The blockade has been a long-standing economic and military tactic to isolate enemy nations and force them to endure siege conditions. This chapter examines how British or pro-British cultural actors managed to disseminate propagandized cultural texts and information via secret channels of communication, smuggling in the cultural capital of the enemy nation(s). The first example is the Bibliothèque britannique, the Geneva-based journal which commissioned and published many translations of British scientific and literary works during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; second, the translation activity during 1914–18 with poetry as case study; third, the role played by the pro-European group, the Federal Union and finally the internationalism and human rights discourse of writing advocated by PEN in London during the Second World War. The chapter concludes with a Cold War section examining soft diplomacy in the use of literature and art to disseminate liberal thinking behind the Iron Curtain. How far do these blockade moments articulate federal and internationalist aims and projects while risking isolationist rhetoric in the construction of liberal ideals in wartime?

The period 1929 to 1939 is a neglected period in the study of Irish-American and American-Irish diplomacy. It was bookmarked by two wars and characterised by unfettered US capitalism which extended to the international stage and it ended with a global war arising from the unchecked rise of fascism spreading from Germany. There is much to be learned about bilateral diplomatic relations during this period of peace and gestating crises including changes of government from W.T. Cosgrave to Éamon de Valera and Herbert Hoover to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and 1933 respectively. It argues that not only did leadership matter in the operation of diplomacy but also the role and character of the diplomat vital and that his family should be examined to decipher how 'soft diplomacy' operated at this time.