In the field of foreign affairs, ordinary people often feel powerless, but this book describes ways in which you can help, personally, to transform the nature of our relationship with the Soviet Union, and our identity as a people. And you can enjoy doing it. . . .

Citizen summitry is the application of individual initiative to what are normally considered the highest matters of state—relations with an adversary. As an ordinary citizen you engage in summitry not by wangling an invitation to the next meeting with Gorbachev, but by deciding that peace matters too much to be left only to politicians. Of course politicians will always be central to any decisions about war, defense, and "national security"; it is they, with the diplomats and military officers, who negotiate treaties, make alliances, take actions affecting the terms of international trade, and deploy armed forces. But in our fascination with this ruling elite, magnified as they are by the contemporary media, we may easily forget our own sources of creativity.

—Craig Comstock in Citizen Summitry

What is the most important single thing one can do to eliminate the threat of nuclear war and bring about peace and common security? Change your perceptions! How? That is what Citizen Summitry is about.

Future generations will look back on the latter half of the 20th century as a time when ordinary citizens awakened into awareness of their own power to affect the future. That process is well underway, and Citizen Summitry bids fair to become one of the significant milestones.

The half-century began with the near simultaneous announcements by the US and the USSR of successful tests of thermonuclear "devices", and the rapidly spreading realization that nuclear weapons had changed the world we live in. War and preparation for war, long considered legitimate functions of a nation-state, were no longer sane responses when war had become the mass murder of civilians and the potential obliteration of civilization. But how to get rid of old habits? How to restrain the powerful momenta of the massive institutions of war (or "defense" as Washington euphemistically relabeled the War Department in 1949)?

A step toward an answer came in the form of a wave of changing perceptions that resulted, by 1973, in a powerful demonstration: Ordinary citizens could prevail over the momentum of the nation's war machine and halt the disastrous Vietnam conflict! According to the official Washington analysis of the situation in the mid-1960s, Communist China had set out to take over Southeast Asia and thus menaced the entire free world. The prevailing metaphor was the "domino theory", wherein if the first "domino" (Vietnam) fell, the rest would tumble one by one. People bought into that perception at first, assuming that the experts in Washington must be basing their picture on information denied the ordinary citizen. But as the '60s came to an end, a widening group of people were concluding that the experts in Washington weren't right after all. They finally brought pressure to stop the debacle.

The change in perception involved was twofold. A stance that had once seemed legitimate was reperceived as not legitimate. And, the people realized that their perceptions determine the legitimacy of any institution, no matter how powerful, and any institutionalized behavior, no matter how time-honored.

As the 1970s slid into the 1980s fear of China diminished, business and tourism increased, and we now perceive the Chinese as pretty good Joes after all (as we had earlier similarly reperceived the Japanese and the Germans). But the Soviet Union is still our bogeyman. To help with the necessary re-perception of the Soviet Union a growing number of ordinary citizens have been taking matters into their own hands and acting as "citizen diplomats"—visiting the Soviet Union and setting up communications with their counterparts there, exchanging books and information, and in general promoting the concept that our main enemies are our fears and our perceptions. In other words, further preparing us for the Great Re-perception that war and preparation for war are no longer legitimate behaviors for the nation-state to undertake autonomously.

One of these citizen-diplomat groups is an organization called Ark Communications, founded by business entrepreneur Don Carlson. And one of their projects is the recently published book Citizen Summitry: Keeping the Peace When It Matters Too Much to be Left to Politicians. This is a collection of essays which, through the skilled editing of Carlson and Comstock, ends up with a coherence not ordinarily found in such collections.

"Citizen summitry" is defined as peaceful initiatives undertaken by citizens and voluntary associations ("non-governmental organizations" or "NGOs") in order to build a more constructive relation with a foreign country—specifically, in the present case, the Soviet Union. The book discusses four types of consciousness changing activity: (1) Building citizen-to-citizen relationships through personal travel, "citizen diplomacy" tours, etc.; (2) conducting international exchanges via "space-bridges"; (3) transforming our own consciousness through changing inner images and conditioning; and (4) creating and sharing positive scenarios for a war-free future.

Carlson and Comstock make a persuasive case for the main hope of sustained peace coming from these sorts of citizen actions. Government, says Comstock, "is structurally ill-adapted to transform hostility into peace. One of the primary duties of government is to identify and defend against enemies. As soon as a pair of countries begins to identify one another as enemies, as the US and the Soviet Union did long ago, they generally take steps to confirm and amplify the initial fears, thus starting a familiar cycle. If a government fails to be vigilant in 'threat assessment' or to procure weapons with which to threaten the enemy in return, it does not deserve to govern." But then it is difficult for that government to also maintain the mind-set that will seek out and create the conditions for peace.

