The unattached diplomats have organisational mobility but are attached to the cause they promote, a configuration that fundamentally opposes that of the traditional or organisational diplomat. The paper uses a comparative, multiple case design focusing on descriptive case studies (Yin, 2018) that explore the diplomatic endeavours and social biographies of “citizens of the world” acting at a global or local level, not explicitly attached to or explicitly against an official, state agenda: Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg and Bill Gates. The purpose of this study is to define the communicational profile of unattached diplomats and explore the viability of state-centric concepts such as citizen diplomacy when discussing non-state actors emerging from civil society. European citizen diplomats have made manifold and often surprising contributions to China’s multifaceted development. The final part makes use of the newly developed hexagon of intercultural communication and collaboration competence to reveal how the European citizen diplomats have managed to navigate the sometimes-treacherous political-administrative landscape in mainland China.
The empirical part of the exegesis traces the experiential learning amongst 12 European citizen diplomats who have engaged China in the activity fields of disability psychoanalysis non-governmental organisation twinning human rights climate change mitigation welfare of orphans, abandoned disabled children and young people youth dialogue public participation animal welfare and inclusive performing arts. After revealing that European policy-makers are only reluctantly acknowledging the role of laymen in foreign policy-making vis-à-vis China, it shows that whilst citizen diplomacy may be a new concept in EU–China relations, it is actually not a new practice. It begins by engaging with the global discourse about “new” diplomacy and outlines how society-centric citizen diplomacy differs from state-centric public diplomacy.
This analysis considers the phenomenon of citizen diplomacy in European Union –China relations.
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