Ici des citations...
The paper first traces the history of passport as part of a growing global mobility regime, with the latest twist of added biometrical technologies to ensure positive identification. This history is shown to be a development towards the universalization of passport as a document, and passport checking as a border control practice during the 20th century. Rather than diminishing the significance of proven identity, loosening border control within the Schengen area and similar zones of free movement has underscored the role of boundaries and border control in regulating mobility to and from these territories. (Häkli, 2015)
The number of international border crossings related to corporeal travel has grown for decades. While no uniform statistical information exists, estimates of the contemporary volume exceed two billion annually (Koslowski 2011). Most of the growth in global mobility has come from business and leisure travel, international migration and movement for refugee and asylum. As one indicator of this growth, air travel has expanded year by year with short periods of economic recession and fear of terrorism as the main exceptions in the trend. According to the statistics provided by International Air Transport Association (IATA), the total number of domestic and international airline passengers has grown from 1.81 billion in 2003 to 2.97 billion in 2012, and for 2013 the number is estimated to exceed 3 billion (IATA 2013). Political reactions to the growth of global mobility reflect the nature of travelling at hand. Most countries are very interested in maintaining high levels of business and leisure travel as these are directly connected to economic growth and tourism industry (Edgell et al. 2008). However, at the same time many countries are developing selective migration policies that favor highly educated and skilled workforce while preventing the entrance of irregular migrants. Refugees and asylum seekers represent yet another form of global mobility that demands policy measures attuned to the specific circumstances of forced displacement (Leitner 1997; Van Houtum & Pijpers 2007). (Häkli, 2015)
Treaties such as the Central America Four Agreement or the Schengen Agreement have made travelling between the signatory countries very easy, but for those seeking to enter these zones of free mobility the border checks are as strict as ever (Walters 2002). As scholars studying contemporary patterns of mobility have aptly pointed out, these routines do not treat passengers equally (e.g. Lyon 2002; Graham & Wood 2003; Paasi 2013). In particular the heightened attention to air travel security after the 9/11 has led into the adoption of security measures and technologies that aim at screening passenger flows so as to detect people who fulfill the criteria of “high-risk traveler” (Salter 2004, 77). These procedures are not neutral or innocent as the criteria by definition reflect certain assumptions on what skin colors, ethnicities, nationalities, past travel patterns, places of origin, destinations, and behavioral traits count as indicating terrorism risk (Adey 2003). (Häkli, 2015)
Cresswell 2010: “Broadly speaking, the scale of regulation for mobility has moved in the past 500 years or so from the local to the global. While mobility of the poor was always a problem for those high up, it was a more local problem in feudal Europe … By the end of the 19th century the nation-state had a monopoly on the means of legitimate movement and … [n]ow we are in a new phase of mobility regulation where the means of legitimate movement is increasingly in the hands of corporations and transnational institutions. The United Nations and the European Union, for instance, have defined what counts and what does not account as appropriate movement”. (Cresswell
2010, 27). (Häkli, 2015)
Even with the scale of mobility expanded and speeded up, key element in this regime is states’ cooperation in identifying and regulating moving bodies (Cresswell 2010). (Häkli, 2015)
While the origins of the passport cannot be traced back to a nascent “travel regime”, it certainly has developed as a response to practical problems from early on. The precursor to passport was a “safe-conduct pass” (sauf-conduit or guidaticum) that rulers begun to issue in the 13th century as a protective measure to merchants, diplomats and other passengers who needed to travel outside or into the realm of the sovereign (Mau et al. 2012). (Häkli, 2015)
These early travel documents served purposes beyond the safety of their bearers. In reducing risks to travelers and goods they facilitated the expansion of trade and the intensification of diplomatic ties both of which were instrumental to the consolidation of the territorial state system (Torpey 2000). In this regard passport and its precursors have been developed as solutions to practical problems, such as the sovereign’s need to accumulate wealth, and the travelling elites to conduct their business. (Häkli, 2015)
Over time and especially in the aftermath of major wars the passport gained new functions tied less to the practicalities of safe travel and more to the territorial states’ concern with national security. Whereas the 19th century witnessed a development from the co-existence of variegated policies regarding the regulation of mobility in different countries toward a period of liberalist tendencies and the abolishment of passport in many countries after the mid-19th century, the First World War marked a turn towards contemporary security-centered functions and practices (Torpey 2000). (Häkli, 2015)
