This paper examines the 1933 legislation that prevented Egyptian diplomats from marrying foreign, especially European, women. While this law emerged during a period of anticolonial nationalist struggle against British colonial rule, it continues to be implemented in contemporary Egypt. Most recently, it has been applied to presidential candidates in post-Mubarak Egypt. This paper historicizes the law in the broader public debates about bachelorhood and mixed marriage that dominated the pages of the Egyptian press in the 1920s and 1930s. As has been argued elsewhere, mixed marriage in semi-colonial Egypt was a contested site of national identity formation that attracted the growing attention of intellectuals and laypeople (Kholoussy 2003). It served as an arena where notions of colonial modernity were produced and reproduced as a condition for the enlightenment and progress of the nascent Egyptian nation and its subjects, most notably its women. An analysis of these debates revealed that mixed marriage was often portrayed as an impediment—and sometimes as a facilitator—to Egypt’s path of modernity where the Egyptian colony could reform and prove to be ‘modern’ and, thus, worthy of political independence. In contrast, this paper focuses on the state’s attention to mixed marriage between Egyptian men and European women through its diplomatic legislation that affected men only. It demonstrates how the 1933 law served as a platform to define the rights and duties of upper-class Egyptian national men who represented the semi-independent nation internationally in its newly created foreign service. It was a vehicle for the state to shape the normative national subject vis-à-vis its intervention into the private lives of public officials. By exploring the various ways in which Egyptian and British legislators, journalists, and social commentators conceptualized mixed marriage and national service, this paper sheds light on upper-class masculinity in early twentieth-century Egypt and its intersections with new formations of gender, governmentality, and national identity. Furthermore, it attempts to understand why the regime that is currently ruling Egypt chose to apply a 1933 law that evolved out of the particular circumstances of the British occupation to presidential candidates in post-Mubarak Egypt.