I received an email from Anya Kucharev, Project Director, INTERNEWS INTERACT, Citizen Diplomacy Archive Project. She explained that she was Director of the Citizen Archive Project at Stanford University. She was contacting citizens that were involved in citizen diplomacy projects. The term citizen diplomacy was coined to describe the activities of hundreds of American and Soviet citizens who working quietly and effectively with their counterparts to, basically take political and educational matters into their own hands. The term was also known as “Track-II diplomacy” meaning that it was an alternative to government to government “Track-I diplomacy.” Now, Kucharev is conducting a research project “to assemble, for the first time, primary source materials from the citizen diplomacy movement of the 1980s, and archive them at a major American university or institution for use by scholars and the public.” The project is far reaching, and will be an important contribution to international relationships, and the value of people-to-people exchanges.

One of the organizations that Anya has contacted is the Association Humanistic Psychology (AHP). During the 1980’s the Association for Humanistic Psychology organized a Soviet Exchange Program with Soviet psychologists and educators. The project sponsored delegations of North American professional psychologists and educators on annual three-week delegations which traveled typically to Moscow, Leningrad (as it was called in the 1980’s) and Tbilisi (Soviet Georgia). The first delegation traveled to the Soviet Union in September 1983, a week after the Soviets shot down Korean Airline Flight KAL 007 over Soviet territory. Initially, the delegation was fly from Washington, DC to Moscow on Aeroflot, but President Reagan banned Soviet flights in and out of America, so the delegation, at the last minute, was re-routed from NY to Helsinki (via Finn Air), and then immediately boarded a Russian train in Helsinki, bound for an 18 hour trip to Moscow. The 30 member delegation, headed by Fran Macy, AHP Executive Director went from the Moscow train station (with out showers) to its first meeting with the Soviet Institute for Psychology! So began collaboration from that day to the present. Anya Kucharev was the official AHP translator on this and the next delegation to the Soviet Union.

The AHP citizen diplomacy project evolved into two projects, one that focused on work in psychology, and the other in education. I organized the education strand of AHP’s exchange program, and it evolved into the Global Thinking Project (GTP), which engaged thousands of students and teachers not only from the USA and Soviet Union, but from Spain, Australia, the Czech Republic, Botswana, New Zealand, England, Canada. The project involved both people-to-people exchanges, as well as the Internet to foster collaboration and inquiry among elementary and secondary students and their teachers to investigate environmental problems. American and Russian teachers worked collaboratively to design and implement the GTP international project. The project developed the concept of global thinking, and designed learning materials in which students were seen as citizen scientists, and worked “globally” to solve local environmental problems in the realms of air, water and soil. You can read a paper that describes in detail the Global Thinking Project, its roots and basis, as well as results—warning, its a long paper.

The GTP citizen diplomacy project impacted directly hundreds of American and Russian youth, their parents and teachers. The barriers that the Cold War had constructed melted away when people sat together in a Moscow home for an evening meal, or send email to and from collaborating classrooms. The project also lead to unpredicted careers for a number of American youth—some ended up studying in Russia, others majored in Russian studies in college. But for many, it was the first time that they had ever traveled out of their own country, and lived with families of another culture. Experiences like this have had lasting effects, not only on the students, but the families that hosted students, and the exchange teachers.

When government gets out of the way things happen. President Dwight David Eisenhower, founder of the concept of people to people exchanges, believed ordinary citizens of different nations, if able to communicate directly, would solve their differences and find a way to live in peace. Or as Yulia Siroyezhina, one of the Soviet educators involved in the GTP exchange program put it, “the more that the common people contact each other the more our leaders will be obliged to contact each other as well”