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Consuls can also be Honorary Consuls General
At a recent Consular Summit in Florida, I lost track of how many times distinguished speakers and panel moderators made reference to “consuls general and honorary consuls” as if the two stand in contrast to each other. This is not the case! Going back to basics, let’s…
Foreign Consuls, expanded eBook, Bestseller!
Consuls and UN, Locally
Not long ago, I was in a discussion about consuls and the United Nations. Recapping UN history: it was founded on October 24, 1945 in San Francisco with 51 member nations. Today there are 193, and the head quarters are in New York City (you may tour certain parts of…
Consular Corps History
For years, we here in Miami believed the consular corps was somehow “founded” in the 1950s (quotation marks are appropriate because, as readers of my book know, a corps is sui generis – by itself – unique in that it doesn’t require a special act to come into…
Larry David on Consul
You can imagine how my ears perked up when the fictional character of a consul appeared Season 9, episode 2, of Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO). How was Larry David going to deal with this person? Was he going to (incorrectly) say “c-o-u-nsel” when speaking…
Consul Suspended in US
Recently many of us read or heard about the suspension from duty of the honorary consul of a European nation (for the purposes of this blog it doesn’t matter what country she represented in a small part of the U.S.), for her political activity on social media. The…
Consul Emeritus Title
In my previous posts (and more extensively in chapter The Tiff over Titles in my book) I have written about the many confusing titles that consular officials may claim. All this makes for interesting (and fun!) social and official situations to observe. Most recently,…
University of Miami 1964 internationalization
Do consuls have an impact on the strategic internationalization goals of today’s universities? I started thinking about that when I ran across a newspaper tidbit from 1964 about how the then-mayor of Coral Gables actively sought to attract consuls to his city. At that…
Consular corp, corps, corpse
You know the old saying that “if I had a penny for every time I’ve heard [fill-in-the-blank], I’d be rich.” Well, some day it’s a dead body – a corpse – that’s going to make me very, very rich. Lest you suspect some sinister motives here let me rush to…
Consul titles. Does anyone care?
When I gathered all my notes for my consular reference book a couple of my beta-readers commented, “Why so much emphasis on titles?” This led me to repeat the commonly-stated explanation of how people in distinguished positions — think judges, politicians —…