When there are no government negotiations, there is a need to build stronger Track Two networks.
The continuing armed conflicts in Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine and the lack of any formal governmental negotiations forces us to ask if more can be done on the part of nongovernmental organizations to encourage negotiations in good faith.
Governmental negotiations can be called Track One. Track One diplomacy is official governmental negotiations with the backup resources of government research and intelligence agencies. There can also be Track One "back channels" of informal or unofficial contacts.
Track Two diplomacy are non-official discussions held by persons of conflicting parties in an attempt to clarify outstanding disputes and to explore options for resolving them. Track Two also aims to keep channels of communication open when official channels are not working smoothly. One of the principle benefits of Track Two is that it gives the participants a chance to widen their view on what the basic factors are that affect the relationship among parties.
World Citizen Norman Cousins (1915-1990) was a pioneer of Track Two diplomacy. By the mid-1950s, after the death of Stalin, there was a feeling among some in the U.S.A. and the USSR that informal talks and cultural exchanges would be possible and useful. Norman Cousins as the editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, a leading literary and cultural weekly, had a good overview of U.S. culture. He had political contacts both in the New York area and in Washington, D.C. At the suggestion of President Eisenhour, he agreed to take on the task of organizing meetings among Soviet and U.S. intellectuals but also to keep the U.S. government officials informed of the thrust of the discussuins.
Thus in 1960, the Dartmouth Conferences, named after the college where the first meeting was held under the leadership of Norman Cousins was born. (1) As he later said "The purpose of the Conferences was to identify areas of cooperation for both countries in reducing tensions. The conferences made it possible for both sides to express certain ideas without penalty."
In 1953, Cousins had published a book "Who Speaks For Man?" - the theme being that while a president speaks for a country and a religious leader speaks for members of the faith, there was no one who was recognized as speaking for humanity as a whole. This task of "speaking for man" was the role which citizens of the world should carry out.
The early 1950s was a time when there was increasing public criticism of testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere because of the radioactive fallout which could endanger health. This was my first political effort, and I met Norman Cousins at that time. We always stayed in touch. I welcomed his advice. Although Norman Cousins was a good deal older than I and much better known, he always treated everyone with respect and with a willingness to listen to what they had to say. He has always represented for me the spirit of world citizenship, rooted in a specific culture and open to the world, its difficulties and its hopes.
(1) For a history of the Dartmouth Conferences see
James Voorhees. Dialogue Sustained. The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference (Washington, DC: Institude of Peace Press and the Charles Kettering Foundation, 2002)
René Wadlow
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