Personal Politics in the Postwar World

Western Diplomacy Behind the Scenes

Susanna Erlandsson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350289178
• eBook ISBN: 9781350150768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

Unravelling the mechanisms of daily diplomacy in the mid-20th century, this book follows one Dutch diplomatic couple, the van Kleffens, on their postings from the 1930s to the 1950s to offer a new perspective on how non-officials and personal politics shaped the postwar world. Combining private and public source materials, Erlandsson foregrounds the political culture of diplomacy and highlights events and people which have been left off the official record. The book integrates the detailed study of behind-the-scenes diplomatic practice into the larger narrative of traditional diplomatic history, connecting social practices with political outcomes. Exploring how women's tea drinking was used to achieve post-war foreign policy and how Rosa, a Guatemalan cook, contributed to the international standing of the Netherlands, it offers a more inclusive history by recognising the diplomatic work done by actors who were not diplomats. In doing so it demonstrates the ways in which diplomacy was class-bound, gendered and racialized, and proves that historicizing gender and cultural norms is crucial to understanding political and international history.

Part One

The Diplomatic Couple

And now I am going to the office – the office of a profession wherein, more than in almost any other one, the wife is at least as directly concerned and as important as the husband. How well you would do, with your beautiful clear head, as a diplomat’s wife.

Letter from Eelco van Kleffens to Margaret Horstmann, 23 March 1934

[Mr Anderson] doit être considéré comme un “ètranger de distinction” et placé immédiatement après les chefs de mission étrangers (ambassadeurs, ministres, chargés d’affaires en pied) et alors aussi après les danois qui ont préséance des chefs de mission.¹

August Esmarch on the rank of the American ambassador’s husband, 1949

§ 441. Wives of diplomatists enjoy the same privileges, honours, precedence and title as their husbands. The wife of an envoy consequently is entitled to:

1.A higher degree of protection than what is assured to her in virtue of her birth and sex.

2.The same personal exemptions as belong to her husband.

Satow’s Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 4th edn, edited by Sir Nevile Bland, 1957

From the nineteenth century and until very recently, ‘diplomatic couple’ always stood for a male diplomat with a female spouse, even after an occasional female diplomat with a male spouse had appeared. The quotations above illustrate how, throughout the period studied, the idea of the diplomatic couple as a husband-and-wife unit working together permeated diplomats’ personal relationships as well as their public guidelines. The first is from a love letter that Eelco van Kleffens wrote to Margaret Horstmann shortly after she had rejected his marriage proposal. Less than six months but over 80 letters later, she changed her mind and agreed to marry him. The prospect of their diplomatic partnership and the important work that would await her as a diplomat’s wife was a recurring theme in her future husband’s ultimately successful attempts to win her heart.²The second quotation shows that a similar position did not await the husband of a married female diplomat (still a rare phenomenon). In 1949, the political appointment of Eugenie Anderson as United States ambassador to Denmark caused the Doyen of the Diplomatic Corps in Copenhagen, Norwegian ambassador August Esmarch, to specify to his colleagues that Mr Anderson did not hold the same rank as his wife. If the United States gave him a title of his own, they should treat him according to that rank and otherwise merely consider him a ‘foreigner of distinction’.³ Among other things, this meant that Mr Anderson was not seated anywhere near the ambassador at dinners and could not perform the duties that a female spouse performed, regardless of how supportive he was of his wife.⁴As the third quotation shows, this treatment deviated from that of female spouses of diplomats, who enjoyed the privileges, honours, precedence and title of their husbands. British diplomat Ernest Satow first wrote the internationally influential A Guide to Diplomatic Practice in 1917, but the text cited is from the fourth revised edition of 1957 updated by the contemporary British diplomat Nevile Bland to ‘ensure that all this information (appertaining to the present day) is accurate’.⁵ Formally, the British Diplomatic Service had been admitting women to the profession since 1946, but none of the updated information accounted for the possibility of female diplomats and certainly not for diplomatic husbands – until 1973, the United Kingdom only allowed female diplomats who were unmarried.⁶

