Passports: On the Politics and Cultural Impact of Modern Movement Control

Indeed, nothing makes us more sensible of the immense relapse into which the world fell after the First World War than the restrictions on man's freedom of movement and the diminution of his civil rights. Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.

—Stefan Zweig (1943, 409-10)

Penning his desperate recollections of Vienna and Central Europe in the lead-up to the First World War, Die Welt von Gestern (1942), Austrian writer and anti-Nazi refugee Stefan Zweig singles out the passport as the most visible sign of Europe's moral and cultural decline. For Zweig, writing in Brazilian exile, the rise of the modern passport system during and in the immediate aftermath of the war is in the first instance an attack on individual freedom: ending more than half a century of almost unrestricted freedom of mobility, the modern passport system forces travelers to contend with the unwieldy and indiscreet bureaucracies of movement control when crossing international borders that previously had only symbolic significance. More generally, Zweig associates the passport with a fundamental reconfiguration of the relationship between states, territories, and citizens, involving a loss of personal freedom, but also, just as importantly, sowing discord between nationalities and effectively undermining what Zweig regards, no doubt too nostalgically, as the happy cosmopolitanism of the Belle Époque. It is only a seeming paradox that Zweig's memoir also registers the acute trauma felt by the Jewish author when being stripped of his passport after Hitler's 1938 annexation of Austria: in an era of comprehensive movement control, the passport signifies a violation of the individual's rights of mobility, yet it is also emotionally invested as documentary proof of personal history, identity and connectedness to a place and a community.

While Zweig's striking reflections on the passport are skewed by nostalgia and a somewhat naïve political idealism, his discussion of the passport as a herald of an epochal shift resonates with a similar shift towards increased movement and border control in today's world. It is true that the passport system, against original intentions, was never abolished after the First World War, becoming instead an indispensable feature of international travel. At least in the West, however, the second half of the twentieth century was characterized by a gradual relaxation of international border control, occasioned above all by mass tourism and international trade and later codified in bi- and multilateral passport and visa waiver agreements. As the culmination of this process, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War seemed to usher in an era in which the nation-state and its borders were marked for dissolution and replacement by new connectivities on a global scale. Variously theorized under the headings of Postnationalism, Neoliberalism and Globalization, this promise of a border-less world was epitomized by the 1992 Treaty on European Union and the associated doctrine of free movement of goods, workers, services and capital within the EU. It should be stressed that freedom of movement was never more than an ideal, which was partly belied, not only by the inequitable distribution of this freedom across the world, but also by the fact that freedoms of the European Union were bought at the price of strengthening the Union's external borders, that is, by transplanting the border politics of the nationstate...