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This is a recognized way of designating certain members of a diplomatic mission and of a permanent mission. There is no exact uniformity in its use, but principally it is employed in two ways (with a third usage now seemingly out of fashion):
In some diplomatic services, junior members – usually those ranking beneath third secretary – are called attachés (or assistant attachés) when they serve in diplomatic missions, or at certain diplomatic missions.
In the overwhelming majority of diplomatic and permanent missions there are specialist staff enjoying diplomatic status who are not members of their state\'s diplomatic service. They come from government departments other than the foreign ministry, such as Defence, Finance, Trade, and Agriculture, or may perhaps be temporary members of the foreign ministry who have been hired for a specific overseas assignment. (The US State Department used to class such people as ‘Foreign Service Reserves’.) Some states give at least some of these officials a diplomatic rank (sense 1), usually indicating their expertise in brackets. Thus Mr X (a member of the Department of Trade who has been seconded to the mission) may be designated First Secretary (Trade). But other states give some or all such officials the title of attaché, indicating that they are attached to its mission from a department with a predominantly domestic focus rather than from the foreign ministry. In such circumstances Mr X would be called a Trade Attaché, or an Attaché (Trade). Other types of attaché include Administrative, Agricultural, Coffee and Cocoa Affairs, Commercial, Cultural, Economic, Education, Financial, Labour, Press, Scientific, Sugar Affairs, Tourism, and Welfare Attachés, and even Medical and Meteorological Attachés.
Depending on the extent to which their work is distinguishable from the general representational and reporting work of the diplomatic or permanent mission, some attachés in sense 2 will report directly to their home departments as well as to the foreign ministry. This will always be true of service attachés and the subsets of this genre: Army (or Military), Naval, and Air attachés (and assistant attachés) – who also in some other respects are in a different position from that of most other members of a diplomatic mission. (Accordingly, they attract a separate entry.) Armed service personnel attached to diplomatic missions sent by one Commonwealth state to another are called advisers, not attachés.
The title of honorary attaché used sometimes to be given to certain members of a diplomatic mission. In British practice they were usually well-connected and affluent young men who found attachment to an embassy – preferably at an intriguing place, like Istanbul – an ideal means of widening their knowledge of the world while sampling a possible career. What they actually did depended on their abilities and the attitude of their head of mission; some did valuable diplomatic work; others did not. The custom of appointing such attachés appears to have died out in the middle of the twentieth century. |
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