What Is a Passport? A Document Invented Twice
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For most of the nineteenth century a person could cross most European borders without any document at all, and the passport was a courtesy letter rather than a requirement. The modern system, in which a state issues a standardised book without which you cannot travel and which asserts who you are, is barely a century old and was introduced as a temporary wartime measure.
The early form
The idea of a document requesting safe passage is ancient, with a reference in the biblical book of Nehemiah to letters to governors granting passage, and equivalents appear across medieval and early modern Europe and in the Islamic world and China. What these documents were is important: a letter from a ruler or official asking others to let the bearer pass and to assist them, which is a request rather than an identity credential, and which protected a traveller rather than restricting them. The English term dates from the sixteenth century, and the word is usually derived from passing through a port or a gate. Internal passes were frequently more significant than international ones, since controlling movement within a territory mattered to states concerned with vagrancy, serfdom and labour supply, which is why internal passport systems have existed in imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, apartheid South Africa and elsewhere and have generally been instruments of control over a population rather than of border security.
The nineteenth-century gap
Passport requirements were substantially relaxed across Europe during the nineteenth century, in step with railways, liberal trade policy and the sheer impracticality of documenting mass movement. France abolished its requirements in the 1860s, and by the decades before 1914 a traveller could cross most of the continent unchallenged, a state of affairs Stefan Zweig described afterwards with real astonishment, recalling that he went to India and America without owning or ever having seen a passport. The First World War ended it immediately and everywhere, as states imposed controls for security reasons, to prevent skilled workers leaving, and to manage enemy aliens. The measures were framed as temporary and were not withdrawn. The League of Nations convened conferences in the 1920s that produced the first international standards for a booklet format, which is why passports around the world resemble each other and why the design of the modern document dates from that moment rather than from any deeper tradition.
What is in one now
A modern passport is a security document as much as a travel one, and its contents follow international specifications:
- •A machine readable zone, two lines of characters in a fixed format at the foot of the data page, which encodes name, nationality, number, date of birth and expiry with check digits
- •A biometric chip in most countries, containing a digital facial image and in some cases fingerprints, signed cryptographically so it cannot be altered without detection
- •Physical security features including watermarks, holograms, microprinting, ultraviolet inks, laser-engraved personalisation and polycarbonate data pages that cannot be separated without destruction
- •A standardised size and layout set by the international civil aviation body, which is what makes automated border gates possible worldwide
- •A statement from the issuing state requesting passage for the bearer, which is the surviving trace of the original letter of safe conduct
- •Colour conventions that have no formal rules, though states cluster around red, blue, green and black for regional, political and practical reasons
What it does and does not confer
A passport asserts nationality and identity; it does not by itself grant the right to enter anywhere. Entry is granted by the receiving state, through a visa, a visa waiver arrangement or a free movement agreement, which is why passport power rankings measure how many destinations a holder can reach without arranging a visa in advance and why those rankings vary enormously between countries. That variation is the substance of what the document means in practice: the same booklet grants a Japanese or Singaporean holder easy access to most of the world and grants a holder from several other countries access to very few places without a lengthy application. Statelessness is the condition of having no nationality at all, which leaves millions of people without any state obliged to document them, and the Nansen passport, issued by the League of Nations from 1922 to refugees who had lost their nationality, was the first serious attempt to solve it. The modern equivalents are travel documents issued to recognised refugees and stateless persons under later conventions.
The takeaway
A passport began as a letter requesting safe passage, protecting a traveller rather than restricting them, and Europe largely abandoned passport requirements during the nineteenth century, so that before 1914 people crossed most borders without documents. The First World War reimposed controls as a temporary measure that was never lifted, and League of Nations conferences in the 1920s produced the standard booklet. It asserts identity and nationality without granting entry anywhere, which is decided by the receiving state.