Breaking Barriers in United States-Russia Relations

The Power and Promise of Citizen Diplomacy

• Publisher: Kettering Foundation
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781945577437
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

The first meeting of what would come to be known as the Dartmouth Conference took place in 1960 at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Despite the volatile stand-off between the two superpowers, the meeting of citizens from both countries was held with the explicit support of both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev. Sixty years later, the Dartmouth Conference is established as the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between citizens of the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States. Over the course of six decades, the Dartmouth Conference has brought together leading citizens from the two countries to candidly discuss a full range of issues affecting the US-Russia relationship, from political and economic considerations to arms control and the role of the two countries in regional conflicts. Philip Stewart has participated in 120 of the 148 sessions of the Dartmouth Conference. In this book, he recounts how the Dartmouth talks have expanded international policy options, weathered world crises, and evolved into an ambitious exploration of how relations between civil societies in the United States and Russia might help build a more peaceful world.

About Kettering Foundation

The Kettering Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering's primary research question is: What does it take to make democracy work as it should? Kettering's research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation. For more information about Kettering research and publications, see the Kettering Foundation's website at www.kettering.org.

CHAPTER ONE

The Dartmouth Conference
as Citizen Diplomacy:
Conceptual Foundations

CHAPTER ONE

The Dartmouth Conference as Citizen Diplomacy: Conceptual Foundations

JUST AS WAR IS TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO GENERALS, international relations are far too crucial to leave to diplomats alone. That is why citizen diplomacy is so vital. The effort to understand the nature and role of citizen diplomacy has been a hallmark of Kettering Foundation research since 1970.

Citizen diplomacy occurs when citizens from different states engage in serious discourse together to shape their own and the other people’s ideas, understandings, aspirations, behavior, and, ultimately, relationships.

The Kettering Foundation’s approach to citizen diplomacy is distinguished from virtually every other such effort. Kettering’s research seeks insights into how citizens influence the relationships between their peoples and countries, particularly when those relationships are in conflict. Kettering recognizes that the wider the scope and the more productive the relationships across lines of deep difference among states, the greater the chances of reducing the likelihood of conflict. How that happens and what conditions contribute toward greater or lesser effectiveness is the subject of this book.

The study of informal diplomatic relationships with Russia provides the opportunity to understand how citizens from the United States and Russia, through the power generated by their relationships, seek some level of influence over issues each side perceives as vitally important. The challenges involved mean that citizen efforts are likely to fail more often than succeed, yet the most useful insights often emerge from such failures. Such insights can then be applied to ongoing dialogues, improving the prospects that citizens in and out of government will make sound collective decisions and interact in ways that will bring about the changes they seek.

The Kettering Foundation brings no political agenda to its remarkable continuity of research on citizen diplomacy other than a recognition that the welfare and security of the United States and the world is heavily dependent upon the quality of the relationships we have with other nations, particularly Russia and China.¹ Because relations among states with long histories of animosity and suspicion are unpredictable and complex, only by persistent, continuous engagement can we hope to develop, test, refine, and apply useful insights. This is why Kettering has for decades assumed responsibility for the United States’ side of the 60-year-old Russia-United States Dartmouth Conference.

For meaningful dialogue to occur, joint ownership in all senses, from financing to agenda and participants, is critical. The stronger this sense of joint ownership, the greater the effectiveness of the process because psychologically and politically it is a manifestation of the equality of the sides. Neither side is doing something for, to, or on the other; each works with the other. The process is sustained because each finds it valuable. Each side recognizes that there are problems neither can adequately address alone, but rather only together, irrespective of their differences. In the nuclear age, security is one of these. As early as 1969, at Dartmouth V, just prior to the beginning of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), Soviet academician George Kistiakowsky observed:

Given the present state of military armaments, the concept of military superiority has no meaning. You can kill an individual and destroy his house only once. But what is important is the concept of “adequacy.” Responsible people in both countries know that “superiority” is an impracticable catchword.²

The Kettering Foundation’s approach to all its work begins with citizens and a particular understanding of citizens’ role in building productive relationships among nations and in democratic politics. In the traditional view, citizens have important, yet limited, roles in democratic politics. Most central is voting for those who, as their representatives, will make political choices on their behalf. This is the essence of representative government, or a republican political system. Citizens may also write letters, emails, or tweets to their local and national representatives and join interest groups or protest movements. In this perspective, making individual decisions about for whom to vote is about as close as citizens come, or should come, to making political choices. For much of the 20th century, this perspective provided a more or less accurate picture of how citizens actually behaved in American politics.

However, this limited concept of citizens’ role has had serious consequences for the most important institutions of our democracy. This is evident in declining public confidence in the federal institution with which citizens should have the most direct links, over which their votes should have the greatest influence: the United States Congress. Gallup surveys covering nearly 40 years, using identical questions, show that between 1973 and today, those who felt “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of confidence in Congress declined steadily from a high of 42 percent in 1973, when this question was first asked, to 11 percent in 2019, up just slightly from a mere 8 percent in 2015.³ Even the presidency, the only office in our democracy filled by a national electorate, has seen a drastic decline in public confidence, from 72 percent in February 1991 to 34 percent in June 2017 and 37 percent in August 2019.⁴ The public also expresses minimal confidence in other institutions, such as our criminal justice system.

