even as it promises independence and mobility, adventure and opportunity, escape and safe haven, it is also an essential tool of government surveillance and state power, ostensibly assuring homeland security and regulated traffic across national boundaries
Introduction: “The Most Precious Book I Possess”
To be sure, the passport is an object closely associated with the rise of the nation-state and the evolution of international relations, and has thus been continually implicated in the regulation of citizenship status, global migration, asylum seeking, national security, and related concerns. It is an object that assigns an individual an official identity and advances state efforts to monitor and control the movement of certain peoples and populations. This is the unyielding paradox of the passport: even as it promises independence and mobility, adventure and opportunity, escape and safe haven, it is also an essential tool of government surveillance and state power, ostensibly assuring homeland security and regulated traffic across national boundaries. It is, in other words, an object that occupies a place at the very nexus of the personal and the political.
… most indices also mark a dramatic upturn in “irregular” immigration over the last two decades, to about 260 million border crossings in 2019. Never in the history of our species have so many been so capable or so compelled to cross these manmade lines; never in the history of the nation-state have those lines been more permeable. Not even a global pandemic could slow the pace of global mobility for long.
Significance accrues to the passport largely because it is the key prop in the modern ritual of border crossing. “At the frontier,” Rushdie writes, “liberty is stripped away— we hope temporarily— and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people and things come in, where only the right things and people must go in and out.” Here we must identify ourselves: our documents proclaim our names and nationalities, our birthdates and birthplaces; the border control officer supplements these details with questions about our activities and intentions, our resources and destinations. The officer examines the document we hand over, looks closely at the picture, at the face of the holder, asks a few more questions. The nation-state he represents offers a form of hospitality that Jacques Derrida calls “conditional,” generating interrogations, tensions, dramas related to who we are and where we come from. We are wise, in these circumstances, if we play along with the routine and present ourselves as plainly as possible: no reason to add to the drama with political opinions, smart quips, seditious irony, or anything else that might attract attention. But we are also liable, in these circumstances, to sense our own estrangement from our homes and ourselves: Am I so easily reduced to a set of dates, place names, and biodata? Do I have any ownership over my identity? Am I somehow someone to be feared? Do I have anything to fear? It is telling that the passport inspection ritual makes an appearance in just about every major work of travel literature from the last century— from Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937) to Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977), Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul (2001), and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (2006)— as an unavoidable, and often anxious, episode in any journey across borders. Here, in this interstitial space
Part One: A Prehistory of the Passport as We Know It
But despite the illustrious history associated with Ramesses II, many accounts of his posthumous journey to France focus on a detail that seems utterly incongruous with both his royal station and his mummified state: the long-dead pharaoh reportedly arrived on French soil that early fall day in 1976 with a recently issued Egyptian passport.
This is perhaps even more surprising when we consider that the Amarna letters include a document (catalogued as EA30) that can be identified as the earliest surviving safe conduct pass, a precursor to the modern passport that provided the bearer secure transit through the lands of the issuing sovereign— and sometimes beyond. The letter takes the form of a command from King Tushratta of Mitanni:
A message to all the kings of Canaan, the subjects of my brother (the King of Egypt). Thus (says) the King (of Mitanni): I am sending herewith my messenger Akiya to the King of Egypt, my brother, on an urgent mission (traveling as fast) as a demon. Nobody must detain him. Bring him safely into Egypt! (There) they should take him to an Egyptian border official. And nobody should for any reason lay hand on him.
In a contemporary US passport, analogous language persists more than three millennia later, though it has morphed into a slightly milder entreaty: “The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.”
And in the middle of the fifth century BCE (nearly simultaneous with the events described in the Book of Nehemiah) the polis passed a measure limiting citizen status to freeborn persons whose fathers and mothers were both Athenians. All other inhabitants of the city-state were considered “illegitimate.”
The Greek word symbolon, combining σύν or syn (“together”) and βάλλω or bállō (“I throw, put”), originally derived from a common commercial practice: a contract was confirmed by breaking some durable item in two, so that each party could retain a piece of the whole. If it was necessitated at a later date, either party could confirm their identity by putting their half of the object together with the other: thus, symbolon initially meant something like a “token employed in comparisons to determine authenticity,” and from there evolved into the more general sense of “token,” “credential,” or “watchword,” eventually including “ticket,” “permit,” or “license” as well.