A major step towards an international mobility regime was taken in 1920 in a League of Nations Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets, motivated by the member states’ twin desire of at once fostering international mobility and national security. Passports and border control procedures were mainly seen as a temporary but necessary measure to stabilize the post-war world political scene (Salter 2003). Yet, despite the liberalist spirit of the interwar period that was strongly geared towards abolishing all restrictions to travel as detrimental to economic recovery and growth, once established the international passport regime was never lifted. (Häkli, 2015)
In practice this meant that a growing number of states begun to require a passport as a means of personal identification from all travelers seeking to enter the country. This change coincided with the expansion of tourism and travelling in the early 20th century and was not greeted with pleasure among international travelers, many of whom still at that time were members of the upper social strata (Löfgren 1994). (Häkli, 2015)
Because the passport is a proof of nationality as much as of personal identity, it begun to project travelers under a “nationalizing gaze” and thus was instrumental in naturalizing the idea of borders and territorial belonging (Löfgren 1999, 11). (Häkli, 2015)
Governments asserted their right to control movement across their boundaries and used passports as a legal device to “embrace” private individuals, and a technique for “nationalizing” them as citizens (Torpey 2001, 6). Passport became an instrument of nationalization in that the control of mobility applied not only to foreign travelers but citizens as well (Salter 2003). (Häkli, 2015)
The newly permanent attention that passport gave to nationality after the First World War helped consolidate the now taken-for-granted bondage between nationality, citizenship rights and territorial residence. (Häkli, 2015)
Passport was, as it still is, first and foremost a travel document needed by those who cross international borders for one or another reason. When thinking of global mobility comprising business travel, tourism, and voluntary and forced migration, it is the vast expansion of leisure travel after the Second World War that has most increased the number of people facing what Löfgren (1999) terms “new forms of anxiety” related to border crossing. The passports are carefully and suspiciously scrutinized and hence “[p]eople cross the border like a criminal under surveillance. Who are you, is this passport photo really you? Are you quite sure you have nothing to declare?” (Löfgren 1999, 10-11). (Häkli, 2015)
If passport once was a document that granted its holder specific privileges, protection, and place above reasonable doubt, with the securitization of international travel it has come to symbolize suspicion that targets all travelers (Adey 2009; Muller 2011; Prokkola & Ridanpää 2014). (Häkli, 2015)
Even though the presence of the traveler is still needed for the machine-operated validation of biometric passports, it is the passport as a mobile object that actually performs the task of certifying that the traveler is who she or he claims to be – human border guards are no longer a necessity. Passport, thus, represents in its own right the unique body and individuality of its holder while being a generally recognized and internationally valid travel document. (Häkli, 2015)
As Salter (2008) aptly points out, the travelers’ anxiety or unease that characterizes border control situations is the direct consequence of the de facto institutionally embedded discretionary powers that border guards hold as representatives of the sovereign power of the state (see also Romero 2006). This power is largely based on the border agents’ need to pass a quick judgment on each traveler under pressure caused by uncertainty concerning the traveler’s intentions. Although the decision to admit or exclude is seemingly systematized by legislation, international treaties, and administrative regulations, in reality the situations at the border are so complex and manifold that no uniform policy can abolish the discretionary power at play in border control (Salter 2008, 376). (Häkli, 2015)
This discretionary use of sovereign power is effectively obscured by the fact thatmost travelers with a valid passport never encounter any trouble in border crossing. For the ‘mobile citizens’ the passport functions as a problem-solving boundary object that does the work of communication between them and the representatives of the sovereign at the border, with maybe only a slight feeling of anxiety as a reminder of the uncertainty that pertains to the situation (Löfgren 1999; Häkli 2007). However, for those whose entry is denied the sovereign power to expel is excruciatingly tangible and the passport they possibly hold is deprived of its function as a boundary object. (Häkli, 2015)
This use of sovereign discretion can turn passport from a problem solver into a problem in itself – from a world-bridging boundary object into what could be called a ‘border object’ that functions as its opposite. As a border object the revoked passport prohibits communication and curbs the autonomy of its holder, thus revealing the way we are ultimately “all made objects of the decision of the sovereign” (Salter 2008, 378). New technologies may introduce some changes into the ways in which passports are checked by humans and machines, but they will not change the fact that in a passport we carry the border in our pocket, a border that the sovereign may choose to enforce upon us. (Häkli, 2015)
