Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3

Defining TRACK II: Meet Joseph Montville

Gauging success is an elusive task.

Everyone knows it when they see it--but coming up with iron-clad methods to evaluate it, establishing metrics and measures, can be daunting.

Evaluating success in combat? Easy: the loser surrenders, withdraws or gives up something of value. Evaluating success at peacemaking? A far more complex equation. Creating a durable peace can only be judged in the context of history.

How about evaluating the success of an individual's life? Among the universally accepted standards are wealth, power and personal happiness. Yet, arguably, one of the most successful figures of the 20th century, Winston Churchill, came up short on all three of these. Churchill spent nearly his entire life in financial debt, the shank of his career as a scorned back-bencher in Parliament and struggled constantly with depression. What defines Churchill's remarkable life as a success are his accomplishments--a statesman of unique vision, an artist, journalist and author--realized only in the context of time.

Thus, accomplishment, as seen in the long view, may define success.

This brings us to consider the work of Joseph Montville, whose singular accomplishment--defining and spreading the gospel of what he dubbed "Track II diplomacy"--seems to gain a greater luster, a sense of success, with the passage of time.

A former State Department official, Montville served as a career Foreign Service officer in North Africa and the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s before entering the specialized "Intelligence" branch back in Washington, D.C., a move that led him to an interesting observation, a groundbreaking reassessment of diplomatic endeavors based on "depth psychology," which in part addresses the perceptions adversaries have of each other. This has defined his life's work as a peacemaker.

"My goal is to save lives," says the 67-year-old Montville, whose idea of Track II is not some theoretical notion, but a very clear means to an end, to which he has assiduously applied his considerable talent and intellect.

Following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Carter administration began a process of disengagement from Moscow, which only intensified in the years that followed with the Reagan administration's posture of severe confinement and strident diplomacy in dealing with "the evil empire."

"There was a deep sense of frustration because a great many people felt you could not simply cut off communications with an adversary who had so many nuclear weapons and missiles aimed at you," recalls Montville. "It was a time in which the survival instinct went beyond the normal tracks of state diplomacy to respond to this type of complication."

Montville was among those looking for untested ways to engage reluctant adversaries--such as the Soviets and Americans or the Israelis and Arabs--in dialogue. His diplomatic background in Middle Eastern affairs naturally brought him to focus his efforts in that region. In 1979, working with the American Psychiatric Association Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, Montville was instrumental in convening a series of "workshops" in the United States, Switzerland, Austria and Egypt, for which he recruited an international array of academics, retired military and intelligence officers and former cabinet members "who," he says, "could command respect, primarily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

"The impact of these workshops was to establish some real theories," Montville explains. "We worked with three concepts of depth psychology: The psychology of victimhood; the phenomenon of dehumanization--meaning, how one side degrades the humanity of the other side; and the inter-generational transmission of grievances, where having suffered great losses in the past to your tribe or nation becomes part of your identity. The central issue is having suffered traumatic loss," Montville continues. "The sense of justice is deeply harmed and so the [group] psychology comes to be defined by a loss of faith, that the perpetrators are not being called to account, that the outside world doesn't care."

On the basis of these sessions, Montville was invited to an informal "brainstorming" session--the first of several that were held at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California in 1980--to discuss continued engagement with the Soviet Union. Attendees included people from government, the business sector and even the arts. The first session started with everyone introducing themselves which, in Montville's case, was still as a U.S. diplomat serving in the Foreign Service.

As Montville recalls, "I started by saying, 'I suppose what I do could be called Track I diplomacy and what you're doing here could be called Track II diplomacy, a concept to characterize unofficial initiatives aimed at fixing a conflict situation." He went on to describe "what I had learned about the limitations of formal diplomacy, government and politics, about being creative in problem solving ... the need for unofficial, informal, noncommittal initiatives designed to establish dialogue and communication and to mobilize adversaries on both sides on how to solve a problem ... Formal diplomacy, Track I diplomacy, simply doesn't have those toolkits."

What Montville calls "unofficial, people-to-people diplomacy" some others refer to as "citizen diplomacy." The New York Times typically refers to these efforts as "private foreign policy conferences." The State Department uses "conference" or "seminar" but is careful to describe such interactions as "not negotiation." One long-time Track II practitioner simply describes what he does as "practicing foreign policy without a license."

The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, co-chaired by former Carnegie Corporation of New York president David Hamburg, completed a four-year study in December 1997, stating, among its key findings, that, "Track II diplomacy...is increasingly the strategy of choice for dealing with problems beyond the reach of official efforts. Indeed, some governments have found [non-governmental organizations] very useful in brokering political agreements and supplementing government roles."

Initially, however, "It was a controversial idea, that non-official people could get called into delicate, diplomatic work," says Montville. Indeed, the idea was sufficiently controversial that, after the 1980 Esalen gathering, it took two more years before Montville's ideas appeared as an article he co-authored for Foreign Policy magazine, in which he argued for recognition of and the need for Track II diplomacy.

The article explained that Track I efforts, which include "traditional ... policy statements by the President and Secretary of State or official visits and meetings" are frequently hamstrung, limited by formalities and complex posturing. For example, a Track I diplomat, wrote Montville, "cannot risk the chance that adversaries will misperceive reasonableness as a sign of weakness." But, as he went on to say, "a second diplomatic track can therefore make its contribution as a supplement to the understandable shortcomings of official relations, especially in times of tension."

Next page: Simply, Montville says: "The goal is to take the edge off resentments," creating opportunities for Track I.

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