Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

With the world awash in refugees, immigrants, "guest workers," travelers, and the occasional terrorist, an interpretive study of identity papers and passports is certainly timely—the more so since even as the administrative reach of individual states keeps growing with modern technology, international norms of human rights and a movement toward open borders in Europe work, ostensibly, to limit state power.	1
The historical sociologist John Torpey is well equipped to address these issues. By training he is equally respectful of historical detail and nuance and of the interpretive arguments in contemporary social science put forward by such scholars as Rogers Brubaker and Gérard Noiriel. While contributing to the literature on "the institutionalist construction of the nation-state," Torpey does so as a well-grounded Europeanist, especially comfortable talking in depth about France and Germany. True, his study is not globally comparative, and he seems to consider communist practice in the twentieth century ephemeral and scarcely worth dwelling on. Nonetheless, his canvass is wide and does ample justice to his subject.	2
What, exactly, is that subject, one might ask? The book traces a clash of historical trends in the West. On one side stands the intensifying attempt by European states to "embrace" their subjects or citizens (otherwise known as state penetration or surveillance and control), which dates from the era of absolutism and accelerated in modern times. But this inexorable trend collided with the liberal ideal of freedom of movement, as proclaimed in the opening stage of the French Revolution. This first attempt to end state controls on freedom of movement soon derailed in the face of emigration by implacable foes of the revolution. Successive responses to counterrevolution, real and imagined, ended up burying the ideal altogether. By the time the Thermidorian Convention turned to this issue, it found itself codifying older traditions of restrictions on both foreigners and vagabonds.	3
The history of internal passports and identity documents in earlier times (such as the French aveu or local attestation of good conduct, whose absence stigmatized the almost mythological gens sans aveu) reveals markers in the "nationalization of political space" at the expense of parochial municipal definitions of citizenship, and in "the bureaucratic codification of social marginality" in relation to vagabondage and allocation of poor relief. Identity documents also stand alongside the secularized French état civil of 1792 and the first censuses circa 1800 in advancing the state's desire generally to identify, track, and if need be control its citizens for such purposes as conscription. But these same states also wished to promote the well-being of their respectable citizens who had to travel abroad. Passports, as Torpey shows in detail, must be viewed from two administrative perspectives: the country of the person's origin, and the country of destination.	4
The notion of freedom of movement, however, did not depend on the liberal ideology of 1789 alone; it was taken up later for entirely different reasons by interests advocating unfettered market capitalism, which required a "free" labor force of whatever provenance. "The burgeoning fortunes of economic liberalism made free circulation appear an unavoidable necessity for industrial development," Torpey argues (p. 56), and he illustrates with an illuminating discussion of Germany and a revealing comparative excursus on Britain. Various German states were not happy about emigration (mercantilist doctrines, ingrained traditions of control, and fears of depopulation still had writ), but gradually they relaxed controls on movement. Freedom of exit did not progress as rapidly as the freedom to settle anywhere within the German states, but progress it did.	. . .