Do passports make us free?

Passports gives the holder an identity — but not everyone can get one. Photo: DW

When Britons voted to leave the European Union in 2016, UK passports no longer gave holders the right to travel freely around Europe.

In short, Brexit actually changed the identity of UK citizens: They were no longer Europeans.

Many Britons living in Germany, for example, decided to apply for German citizenship to obtain a German passport so they could legally remain in the EU without needing a visa. For some UK nationals, this might have only worsened their sense of displacement.

But not that long ago, one could travel across borders without passports.

Passports a relatively new invention

In fact, passports as we know them today have only been around for about 100 years, according to Hermine Diebolt, who works at the United Nations Library and Archives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Geneva used to be the home of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations that was founded in 1920 to help maintain peace after the horrors of World War I.

It was a time when old colonial empires were crumbling and new nation-states were being born. People were no longer subjects of their rulers, but citizens of nations.

Many were also crossing borders after being displaced by the war. But most people tended to carry random local papers — if anything — to prove their identity. 

Already during the war, countries like Germany, France, the UK and Italy had started to insist that people from enemy countries needed official identification documents to enter their territories.

"Border officials suddenly were confronted with a lot of different travel documents with different shapes, different sizes and it was hard to know if the passport was authentic or not," said Diebolt of the great movement of people after 1918 when the war ended. "So, they really needed to find a solution."

Finally, in 1920, the League of Nations gathered world leaders in Paris to participate in the "Conference on Passports, Custom Formalities and Through Tickets."

And so, it was official: passports everywhere should look a certain way and include the same kind of information.

Measuring 15.5 by 10.5 centimeters (6 by 4 inches), passports were to be 32 pages — a format still in use today — and the front of the document must bear the country's name and the coat of arms.

Confusion, anger at Ukrainian passport offices in Germany

'The Passport Nuisance'

But soon there was a backlash against passports, said Diebolt.

Many world leaders preferred things the way they were before, when people could move around freely without having to carry documents.

The passport was also very unpopular with the public and with the press. People thought passports undermined their freedom and invaded their privacy. The document also relied on a lot of bureaucracy and red tape.

In 1926, an article in The New York Times referred to the "The Passport Nuisance."

"Must passports be retained as a permanent feature of travel?" the newspaper wrote. "The system in vogue since the war is cumbersome, vexatious and a drag on free intercourse between nations."

But it was too late to go back to this freedom of movement.

League of Nations members couldn't agree on what a world without border controls and passports would look like. 

And so, the passport was here to stay.

Modern passport reflects a global divide

Across the world, a simple travel document can make or break citizens, one's nationality dictating where they can travel and where they can stay.

That is why "passport indexes" are released annually that rank passports from first to last based on how many other countries can be visited visa-free by a passport holder.

According to the Global Passport Power Rank 2025, the No. 1 spot is held by wealthy oil state the United Arab Emirates, meaning its citizens have strong freedom of global movement.

At the bottom of the list are Afghanistan and Syria, war-ravaged nations with people living under isolated regimes who have very little ability to travel — although recent regime change in Syria may affect its future ranking.

But what about those who have no nationality or citizenship and hence no passport?

For around 10 million stateless people in the world, that's already a reality — often due to discrimination against certain ethnic groups such as Roma and Sinti people, with around 70% of their population in Germany remaining stateless, according to the US Institute of Diplomacy and Human Rights.

But statelessness is nothing new. It emerged around the same time as the passport, as empires fell and nation states emerged post-WWI.

More than 9 million people were also displaced in Europe at the time. This included many refugees from Russia who had become stateless when the Bolsheviks issued a decree that revoked the citizenship of old Russian expatriates.

Meanwhile, as the European map was being redrawn, millions of people found themselves in countries that either didn't recognize their legal identity or weren't willing to give them one.

Freedom of movement for the few

This is again a problem in the 2020s, including in the UAE, even though it tops the global passport index.

Young people can only get passports if they have an Emirati father, though with some exceptions. Meanwhile, minority groups or opponents of the ruling royal families are often stripped of these identity papers.

Nonetheless, the UAE has sought to offshore its stateless population by purchasing around 50,000 passports from the island nation of Comoros off Africa's east coast. It legalized their status while ensuring these would remain "foreign residents" with fewer rights than Emirati nationals.

This is just one example of how passports are powerful instruments of both freedom — and oppression.

Sketch: TBS

Stuart Braun Berlin-based journalist with a focus on climate and culture.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on DW, and is published by special syndication arrangement