Emotional warfare? Track two diplomacy and the emotionalisation of the Cold War

Abstract

This article discusses a series of US citizen exchanges to the USSR that were termed track two, or citizen, diplomacy. The track two model was meant to address the freeze in high-level diplomatic engagements at a time of heightening tensions between rivals. Intriguingly, track two diplomacy was explicitly emotionalised – that is, linked to a psychologically informed approach to conflict resolution and contact. I focus on two sets of diplomatic delegations – those co-organised by the Esalen Institute and the Association for Humanistic Psychology, as well as grassroots citizen exchanges. Of particular interest is the famous visit by Carl Rogers to the USSR in 1986 where he held a set of workshops that were part of the AHP Soviet Exchange Project. I show the various central roles that discourses on emotions (psychological theories), emotional discourses (the expression of emotions) and emotion-evocation played in these US endeavours. What is particularly interesting to see is how, as the Cold War began to wane, the United States’ emotionalised exchanges became more unidirectional and interventionist in nature. I term this form of emotionalisation ‘emotional warfare’ and conclude that, as pedagogies, techniques and informal contacts, they should be read not only through the prism of friendly exchange, but also through those of geopolitical agonism, as well as the neoliberalisation of both empires in the post-Cold War period. In focusing on these exchanges in the 1980s, the article also makes a contribution to contemporary studies of emotion culture in the post-Soviet context by describing some of the prehistory of Russia’s ‘psychological turn’.