“Queue at passport control! So I wait patiently, but at the same time humiliated and bitter […] I feel vexed, I am no longer a free and autonomous person, but a subject, and when I see this, the feeling of rebellion immediately arises”. Border controls drove Stefan Zweig out of his mind in 1935 (Diarios, Acantilado, 2022). And not only then: it is a theme that returns with insistence in his writings.
Zweig considered that borders, passports and exacerbated nationalisms were among the most dire legacies left by the First World War. And they were, above all, for the cosmopolitan and cultured universe to which he belonged, masterfully described by Orlando Figes in The Europeans (Taurus, 2020).
He was used to moving around the world without major obstacles or inconveniences. The First World War marked the end of those times: henceforth, passports, in addition to identifying the individual inside and outside his country, could open or close borders, make life easier or more difficult for him by the mere fact of being born, himself or their ancestors, in a certain national territory.
The concern of governments to control the movements of the population came from afar. Preventing a community member from leaving or preventing someone unwanted from coming to settle is probably as old as the world. Even in the golden age that Zweig claimed: although a formal document was not always used then, those who did not belong to the elite were subject to controls and restrictions, especially in the decades before the Great War, when the needs, if not the misery, pushed massive migration to America or Oceania.
There are plenty of documents that prove that safe conduct and passports were not something new. Whether they were effective was another thing: the problems were, basically, having the administrative infrastructures capable of exercising that control and being able to accurately identify individuals.
It was easy to know who was who in a community where everyone knew each other, but in cities or more populated areas it was another matter. Usually, the document that proved the existence of a person was the baptismal certificate, and the identity was, ultimately, the name and affiliation that the person himself gave to the authorities. Sometimes documents were established that included a description of the individual (tall or short, with a scar…), and when deemed necessary, witnesses were called to ensure that it was the correct person. But, even so, impostures were frequent, it was easy to impersonate someone else.
The sociologist John Torpey mentions in The Invention of the Passport (Cambridge U. P., 2000) that, as Louis XIV needed recruits for his armies and they could flee, he imposed the obligation to present a passport in order to leave his domains. The question is that it was possible to control the entrance and exit of the cities, which used to be walled, but how to monitor the rest of the territory? The land borders were unreachable and beyond the control of the authorities.
Decades later, at the time of the French Revolution, when it was discovered that Louis XVI and his family had escaped with false passports, the foreign minister was held accountable. His argument was obvious: it was impossible for him to verify the name of each of the people who requested it. No charges were retained against him.
Beyond this case, the passports and their eventual scope in terms of restriction and freedom of movement were topics of intense debate in the revolutionary assemblies. The armies required increasing quotas of soldiers and, despite the bureaucratic structure put in place, the difficulties in preventing the escape of candidates were persistent.
Torpey also points out that the word “foreigner” had a different meaning from the one we attribute to it today. Until the early 19th century, when documents mentioned a “foreigner” they could refer to someone who came from elsewhere, perhaps a foreigner, but not necessarily someone with another nationality, and this precisely because national identities did not yet represent a reality. As concrete as today.
According to historian Benedict Anderson, it was only later, in the 1820s, that “official nationalism” took hold, that is, the voluntary fusion of the dynastic empire with the idea of ??nationality for its inhabitants. This process broadly coincided with the entrenchment of modern nation states.
In this sense, it is usually considered that, although this process was already taking place before, the French Revolution and the events that it unleashed led the states to equip themselves with an army and an efficient bureaucratic structure. This helped them to consolidate, because, given the circumstances, they had to implement the technical means so that the group could defend itself and manage itself efficiently.
For that, of course, money was needed, and consequently, people needed to pay their taxes and carry out their military service: it became essential to know both the territory and the inhabitants well, to know who they were, where they lived, what tax they could be required… And so the censuses and maps became more precise and detailed throughout the 19th century.
Those same censuses and maps also had an indirect influence on the collective unconscious: they implicitly led to the reinforcement of the feeling of belonging to a national community in the inhabitants of those spaces. Towards the end of that century, national identities were already a tangible fact, and they came out more than reinforced from the trenches of the First World War.
On the other hand, before the war broke out, laissez-faire principles prevailed, and states tended to interfere little in the country’s affairs. The war context required a radical change in attitude on the part of the authorities, they had to take the reins and regulate in different areas, for example, giving priority to some sectors of activity or rationing resources. Freedom of movement, which was conceived as a fundamental right that favored trade and the international economy, was another aspect in which States began to intervene more seriously, controlling who came and went.
Meanwhile, administrative surveillance capabilities had been honed by identification techniques developed toward the end of the 19th century by Alphonse Bertillon, the forerunner of today’s scientific police. These recording techniques, designed to prevent crime, soon began to spread to the entire population.
At the same time, bureaucratic efforts to regulate circulation became more intense, and states began to distinguish more strictly between nationals and others. And, although these identity and movement controls began to be applied both to foreigners and to the citizens themselves, they seemed something natural and unquestionable when it came to “protecting” territory and population. Passports became universal, and were one of the instruments used by administrations both to determine who could (or could not) have the rights and benefits inherent to their status as citizens and to regulate mass migration and the situation of people displaced by the conflict.
Among the legacies left by the war are the birth of some democracies (fragile, by the way, such as the Weimar Republic or the countries created after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires), a significant number of displaced people, the protectionist position assumed by the nations and, given the greater citizen participation in politics, a greater weight of public opinion in the decisions of the States, in who would be welcome and who would not.
As this idea of ??nationalist self-defense against foreigners took hold, bureaucratization grew, identification capacity improved, and entry control to countries intensified, in an effort to protect the border against unwanted entries, while the Exit restrictions were increasingly a feature of authoritarian states.
Today, despite the sophisticated technology embedded in biometric passports, countries are far from achieving complete control over international population movements, and borders remain more porous than some would like, but in any case, passports are the main control tool.
There are many factors that converge and materialize in this small notebook that has also become the identification system on an international scale: it reflects the understanding between nations, and, as well as supposedly guarantees the help and protection of the country of origin in foreign territory. , it can also, in the worst case, make its bearer vulnerable or persona non grata.
The world without borders or nationalisms enjoyed by that cosmopolitan and wealthy sector that Zweig longed for was definitively forgotten and without any possibility of going back.