As Carlson observes, the badly needed new approach to peace and security is "unlikely to come from politics or diplomacy as currently practiced. . . . One place I find hope is in the growing number of people who have suddenly come to the realization that because of the failure of 'experts' we must, as ordinary people, come to the rescue of our collective destiny. Not encumbered with the awesome responsibilities, rituals and reputations of 'experts', ordinary people are capable of fresh perception, new goals, and wonderfully creative strategies; they are not experienced enough to dismiss daring and unprecedented actions as 'unrealistic' or 'impossible'. While 'experts' play out the tired old strategies, new and powerful ideas for easing planetary tensions are appearing everywhere among people who understand that world security can no longer be left to those who got us into the present fix."

Michael Shuman echoes these thoughts about citizen diplomacy: "What is most significant about citizen diplomacy is that it gives each of us a concrete, realistic task for tomorrow. We no longer need to despair that nuclear war is inevitable and we as individuals can do nothing about it. We can now join hands with our neighbors and transform our enemies, one by one, into our friends and partners. The power to rebuild the wreckage of US-Soviet relations into an exemplar for a new era of global peace is now within our grasp."

One of the most informative and moving portions of the book is the story of the historic TV satellite spacebridges from 1982 to 1985 (including the "US" festivals, the Nuclear Winter Conference, the Beyond War telecast, and the Live Aid concert). The potentialities of this technology for promoting understanding through communication are generally recognized. But the fact is far less widely known that the initiation of the spacebridges, and the spirit of friendship in which they were held, were a triumph of citizen diplomacy. This was the dedicated work of a handful of private (I was about to say "ordinary", but they are extraordinary) citizens. At a time when it was generally assumed that the Soviet Union would never permit live, unscripted, spontaneous two-way broadcast, these few persevering persons proved the assumption wrong. Jim Hickman, Kim Spencer, Evelyn Messenger, and a small number of others, created what may be the most spectacular demonstration so far that citizen diplomacy can sometimes make things happen which would be far less likely if left to "the people in power".

Citizen Summitry also includes a collection of papers by Soviet citizen diplomats. (Yes, the Soviet Union has them too!) One of these, Joseph Goldin, proposes a "Mirror for Humanity"—a multiple-space-bridge network with gigantic video screens situated in many different parts of the world. One of the first programs he would share around the world features the sun. "The montage will take the sun up over the Earth . . . switching the image from one enormous video screen to another in a smooth glissando, changing with the landscapes and different populations. In some countries we see yesterday's twilight, in others the dark of night, but it is, above all, people that we see everywhere: people young and old, people with their chins turned upward or their hands folded in prayer, people embracing and looking at the sun as it rises at the edge of the Earth, their eyes catching each new ray of sunlight as it streams forth. This would be the first ritual of an emerging humanity as a community."

Citizen summitry is the focus, as one would surmise from the title, yet there is a broader message as well. Marilyn Ferguson summarizes the promise of transformation that is threaded throughout the book:

"We have had a profound paradigm shift about the Whole Earth. We know it now as a jewel in space, a fragile water planet. . . . We have discovered our interdependence. . . . The old gods of isolationism and nationalism are tumbling. . . . We are learning to approach problems differently, knowing that most of the world's crises grew out of the old paradigm—the forms, structures, and beliefs of an obsolete understanding of reality. . . . Individuals are learning to trust—and to communicate their change of mind. Our most viable hope for a new world lies in asking whether a new world is possible. . . .

"War is unthinkable in a society of autonomous people who have discovered the connectedness of all humanity, who are unafraid of alien ideas and alien cultures, who know that all revolutions begin within and that you cannot impose your brand of enlightenment on anyone else. . . ."

Over and over, throughout the book, the same point is made: Our enemy is not the Russians, but a mind-set. As Roger Walsh puts it: "The current global threats to human survival and wellbeing are actually symptoms of our individual and shared states of mind. . . . The state of the world reflects the state of our minds; our collective crises mirror our collective consciousness. That same consciousness which both created and was created by our millions of years of evolution now stands threatened by its own remarkable, though incomplete, success."

Summarizing the book, Craig Comstock says, "Although we are now in serious danger, our civilization does not have to perish in a nuclear war. In fact, we can have a future much better than most of us usually allow ourselves to imagine. Peace can be kept. We don't have to wait for somebody else, such as a leader, to provide the initiative; everyone can take part. Getting there will be half the fun. It will involve enriching our lives through contact with what's now alien and foreign, through inner development, and through imagining exactly what we want and working back to how we get there. In a few words, that's the message of this book." It's a message both welcome and effectively presented.

Willis Harman was the former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. From Professor of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford, he moved to SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where for sixteen years he did research in futures studies and strategic planning. He was the author of Global Mind Change and Creative Work, among other books. He died in 1997.