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What American Post Presences do
My wife, Julia, and I arrived in Lyon in July 2007, and we look very much forward to meeting those of you we do not know yet.
We opened the Consulate in 1999, after several years of not having an American representative in Lyon. After the breakup of the former Soviet Union, the Department of State established embassies in all the ex-Soviet republics. Since the Department received no new funds to do this, however, it closed consulates throughout Western Europe. This decision affected U.S. Consulates in Lyon and Bordeaux. In the late nineties, Ambassador Felix Rohatyn believed that the U.S. could not fully successfully engage the French people from Paris and proposed a new diplomatic model, “the American Presence Post” or APP. He proposed sending one of the Embassy’s officers out to Lyon and establishing a scaled down Consulate, which would obtain its budget from the Embassy’s existing resources. The Ambassador had to overcome substantial opposition in Washington to this new idea, but, in the end, he prevailed. APP Lyon’s early successes resulted in the establishment of similar APPs in Bordeaux, Rennes, and Toulouse, adding to the consulates general that already existed in Marseille and Strasbourg.
The APP Lyon has a mandate to enhance cultural and economic ties between the U.S. and the Rhone Alps, Bordeaux, and Auvergne Regions. We also provide consular services to American citizens in these regions to save you from traveling to Paris. The APP in Lyon, in fact, provides as many consular services than the other APPs in France combined. We also try to get to know the American businesses in the region, and certainly will help with any difficulties you have with local administration. We also have a team of specialists in the Foreign Commercial Office in the Embassy in Paris that can help find distributors and potential buyers for your products. The Economic Section takes care of trade issues and intellectual property issues. If we cannot solve a problem, we can help put you in touch with those who can.
The upshot is that the APP model has been so successful that the Department of State has decided to establish APPs throughout the world, mostly in developing countries. APPs exist in China, Korea, Malaysia, and some African countries.
This article was written by Harry Sullivan, US Consul in Rhône-Alps, Auvergne and Burgundy.
http://france.usembassy.gov/lyon.html
Harry Sullivan, US Consul and Victor Vitelli, Cultural and Commercial Affairs Specialist at the APP in Lyon