The Irish Free State and Public Diplomacy: The First Official Visit of William T. Cosgrave to the United States

Abstract

The contemporary use of the term is generally attributed to the retired diplomat Edmond A. Gullion, when, as dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy he opened the Edward R. Murrow Center in 1965. By public diplomacy Dean Gullion meant the attempts by a state to carry out a foreign policy objective by reaching directly to the public, rather than the traditional ap- proach of diplomats of a government working exclusively with their diplomatic counterparts. 1 In particular, the circumstances of the Cold War led to the great powers attempting to influence both foreign populations and their own com - munities in favor of their policy However, the practice of attempting to win favorable support both at home and abroad was by no means unique to the Cold War era. Indeed, it might be said that the publication in 1861 of The Pa- pers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States was an effort to win both international and domestic public support for the Union's diplomatic policies in the American Civil War. The British, too, undertook a form of public diplomacy in 1934 with the establishment of offices and programs of the British Council (originally called the British Council for Relations with Other Countries) in numerous countries, through which it hoped to show that British culture and interests would be shown in a sympathetic light. The Voice of America, created during the World War II, and the United States Information Agency, founded in 1953, performed similar functions. It should not be surprising, therefore, to find the fledgling Irish Free State also engaged in a form of public diplomacy. The Dail Eireann government from 1. One definition of public diplomacy applicable to William T. Cosgrave's objectives for his visit to the United States in 1928 reads as follows: Public diplomacy was defined as government action to generate support, through information and persuasion, for national security objectives. En- cyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, ed. Alexander DeConde, Richard Dean Burns, and Frederik Logevall (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002), vol. 3, p. 498.