CAT 2024 Slot 1 VARC: A History of the Passport

It is easy to assume that the passport, in something like its current form — a booklet identifying a citizen and inviting other states to let them pass unmolested — has always accompanied the idea of the nation-state. The truth is closer to the opposite. For most of the nineteenth century, travel across the borders of Europe required no such document at all. A British subject could board a train in Calais and disembark in Vienna having shown no more than a ticket. Passports existed, but chiefly as letters of introduction and safe conduct issued to the wealthy or the diplomatically connected; ordinary movement across frontiers was, for decades, largely unpoliced by paper.

What changed this was not, at first, a desire to control migration in the sense we now understand it, but war. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 forced belligerent states to distinguish combatants and spies from civilians moving through contested territory, and passport requirements, introduced across Europe as an emergency wartime measure, proved administratively convenient enough that almost no government fully repealed them once the war ended. A League of Nations conference in 1920 attempted to standardise the resulting patchwork of national documents, recommending a booklet format, a photograph and a set number of pages, much of which persists in the modern passport's design. What had been conceived as a temporary security expedient hardened, within a single generation, into a permanent feature of international life.

The interwar period also introduced a distinction that would prove consequential: between the passport as proof of identity and the passport as proof of the right to return. Stateless persons — a category that swelled enormously after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires — could not obtain a passport from any government willing to vouch for them, leaving millions unable to cross a border legally even where no political objection to their presence existed. The Nansen passport, an internationally recognised travel document created in 1922 for refugees under the auspices of the League of Nations, was the first serious attempt to decouple travel documentation from national citizenship, and it foreshadows debates that persist today about documents for the stateless and the displaced.

The post-1945 order globalised what Europe had improvised. Newly independent states emerging from decolonisation adopted the passport model largely intact, in part because international air travel, expanding rapidly from the 1950s onward, made some globally legible form of identity documentation a practical necessity for any government wishing to be treated as a full member of the community of states. By the late twentieth century, the passport had become not merely a travel document but a marker of formal statehood itself; a government's ability to issue passports its citizens can use, and to have its passports recognised by others, functions as a quiet but real form of diplomatic acknowledgment.

The biometric passport, introduced from the early 2000s largely as a security response to a specific act of mass violence in the United States, repeats the historical pattern with striking fidelity: a document born of an acute security crisis, initially framed as exceptional and temporary, has since become the unremarkable global default, incorporated into international standards bodies and now expected of virtually every state's citizens. Each layer of the passport's history — wartime emergency, refugee crisis, decolonisation, terrorism — has been absorbed permanently into its design, so that the object now carried in a hundred and ninety-odd countries' pockets is less a single deliberate invention than a sediment of a century's separate emergencies, each of which was supposed to be temporary.