Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate “Means of Movement”
- 2 “Argus of the Patrie”: The Passport Question in the French Revolution
- 3 Sweeping Out Augeas's Stable: The Nineteenth-Century Trend Toward Freedom of Movement
- 4 Toward the “Crustacean Type of Nation”: The Proliferation of Identification Documents From the Late Nineteenth Century to the First World War
- 5 From National to Postnational? Passports and Constraints on Movement from the Interwar to the Postwar Era
- Conclusion: A Typology of “Papers”
- Notes
- References
- Index
5 - From National to Postnational? Passports and Constraints on Movement from the Interwar to the Postwar Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate “Means of Movement”
- 2 “Argus of the Patrie”: The Passport Question in the French Revolution
- 3 Sweeping Out Augeas's Stable: The Nineteenth-Century Trend Toward Freedom of Movement
- 4 Toward the “Crustacean Type of Nation”: The Proliferation of Identification Documents From the Late Nineteenth Century to the First World War
- 5 From National to Postnational? Passports and Constraints on Movement from the Interwar to the Postwar Era
- Conclusion: A Typology of “Papers”
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The growing importance of national belonging resulted in a profusion of bureaucratic techniques for administering the boundaries of the nation, in both territorial and membership terms, in the period up to and immediately after the First World War. At the same time, the number of states that understood themselves in national terms was increasing as a product of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires: the era witnessed the end of dynastic states in Europe and the elimination of the “easy-going nations” of the past in favor of what Karl Polanyi called the “crustacean type of nation,” which crabbily distinguished between “us” and “them.”
The rapidly improving technological possibilities for movement thus confronted intensified controls on ingress into the territories of European states, although restrictions on departure had increasingly become the province of authoritarian states alone. Egidio Reale, the leading contemporary analyst of the new passport regime, describes its impact with a variant of the Rip Van Winkle story: a man awakes during the interwar period from a slumber of some years to find that he can talk on the telephone to friends in London, Paris, Tokyo, or New York, hear stock market quotations or concerts from around the globe, fly across the oceans – but not traverse earthly borders without stringent bureaucratic formalities in the course of which his nationality would be scrutinized closely.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Invention of the PassportSurveillance, Citizenship and the State, pp. 122 - 157Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999