The passport, which is supposed to facilitate the movement of people, is, according to John C. Torpey, one of the instruments by which the modern state tightens its grip on its nationals. A process that the war against terrorism has only accentuated.
Although it has been almost twenty years since it was published The invention of passportinaugurating the opening of a new field of historical investigation devoted to the practices of identifying people – a field that has since largely developed, in France in particular with the work of researchers such as Vincent Denis, Ilsen About or Pierre Piazza –, the work has just been the subject of a new edition augmented by a final chapter that takes us to the frontiers of our own current events. By crossing, as the subtitle of the work indicates, the questions of surveillance, citizenship and the State, the American sociologist and historian John C. Torpey examines the conditions of emergence of what appears today as the indispensable tool for recognizing an individual outside the territory of which he bears the nationality: the passport. Beyond a simple tool of control, the passport acts as an act of recognition, by a State, of the quality of national of the individual to whom it is issued. Neither strictly linear nor strictly comparative, the proposed analysis takes on the ambitious challenge of drawing from the singularity of contexts of development of practices of control of population movements as different as those of France, Germany, the United Kingdom or even the United States, a set of historical variations of the government of mobility.
Capture and Embrace of the State Apparatus
The book sheds light on the different ways in which the State, and in this case Western States, has sought and succeeded in “embracing” individuals. It is interesting to note that this concept has its origins in the German verb erfassen, which refers as much to the idea of seizing something as to the action of recording, that is, of seizing by recording. J. Torpey substitutes the “masculine” and conquering image of the penetrating State with that of the embracing State, as a way, through recording, of making a society “legible” (pp. 14-15).
My metaphor of states ’embracing’ their population much more akin to James Scott’s idea that states seek to render societies ‘legible’ and thus more readily available for governance.
(As I understand it, the metaphor of the state’s “embrace” of populations is close to the idea developed by James Scott on the way in which states make societies ‘legible’ and thus more vulnerable to the imperatives of governance).
This idea refers entirely to the Deleuzian notion of the state apparatus, defined by its capacity for capture, for “overcoding”. The embrace, as a specific form of state government of the social, is embodied by a bureaucratic type of hold, by the progressive construction of an inseparable link between the exercise of citizenship, identity and the state.
The idea ofembrace of the state, like the idea of captureinvite us to think not simply of a way of reading society from a position of pure exteriority. Indeed, the state apparatus is characterized as a way of reformulating, of encoding a society which, in a performative dimension, participates in its own fabrication. The passport has thus gradually imposed itself as a technology of encoding the relationship between nationality and identity, a technology of fixation which conditions the individual exercise of the freedom to come and go outside national borders by its integration into a complex network of inter-state recognition games. J. Torpey clearly indicates that the geographical perimeter chosen for his study is based on the postulate of a supremacy, during the period considered, of Western states in the diffusion of administrative identification practices and whose passport control system “represents the product of the progressive strengthening of state apparatuses in Europe and the United States over the last two centuries”.
Modernity and control technologies
The plurality of sources and contexts studied in this ambitious historical investigation invites us to observe the different situations that have contributed to gradually establishing a “state monopoly on ‘legitimate means of circulation'” (p. 9). From a history of the document that is mainly based on legislative sources, J. Torpey manages to restore a whole movement of nationalization of the control of mobility that accompanies and structures our political modernity. Well before constituting a centralized and standardized administrative form, the modes of identification were essentially based on local modalities of mutual knowledge. The author is thus interested in the way in which the “legal concept of foreigner” evolved in France at the end of the medieval period from a private “local” definition to a public “national” definition (p. 29). This change of scale has a decisive impact, because it replaces the individuality of the threat contained in the figure of the foreigner, of the one who is not from here, with a collective impact embodied in the idea of a foreign “population”.
Social Danger
By devoting an entire chapter to the question of the passport during the French Revolution, J. Torpey clearly shows how this “nationalization” of the control of mobility is inseparable from the construction of nation-states. If the defense of freedom of movement is at the heart of the concerns of the representatives of the Estates General, the contingencies of the revolutionary period lead to an increase in control practices. The advent of the idea of the nation contains, in the historical antagonisms inherent in it, the figure of the enemy of the Nation, the counter-revolutionary. The figure of the foreigner is then intimately attached to the threat of European alliances fomented by the émigré French nobility. From this point of view, the foreigner is thought of during the French Revolution as the incarnation of a threat that is as much internal as external, which the historian Sophie Wahnich defines through the three figures of the “traitor”, the “savage” and the “nomad”.
J. Torpey explains why the invention of the passport does not only appear as a natural extension of the administrative centralization of modern states. Beyond a condition of individual exercise of freedom of movement, the imposition of the passport originates historically as a defense strategy intended to face different types of social danger. If this danger is effectively embodied in the figures described by S. Wahnich, it extends over the course of the XIXe century to other figures such as the vagabond, the indigent, the colonial subject or even the foreign worker.
The Embrace and the War
J. Torpey’s comparison of the different national contexts reveals the central place occupied by war in times of tightening of the State apparatus’s grip. It is not surprising to note that the first centralized identification systems developed in France under the Ancien Régime were precisely aimed at controlling armies and preventing desertion. War nourishes and accentuates representations of threat and the figures of the foreigner, the traitor or the spy are more easily associated with those of criminality. The practices of identifying criminals and foreigners are therefore adjusted within increasingly shared frames of reference. The example reported by the author of the generalization of the anthropometric identification of criminals, developed in France by Alphonse Bertillon, to the entire foreign population of the territory is particularly enlightening from this point of view (pp. 131-132).
The sixth chapter, a supplement to this 2018 reissue, allows us to connect this long and rich genealogy to the most contemporary upheavals in identification practices in the era that opened in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. An era marked by a phenomenon of ever-wider extension of mobility control articulated around the new principle of war of terror which the first one claimed GW Bush to announce the American intervention in Iraq. The concept of war against terrorism refers to a war not against an identifiable enemy, nor against one or more nations, but against a strategy, against a series of political tactics aimed at the symbolic weakening of the power of States. For Western States, the logic of this new war is not so much to weaken an enemy, by essence always elusive, as to strengthen its own power of control: Patriot Actreturn of preventive internment and systematic torture practices by the American army, standardization of biometric identification, internalization in France of the provisions of the state of emergency, etc. The war against terrorism appears as the new springboard for tightening the grip of the state apparatus, as an essential dynamic of an increasingly irreversible security movement.
However, this supplement can be criticized for its extremely synthetic nature. In twenty pages, the fundamental transformations of American internal security services are reviewed, the generalization of new procedures for controlling migration and populations in the United States, Canada, Germany and France. The subject, very descriptive and based essentially on legislative references, while it does allow for taking stock, lacks any questioning around the specific genealogies of this ” war of terror “. Its origins cannot in fact be confined to the post-September 11 period, especially since the experience of the Algerian war of independence appears absolutely decisive in terms of developing counter-subversion strategies. We would have liked to find the same richness and power of analysis as in the previous chapters, but J. Torpey seems here to want to set out lines of reading, to propose avenues of work in the light of a history already written. More than an updated conclusion, the sixth chapter is an invitation, in the present, to continue the questioning.