Position Statement
March 5, 2007
Citizen diplomacy is the concept that the individual citizen has the right – in fact, the responsibility – to help shape U.S. foreign relations. For more than half a century, many have recognized that citizen diplomacy is a powerful force for good in a turbulent world. The effective conduct of U.S. foreign policy requires the empowerment of American citizens of all ages to reach out to the rest of the world – through exchanges, through education, through business, through professions and through everyday life. Citizen diplomacy enables the world to breathe hope instead of fear. Nonetheless, it remains an underutilized asset in America’s quest to make friends around the world and underscore our common aspirations.
Why is this so important now? Why is it more important today than ever before for Americans to engage the world around us?
Today, numerous polls and studies document that anti-American sentiment around the globe is dangerously high and has grown to unprecedented levels. Today, the critical challenge for America’s national security is to dramatically increase our capacity and capability to reach out to the rest of the world to foster common interests and values and to confront common threats together. Today, America is falling behind in the race for engagement with the world, international competitiveness, and global education excellence. However, in spite of these serious concerns, the United States spends one-tenth of one percent of its budget on foreign affairs and only one percent of that on the single most important facet of U.S. foreign policy – citizen diplomacy.
We cannot afford to continue this pattern of neglect. We need to engage all levels of society in the United States, globally. In an era of increasing globalization, more and more people develop their most lasting impressions of the United States through face-to-face, personal encounters with Americans, when they visit this country or when Americans travel abroad. In such a context, the ‘citizen diplomat’ has become a powerful force in defining the United States to the rest of the world.
How do we reverse these drastic trends? How do we commit the resources needed for citizen diplomacy? How do we harness the can-do optimism and activism of Americans in the service of international exchange and outreach? How do we dramatically increase the positive contribution of citizen diplomacy to U.S. foreign relations thereby influencing how the United States is perceived around the world?
“The mission of the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy is to promote and expand opportunity for all Americans to be citizen diplomats and affirm the indispensable value of citizen involvement in international relations.”
Adopted: USCCD Board of Directors, Feb. 2, 2007, Des Moines, Iowa
In the next ten years the Center is committed to addressing these issues and increasing fourfold Americans actively involved as citizen diplomats.
“Average Americans, in their natural state, are the best Ambassadors a country can have”
The Ugly American 1958 |
