The Foreign Service Journal, March 2022

22 MARCH 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL SPEAKING OUT Time to Bring Back Legations Headed by Diplomatic Agents? BY GERALD LOF TUS AND STUART DENYER Gerald Loftus, a retired State Department Foreign Service officer who lives in Brussels, was resident director of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies from 2010 to 2014. He is the author of Lions at the Lega- tion & Other Tales: Two Centuries of American Diplomatic Life in Tangier (Tangier Legation/Foundation Jardin Majorelle, 2018) and several Foreign Service Journal articles. Stuart Denyer served 10 years in the Civil Service before joining the Foreign Service. Assignments in Washington have included the Bureau of Consular Affairs, the Operations Center, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Foreign Service Institute and as a Powell Fellow. He has served overseas as vice consul in Lusaka, public affairs officer in Djibouti and consul in Algiers. He is currently the consul in Ljubljana. R eaders of the amusingly satiric stories of mid-20th-century English writers Evelyn Waugh and Lawrence Durrell would recognize diplomatic missions called legations, and they wouldn’t associ- ate “diplomatic agents” with security. The terms are redolent of top-hatted diplomats in capital cities of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, that era was their swan song. By the 1960s—for the United States, the last American legations in Budapest and Sofia were elevated to embassy status in 1966—“legation” had become an anti- quated term. After President John F. Ken- nedy’s “diplomatic universality” policy resulted in the establishment of dozens of full embassies in newly independent African nations, those American legations in Eastern European communist capitals truly seemed like holdovers from the past. And yet, our question: Is it time to bring back legations? Likewise, “diplo- matic agencies,” which indicated an addi- tional diplomatic as opposed to purely consular function at American consulates and consulates general? Would a legation offer an alternative in future situations— North Korea, Taliban Afghanistan come to mind—where the U.S. would want to establish more than an “interests section” housed within a foreign embassy, but less than full embassy status with an ambas- sador? What would this type of diplo- matic representation mean in practice? There are still hints of the previous ubiquitous nature of legations—for example, “ALUSNA,” or American Lega- tion United States Naval Attaché. Though it was originally used as a cable address, American naval attachés in U.S. embas- sies throughout the world continue to hold this title despite the fact that the last legations closed their doors (or rather, were renamed “embassy”) more than a half-century ago. Many of America’s founders were min- isters of legations: Benjamin Franklin was the very first (to France, succeeded by Thomas Jefferson), and John Adams was the first American minister to the former mother country, Great Britain. Even the Chevy Chase section of Washington, D.C., has a Legation Street. What Is a Legation? What is (or was) a legation? A better start might be to ask what an embassy is, because in its original sense, an “embassy” was a temporary mission. A king would send a noble to represent him on “an embassy” to another monarch, “ambassador extraordinary” connoting a special mission. His “embassy” might last months, and he’d hopefully return with a promise of trade, or a treaty. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that resident ambassadors (“ordinary”) began to appear, but the high cost of their upkeep encouraged some nations to appoint ministers, who headed legations. The diplomatic pecking order in European capitals gave precedence to ambassadors from other monarchies. Just as the United States was slow to provide its diplomats with uniforms commen- surate with those of foreign diplomats (and eliminated them entirely in 1937), it chose not to name its top diplomats “ambassador extraordinary and plenipo- tentiary.” At its outset, diplomats of the American republic were literally alone among representatives of kingdoms, and so America’s default chief of mission was a minister—of a legation. The State Department’s Ralph Bunche Library map collection, especially the series “Diplomatic and Consular Offices” (later “Foreign Service Posts”), shows the evolution between 1888, when U.S. legations were the norm, to 1903, when