De la signification des couleurs...
Passport design : Hue and cry | The Economist
►http://www.economist.com/node/21548936?fsrc=scn/tw/te/mt/hueandcry
Passport design
Hue and cry
The many meanings of a passport’s colour
Mar 3rd 2012 | from the print edition
THE birth of South Sudan owes a lot to America. Perhaps as a sign of gratitude, its national coat of arms (chosen in a public competition last year) looks rather like the great seal. And its new passports, blue and eagle-crested, closely resemble America’s travel document. Those who decry such imitation should study history. Benjamin Franklin based the new American passport, in those days just a single sheet of paper, on the French one.
Just as a passport represents national sovereignty—it is one of the defining categories of a claim to statehood—so harmonising passports is a sign of co-operation. That can be a slow process. It took the nine members of the-then European Community (now the 27-strong European Union) years to settle on the colour of the passport cover that its member states now share (though other features differ: Germany’s document still has stiff card covers, not the floppy ones used by the rest).