These sharp and continuing declines in public confidence in our core institutions threaten the very legitimacy of our political system. In Western countries, democratic legitimacy is created and sustained through citizen participation. But legitimacy is not automatic; legitimacy depends upon citizens’ readiness to accept their government’s right to rule. The figures above reflect a steep decline in citizens’ willingness to cede this right to their government. In fact, the increasing polarization of our Congress—the disappearance of “moderate” or “overlapping” interests between Democrats and Republicans—is at once a sign and a result of this loss of legitimacy. Citizens increasingly feel left out, powerless to impact those aspects of their lives they value most highly. These tendencies constitute a grave threat to the very survival of democracy. In many ways, our democracy is not working as it should.

What might it take, then, for democracy to work as it should?⁵ Among the numerous thinkers and scholars who have struggled with this question over the past 30 or more years, the contributions of Daniel Yankelovich and David Mathews stand out for their insight that the citizens’ role in making democracy work as it should is central, critical, and foundational.⁶ Unless citizens do the work only they can do, their representatives are unlikely to be able to conduct their work in a responsible manner. As Yankelovich argues, citizens must come to what he calls “public judgment” on the major issues that impact our lives, from health care and livable wages to the scope and quality of the safety net we want government to provide and the kind of relationships we want to have with other nations, including Russia. Particularly at the state and local levels, citizens need to find common ground and ways to act. The sharp decline in support for our democratic institutions and the rising strengths of populist appeals are all indicators that creating a public voice is very much a work in progress. A citizen-centered conception of democracy constitutes the rationale and motivation, and defines the strategies behind, Kettering’s approach to citizen diplomacy.

L-R Yuri Arbatov, David Mathews, and Norman Cousins, 1984

David Mathews, writing in The Ecology of Democracy, describes how Kettering traces the notion of democracy back to its Greek origins:

Democracy … is based on the concepts captured in the two roots of the word itself—demo and cracy. The demos is the citizenry, and the cracy (from kratos) is their power to rule or prevail. In other words, democracy is governance based on the power of people to shape their future. Citizens are at the center, although it has always been a struggle to keep them there.⁷

There are a number of historic instances in which the public has found its voice, such as the Civil Rights Movement that led to profound changes in our society, particularly for African Americans. Others include the sharp decline in smoking and the emergence of a broad consensus supporting the rights of gays and lesbians, including marriage. Sustainable legislation or policy takes account of this public voice; it tends to follow, not precede, the formation of a broad public consensus. Under such conditions, elected officials are given “public permission” to act. The converse seems to be true as well. When the public has not done the hard work of coming to judgment, the result tends to be political deadlock. President Abraham Lincoln understood this when he declared, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”⁸ One of the ongoing challenges in our policy toward Russia is the absence of just such “public sentiment” for a constructive relationship.

Elected officials, officeholders, experts, and professionals in general tend to believe that this public voice is largely shaped by their exhortations, appeals, and analyses. Yet this is a more complex process. Yankelovich identified seven stages through which the public comes to judgment.⁹ These stages begin with “dawning awareness,” move to “a sense of urgency” to do something, and culminate in a third stage of “reaching for solutions.” In this third stage, people do tend to reach for solutions proposed by policymakers or experts. But they seldom understand the full range of consequences or costs and benefits of these solutions. This leads to the fourth stage, called “wishful thinking,” in which citizens are often told and easily come to believe that “they can have it all.” The reason for this is simple yet of fundamental importance. People instinctively resist the very hard work of facing and working through trade-offs. Many want the benefits of universal health care, for example, but few are ready to accept the costs. Weighing and working through these choices intellectually and finally coming to emotional acceptance round out Yankelovich’s stages.

Six Core Democratic Practices

Through these stages, citizens move from inattention to formation of a public voice, to a stable, durable perspective. Mathews argues that to learn how citizens do this work in a more democratic way, we need to understand the practices they use. As he emphasizes, these practices are not techniques or tools, rather, “They promote democratic values and stimulate the learning that allows citizens to combat many of their own problems. They are ways of both learning and doing simultaneously.”¹⁰ These processes apply equally to citizens from a single community or citizens from several, often antagonistic, countries working through issues together in citizen diplomacy. Kettering Foundation research has identified six core democratic practices:

1. Identifying what the problem is, or “naming,” but not in expert or technical terms alone

Citizens will engage with a problem when they see that it affects things they hold valuable or dear. What people hold valuable usually emerges from their personal experience over a lifetime and is held in the somatic, or emotional, brain.¹¹ In 1973, psychologist Milton Rokeach published a survey that ranked things held valuable by a random sample of US citizens. The top five were freedom from war and conflict (peace), family security (taking care of loved ones), independence of choice (freedom), equal opportunity for all (brotherhood), and self-respect (self-esteem).¹² While everyone holds these things valuable, their priority will vary from person to person and issue to issue. In deliberative decision-making, there will be as many struggles with tensions within individuals as between or among them.

2. Clarifying the choices, or “framing,” for addressing issues and the things that people hold valuable in each choice

“I want to be secure, but that will mean giving up some freedom. How much am I willing to give up or trade off?” People strongly resist working through trade-offs among things they hold valuable. This resistance is better overcome when these trade-offs and the tensions arising from them within and among options are made clear. This is a core function and major challenge of citizen diplomacy as well.

3. Making decisions deliberatively

This is not about just talk; it is about deciding, whether it involves citizens in a coffeehouse or citizens from the United States and Russia struggling together to work through options for action. The question is what should we do? Questions of should are moral questions. Moral questions cannot be decided by facts alone. They require judgment. And, in order to address adequately all the concerns surrounding the options, we have to hold back our own rush to judgment in order to really hear all the voices in the room; we have to deliberate.

For many, deliberative decision-making is all about exchanging rational arguments.¹³ Yet the deliberative working through of trade-offs involves, in addition to logic and reason, at least as much the telling and retelling of the personal experiences that offer an account of why each...