History shows the English-speaking peoples first asserting in the 17th Century their right to consult, to debate, to counsel, to prophesy and to vote. Slowly thereafter they learned to make policy, both domestic and foreign, in a variety of increasingly innovative, participatory ways.

Many people make policy with little or no attention to what national governments do. The people of Black Mountain, North Carolina, collect money to rebuild an Orthodox church in their sister city, Krasnaya Polyana, Russia. Others defy national policy: Jane Fonda in Hanoi, Viet-Nam war opponents fleeing to Canada or playing games with their draft boards. Still others make time to pay attention to what their national, State and county governments do and to persuade government leaders in turn to pay attention to private ideas and to cooperate with civic and economic groups in actions across foreign frontiers.

In our first meeting four weeks ago we discussed an abstract vision of participatory foreign policy. A far cry from such a vision is anything which our national government has tossed to us as a bone under the Presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton. Yet history reminds us that it was not always so. Foreign policy-making can go beyond George Herbert Walker Bush's Big FIve decision-makers: President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Armed Forces' Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Advisor.

For history displays a former Chief Justice leading a treaty negotiation. History shows a journalist negotiating the end to the Spanish-American War and Senators making treaties at Paris and San Francisco. Private Americans influenced governments of France: George Logan in Paris in 1798 and James T. Shotwell with Foerign Minister Aristide Briand in 1927.

Time was when Kiwanis, the American Association of University Women, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and 39 other private American groups were officially consulted on making the Charter of the United Nations. That making of the United Nations was the marriage of theory and history. It is hard to imagine a more harmonious, democratic way of making national policy.

The UN Charter experiment worked. It was popular, educational, empowering. The people loved it. So why has it never been tried again to the same extent?

Is it the case that Presidents instinctively reach out to Congress and to private individuals and groups which are not bureaucratically or politically beholden to them only when absolutely backed into a corner, when there is no other way to get a treaty past the Senate?

I propose for further discussion among ourselves this evening in this our fourth and concluding session:

--Are we doing what we personally can do and want to do to make a difference in our world?

    --As individuals? By reading, questioning, writing to our Congressmen, inviting candidates for public office into our homes for neighborhood discussion?

    --As joiners and members of groups? By attending and teaching Eldehostels? Praying and making pilgrimages? Funding literacy programs in the Third World/ Supporting, for example, Amnesty International? Saving the Whales?

    --As citizens of town, county, State and nation? Do we make it clear to our leaders how we want our tax money spent?

    --As world citizens? With access to the United Nations through the Presbyterian liaison office in New York? Do we read the international conventions on human rights, on women, on children? Do we work for or against a return of the US Government to UNESCO? What will we think of the United Nations Security Council if it does not end the killings in former Yugoslavia? Do we care about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)?

--How do we make our views known?