The chapters of this part explore how the central position of the diplomatic couple as invariably a male diplomat with a female spouse affected everyday diplomatic practices as well as personal lives in the mid-twentieth century with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences – for the men and women who conformed to expectations as well as for those who did not fit that template. Since the late 1960s, a few scholars – first anthropologists, then political scientists, then historians – have pointed to the important roles played by diplomats’ wives.⁷ Nevertheless, most studies of twentieth-century diplomacy, including those centring on diplomatic practices and networks, overlook the heterosexual couple as a fundamental diplomatic organizational unit with implications for how the whole system functioned.⁸ Even studies of gender and diplomacy in the mid-twentieth century tend to focus more on mechanisms of exclusion than on the cooperation between husbands and wives in daily diplomacy. The focus on the struggles of women and their conflicts with men is understandable: this was, after all, a time in which formal changes to the admission system had led to the appearance of female diplomats who encountered a lot of overtly sexist opposition, whether in the shape of outright hostility or condescending benevolence. Nevertheless, diplomacy before the female diplomat was not an all-male world, but a world in which men and women worked together as a team far more often than as separate (let alone opposing) entities. Before women could become diplomats in their own right, men and women certainly did not have equal or the same tasks, but both were indispensable to diplomatic interaction. To understand the difficulties of female diplomats as well as how daily diplomatic work functioned in practice, a few separate studies of wives is not enough. It requires attention to the functions of masculinities and femininities in everyday diplomatic practices and to how men and women, as well as their employers, saw their separate spheres as part of a common endeavour.

The first chapter exposes mid-twentieth-century gendered assumptions about diplomats and their spouses based on an analysis of diplomatic guidebooks and Foreign Office rules and regulations as well as debates on changing those rules to allow the admission of female diplomats. To give the reader an idea of the persistence of the pattern, references to a guidebook from the 1970s and some findings from recent research on present-day diplomats are included. With the lasting repercussions in mind, Chapter 2 then moves back in time and zooms in on the norm of the diplomatic couple in the shape it had before foreign offices started allowing female and (openly) homosexual diplomats. The love story of Eelco and Margaret van Kleffens provides an empirical lens through which to discuss the political and professional implications of the personal and intimate matter of marriage (and vice versa: the personal and intimate implications of aspiring a diplomatic career) in the 1930s. Chapter 3 proceeds to scrutinize the connection between marital trust and diplomatic secrecy in the 1940s and 1950s, drawing both on ego-documents that reveal what information diplomatic husbands actually shared with their wives and on British Foreign Office deliberations regarding wives as a security risk. Chapter 4 treats the question of how the diplomatic couple’s division of tasks according to beliefs about male and female characteristics had consequences for unmarried diplomats, homosexuals and women in power too, noting how Margaret van Kleffens in her diaries reconciled the dissonances between personal experience and norm. Part I ends with a few concluding remarks positing the mid-twentieth century diplomatic couple as a cornerstone of everyday diplomatic work.

1 The persistent notion of the incorporated wife⁹

As this part’s introductory quotations show, both individual diplomats and normative texts in the mid-twentieth century proceeded from the general assumption that (1) diplomats were men, (2) diplomats’ spouses were women and (3) the position of the husband determined both his and her duties and privileges while the reverse did not apply. The first notion was very slow to change, the second slower yet, but the third has probably been the most persistent. In the face of a slowly growing presence of female diplomats in the second half of the twentieth century, the gendered perception of diplomatic spouses did not change pari passu with the perception of the diplomat. The Netherlands, the country that Eelco and Margaret van Kleffens served and represented, formally allowed female diplomats from 1947.¹⁰ Like other female civil servants, they had to be single: until challenged in parliament in 1955, leading to the decision to remove the stipulation on 1 January 1958, the honourable discharge of female state employees when they got married was automatic.¹¹ From the state’s perspective, this made female diplomats bad business as it meant training diplomats who might soon have to leave their posts. Diplomacy was, in practice, a job best done by a couple and the bargain had been two for the price of one: most male diplomats married (and were encouraged to marry), their wives then became unpaid servants of diplomacy.

Though not phrased in terms of economic cost, mid-twentieth century objections to admitting women to the Service were clearly related to the roles played by diplomats’ wives. Although, from 1947, a diplomat in theory could be either male or female, in that same year the Dutch Foreign Service Directorate introduced new evaluation forms that unequivocally presumed a male official. Modelled on existing British forms for the assessment of officials of the Foreign Service, the forms included questions evaluating the performance of the official’s wife.¹² In practice, the powerful Head of Examinations and Committees, BWN Servatius, thwarted Dutch women’s efforts to enter the Service for years to come, functioning as a gatekeeper. He consistently and determinedly discouraged female applicants, who were required to talk to him before they could take the exam. When questioned in 1957 by a member of parliament about the Service’s systematic exclusion of women, Servatius defended his negative advice as being in their own interest. He was simply trying to prevent them from entering a profession that would be too taxing for them. The particular hardships for women that he mentioned included the harsh climate in some parts of the world (apparently more taxing for female diplomats than for wives who accompanied their husbands) as well as the misogynistic culture of countries, not as progressive as the Netherlands, which would make it difficult for female diplomats to function in all but a few likeminded countries. Howe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The personal politics of daily diplomacy
• Part One The Diplomatic Couple
• Part Two The Diplomatic Home
• Part Three Dinner Diplomacy
• Part Four Diplomatic Aptitude
• Conclusion Behind the scenes of building the postwar world
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright