Americans as cultured and caring.

Shortly after the Cold War was institutionalized in 1948, both the Soviet Union and the USA helped in the creation of non-governmental organizations to carry out citizen diplomacy and especially to support their policies. The Soviet Union, with the experience of creating “popular front” groups in the mid-1930s, took the lead but was quickly matched by the USA. Starting with the creation by the Soviet authorities of the World Peace Council in 1949, the US government helped in the creation of the Congress of Cultural Freedom in 1950. Following the same duality, the Soviet-sponsored International Union of Students was opposed by COSIC, the World Federation of Democratic Youth by the World Assembly of Youth etc. The history of these organizations, their role and impact is partly told by Hugh Wilford The Mighty Wurlitzer (Harvard University Press, 2008)

As I was Chairman of the US section of the World Assembly of Youth in 1955-1956 and much later was a friend of John Thomson, the English Secretary-General of COSIC, we compared notes and stories. There is still a good deal of the period to be analysed. However, by 1959-1960, the Soviets realized that talking with their supporters in the USA and Western Europe was of limited use and that serious dialogue with more representative Americans was necessary. It is this second period of citizen diplomacy, starting in 1960, which may provide insights for the current wider Middle East efforts.

The first multi-national Pugwash conference of scientists had been held in 1957 at the home of Cyrus Eaton in Nova Scotia with 22 nuclear scientists following the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, thus starting a pattern of having people representing themselves and not as representatives of governments or organizations. However, it had been fairly easy to choose the 22 people as nuclear physics was a rather closed field in which the leaders knew one another.

A broader-based but bi-national meeting of individuals was more difficult to organize. Early in 1960, Georgi Arbatov, the Director of the Institute of USA and Canadian Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the leading specialist of US policy in the Soviet Union and Evgeni Primakov, later Prime Minister of Russia, then an academic with close government contacts, approached Norman Cousins, Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature and an activist against testing nuclear weapons in the late 1950s to see if he would organize a meeting of non-governmental US personalities to discuss with an equal number of Soviet non-governmental persons, but persons who had access to government decision-makers. Arbatov would handle the Soviet side of the effort.

Cousins agreed and so began the first necessary step in citizen diplomacy: contacts. It is necessary to know who has influence on government decision making but who are not currently in government and how to contact such persons. Cousins turned to his long-time friend Adlai Stevenson, former Governor of Illinois, twice the Democratic Party candidate for President, an intellectual in politics who had a wide circle of friends. Stevenson’s ex-wife was the editor of the leading US poetry magazine, and so Stevenson had known a good number of writers. Stevenson could not participate himself being still a political figure, but he knew many key people and introduced them to Cousins.

The second person with many diverse contacts and who became an active participant in the meetings was David Rockefeller. Rockefeller was president of a large New York bank involved in economy world wide. He had a long-standing interest in modern art and was active in the New York Museum of Modern Art. He had brothers involved in a wide range of activities including politics, and the Rockefeller Foundation had contacts in many different milieu and could give advice on ”˜who was doing what of interest’.

The third person who played an active role was the ”˜free spirit’ Buckminster Fuller, a man of a multitude of interests and contacts. With these contacts, the Dartmouth Conferences were born, named after the college in New Hampshire where the first meeting was held in late 1960. An analysis of the conferences was written by James Voorhees .Dialogue sustained: the multilevel peace process and the Dartmouth Conference (US Institute of Peace Press, 2002) As from 1959 on, I was working in Europe, I did not participate, but I knew Norman Cousins fairly well, and we discussed the Dartmouth Conferences on some of his visits to Europe.

The yearly Dartmouth Conferences were just “getting off the ground” when the Soviets pulled out in protest to the US-led war in Vietnam. Thus, just in the years when they would have been most necessary, there were no meetings from 1965 to 1968. They began again in 1969 because 1968 had been the year of all protests, and few knew what the future might hold. The Dartmouth Conferences gave birth to five more intellectually-oriented Soviet-American Writers Conferences.

In addition to contacts, a second vital aspect of citizen diplomacy is communication, both to an interested public and to government policy makers. Communications to an interested public was largely done through editorials and articles in the Saturday Review of Literature which was published weekly in 500,000 copies for a largely middle-class intellectual readership. Both Cousins and Rockefeller had access to political figures, and the US State Department was interested in the conferences from the start.

The third vital aspect of citizen diplomacy is money so as not to need government finance nor for the individual participants to finance their trip and stay costs. Three US foundations, the Ford, Johnson and Kettering Foundations covered US costs. Non-governmental funding was not really in the Soviet pattern, but there was a Soviet Peace Fund so that one could say that the Soviet government was not paying for the Soviet participants.

It is impossible to reproduce the Cold War setting and the central role that US-Soviet politics played during the Cold War for the new citizen diplomacy efforts, but it is useful to analyse the past and to study some of the key elements.

Rene Wadlow, Representative to the UN, Geneva, Association of World Citizens