It is possible to reconstruct the use and significance of these ancient passports thanks to the extensive use of documents and thorough record keeping during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE). Over the last century, a series of discoveries in the ruins of ancient watchtowers scattered along the Juyan and Jianshui border defense lines has provided archeologists and historians with more than 30,000 bamboo strips and other wooden documents. These include detailed registers— ancient databases, as it were— of those granted permission to pass through checkpoints, as well as wooden passports that had evidently been presented at checkpoints but subsequently confiscated from or otherwise relinquished by travelers. These were travel documents, then, that presage the other, bleaker side of the passport paradox, for they were intended not so much to protect or propel the vulnerable body of the holder as to track and control its movement across frontiers.
Perhaps most striking, both the zhuan and the registers contained information relevant to the identification of individual travelers, including, as Brennan and Hsing note, their name, title, height, complexion, age, and other biodata.
Capable of verifying stable features of personal and legal identity, they nonetheless provide a glimpse of what was to come: they served to locate travelers within a larger bureaucratic system of registration and control designed to restrict freedom of movement.
He gave them, as emissaries of the Great Khan, four tablets of gold, each a cubit in length and five fingers in width and weighing three or four marks. Two bore the sign of gerfalcon, one of the lion, and one was plain. In these tablets it was written that in reverence to the Everlasting God the name of the Great Khan should be honoured and praised throughout the length of years, and everyone who disobeyed his commands would be put to death and his goods confiscated.
Indeed, members of the royal court who lost favor with the sovereign— for some private misbehavior or some public disobedience— often asked for a license to travel abroad as a relatively graceful means to avoid the wrath of the monarch, through a form of voluntary (or at least self-imposed) exile.
The facility with which such a document could actually be attained is evinced in an anecdote featuring the always resourceful Benjamin Franklin during his days in France as the first United States Minister to the Court of Versailles. As media historian Craig Robertson tells the story in his study of the American passport, Franklin needed some official way to safeguard another representative from the fledgling nation-state, Francis Dana, on a diplomatic errand from France to Holland. So, during the late summer of 1780, the iconic American polymath (who had begun his career as a printshop owner in Philadelphia) simply created a “passport” on his own press in Paris. Written in French, the one-page document contains a rather tentative appeal from the US representatives: that Dana not be hindered on his journey but instead be granted aid and assistance “as we would do in like circumstances for all those recommended to us.”
It was not long until French authorities created the first state-supervised registry of persons to track births, deaths, and marriages across the entire population of the nation-state. And soon they placed all foreigners traveling in France (who had not arrived on an official mission from a friendly power or acquired French citizenship of their own) under special surveillance and subjected them to deportation if their presence was judged “susceptible to disturb the public order and peace.”
It was there, in a rented house on the shores of Lake Geneva, that she first conceived her novel Frankenstein (1818).
With a rather unexpected “commission”: would he procure a passport for two of her friends who were planning to cross from Brighton to Dieppe in a few days’ time? Since, as Shelley acknowledged, the passport office would not issue documents except to the persons themselves, the assignment would require Payne to employ his acting talents to impersonate one of the travelers and to enlist a performer friend to play the other.
In the fall of 1827, after Payne had agreed to her commission, Shelley sent another letter with detailed physical descriptions of the travelers, not just for the passport applications, but for makeup, hair, and costuming: “Mrs Douglas is short, i.e. an atom shorter than I— dark, pretty with large dark eyes & hair curled in the neck . . . Mr Douglas is my height— slim— dark with curly black hair— the passport must be drawn out for Mr & Mrs Sholto Douglas.” Shelley supplied the signatures of “Isabel Douglas” and “Sholto Douglas” to aid Payne and his accomplice in forging the passport applications, which were also to include mention of their traveling companions, “Mrs Carter & her two children— boys one ten the other nine— Mrs Percy Shelley and boy.”
