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Instructors: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Birgit Menzel
Event type:
online: Lecture
Displayed in timetable as:
06.139.0505
Credits:
3,0
Language of instruction:
German
Min. | Max. participants:
- | -
Contents:
Citizen Diplomacy: An Independent Soviet-American Peace Movement to End the Cold War
Tuesday, 11.20-12.50, MS Teams
For almost half a century the Cold War was the global matrix in which collective images of Self and Other, as well as strategic ideas of strength and weakness were defined. The East-West conflict between the two nuclear superpowers dominated not only international political relations, in particu¬lar the history of separated Germany, but also the culture and mentality in the widest sense, directly by ideology and propaganda, and indirectly by mutual projections and the competition of systems in artistic practice, films and everyday life.
As a reaction to the politics of fear and the arms race, since the 1960s ordinary citizens began to seek alternatives and developed personal contacts with each other across the Iron Curtain. In this lecture the untold history of a grassroots-movement of Soviet-American exchange between citizens in the 1970s and 1980s will be presented; a movement which emerged at the height of the Cold War, when the relations between the two super¬powers were frozen, nuclear war was an immediate threat, and official channels of diplomacy were closed. Personal contacts were established between individuals in both countries, who developed informal networks of communication and unprece¬dented forms of cooperation in a wide range of areas (i.e. science, telecommunication, humanistic psychology, alternative healing & medicine, ecology, education). This movement was initiated by activists of the American New Age counterculture, but then spread out beyond that, and by 1986, already hundreds of organizations were involved in this exchange. All this happened “under the radar” of state official diplomacy.
The movement opened the gates to the international breakthrough of the Perestroika, i.e. by the first satellite space bridges, by connecting astronauts and cosmonauts or by bringing tele-communication to the U.S.S.R. After Chernobyl, an ecological exchange movement followed. Many of the individually established contacts and networks lasted throughout the 1990s, some until the present. In today’s multipolar world, 30 years later, the escalating geopolitical conflicts are in many ways com¬parable to the early 1980s. Citizen diplomacy is needed more than ever before.
The lecture offers a survey of the citizen diplomacy (“Bürgerdiplomatie”, “narodnaia diplomatiia”) movement, its activists and facilitators, focusing on actors and concrete exchange projects (Space bridges (1982-1989), youth exchange in alpine hiking, home & water-birthing). More choices are open for participants’ preferences. The lecture aims at inspiring students for thesis-works, based on a wide range of topics on unpublished material available from archival and personal research.
Former activists of the citizen diplomacy-movement will be invited as guests into the lecture.
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