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.