David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, has recently likened the tenuous condition of the fugitive slave to that of the “illegal” migrant in our own time: “Hope and dread marched on all sides in antebellum America, as they do today in a Jordanian refugee camp, overcrowded boats leaving the Libyan coast, a detention center in Germany, in the border patrol queues at Heathrow Airport, or a customs line at JFK.” Even now, the supposedly universal rights of man accrue only to the citizen of the nation-state, with the proper papers to corroborate that status.
Enslaved men and women in the South had long been required, on punishment of brutal violence and even death, to carry a written pass from their owners whenever they left their plantations. Now white southerners, like those they considered chattel, were compelled to apply for travel documents—and many complained that the new system represented a vexing intrusion “upon personal liberty,” as even the officials in charge had to acknowledge. Moreover, the documents carried by white travelers closely resembled those carried by Blacks moving through the Confederate States, often including not just their name and destination, but also their physical description: height, hair color, eye color, complexion, and scars. Thus, as Sternhell drily observes, “the internal passport system brought into sharp relief the uncomfortable fact that the war had cost Southern masters both their own freedom of movement and the freedom to control the movement of their human property.”
Part Two: The Advent of the Passport as We Know It
The period covered by the Joyce family passport saw the Easter Rising of 1916, the formation of a secessionist Irish parliament in 1918, and the War of Independence, which ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the establishment of the Irish Free State. Indeed, by the time the passport finally expired (after four renewals) in the summer of 1923, “Ireland” (and anyone born in Dublin) could no longer be considered “British.”
For instance, compelled to provide an “AFFIDAVIT TO EXPLAIN PROTRACTED FOREIGN RESIDENCE AND TO OVERCOME PRESUMPTION OF EXPATRIATION,”
Part Three: The Passport as We Know It
An early effort to address these concerns in the international community came in the form of the so-called Nansen passport, which was actually a whole series of identification and travel documents issued to stateless persons during the interwar period. During these years, nearly half a million of the passports were issued by the fifty-three governments that had ratified the effort, each of which had its own version of the document, related to others only by the “Nansen stamp” that made them all official. The passports were named for Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian zoologist, oceanographer, explorer, historian, and university professor turned humanitarian and statesman, who proposed the idea of a supranational passport shortly after he assumed his position of High Commissioner for Refugees at the League of Nations in 1921. The adventurous Nansen had conducted a series of harrowing Arctic expeditions in the 1890s, and later participated in several oceanographic voyages in the northern Atlantic, exploring possible trade routes that brought him into close contact with the Russian people of the Siberian interior. For his efforts on behalf of stateless Russians and other refugees across Europe he would receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922. The travel documents named for him offered a lifeline to those who had been cut loose by the new nation-states emerging after the war; the form of intergovernmental cooperation embodied in the passports initiated what many scholars and journalists have identified as the emergence of international refugee law.
All told, Fry and the ARC helped to rescue as many as four thousand people from the Nazi regime; but in the face of global war, abrupt revocations of citizenship, and the many perils of statelessness, the organization could only do so much.
Thus, despite an international outcry and his own repeated requests, Ai remained suspended in a state of bureaucratic perdition: under house arrest at his Beijing studio, FAKE Design; under constant surveillance; and unable to travel to his exhibitions and other engagements abroad.
When the poet insisted that he did not have a diplomatic passport, only a standard one he considered to be his private property, the police official— acknowledging his admiration for Neruda — called the ambassador and refused to confiscate the document. After hanging up the phone, he declared to the poet with great hospitality, “You can stay in France as long as you wish.”
As Talvin Singh, the London-based producer, composer, DJ, and tabla player, later commented: “His philosophy was that either you be part of society or you don’t. And he wasn’t part of it. He created his own. I mean, I actually saw his passport and there was some weird shit on it. It had some different stuff.” For one thing, the document confirmed his birthplace as “Saturn,” but indicated no birthdate.
Only six countries formally recognize the World Passport, although dozens, including South Africa, have accepted them and stamped them with visas on at least one occasion. Shortly after his arrest, Bey conceded that “South Africa might call the World Passport fictional,” but he went on to assert that nation-states themselves are grounded on nothing more than collective agreement: “Really South Africa is fictional.”