Why the design of passports of all countries in the world is the same

Is there a gilded coat of arms on the cover? And that's her color? And all those intricately designed interior pages? The appearance of each of the elements of a modern passport has its own reason and meaning, writes Air force.

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Let’s sympathize with our poor passport, because without it you won’t be able to cross the border and you won’t be able to prove that you are you. But, nevertheless, it is doomed to spend most of its time hidden in a safe place, and if anyone turns over its pages, it is usually tired and always irritated officials.

The passport reliably performs a dual task - it identifies the identity of the bearer and the state that issued it. But we often wince when looking at our photograph in it, or even get annoyed why this archaic concept of “citizenship” is given such importance that we are forced to take with us on any trip this little book with fake gilding on the cover.

Nevertheless, the passport, as an artificially created means of identification, carries a rich visual and historical content that emphasizes our common features, although its very existence indicates the presence of boundaries separating us.

Traditional passport design rarely arouses curiosity. Why, despite the incredible abundance of various visual elements (from birds and butterflies to bowls full of rice, a variety of colors - pink, purple, yellow and orange), passports still have to look exactly the way they look today?

From handwritten parchment to booklet

Passports were not always semi-rigid, compact books. One of the earliest references to a document that served as a passport can be found in the Old Testament book of Nehemiah (Second Book of Ezra), where the Persian king Artaxerxes I (about 450 BC) supplies Nehemiah with a special letter by sending him to Judea. In that letter, he asks the rulers of the lands beyond the Euphrates to allow Nehemiah to travel unhindered to Judea.

Written around 321-297. BC. The ancient Indian political and economic treatise “Arthashastra” also mentions travel documents issued for a fee, without which not a single resident of the country could leave or return to it. We have no way of knowing exactly what those documents looked like, but it is likely that they were similar to the oldest surviving passport. Written on parchment in an intricate handwriting, it included the signature of the English king Charles I. Since the sheet was far from pocket-sized, it had to be folded several times.

This document was issued in 1636 to Sir Thomas Littleton, allowing him to travel outside the kingdom to overseas countries. He gave the right to be accompanied by four servants, as well as the possession of a sum of 50 pounds sterling, suitcases and basic necessities.

When World War I broke out, governments viewed passports as a means of preventing spies from crossing the border. The first British passports resembling modern ones began to be issued in 1915. They were a piece of paper that was folded up and placed in a cardboard folder with the image of the British royal coat of arms.

The same unicorn and lion, symbolizing Scotland and England respectively, appear on current British passports, along with two mottos in French (since Norman French was once the language of the English aristocracy): dieu et mon droit (“God and mine”) right") and honi soit qui mal y pense ("Shame on the one who thinks badly about this").

Early passports also had clear differences, primarily in photographs. The owner's photograph first appeared on a British passport in 1915, but his style was radically different from today's impossibly regulated photographs. Take, for example, the passport photos of Arthur Conan Doyle, which were taken a hundred years ago: on them he poses with his wife and two sons in fairly free poses (the whole family could travel with one passport).

On passports of those years you can find photographs of people posing in their garden or on the seashore, with a cigarette, a newspaper or a musical instrument. There is nothing official in those photographs - the person’s character is visible there.

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However, such images did not always work as a means of identification. In his book Passport in America, scholar Craig Robertson recounts the case of a Dane who arrived in Germany with a huge mustache, only to find that he resembled Kaiser Wilhelm. He shaved off his mustache, but on the way back he was detained at the border, since he did not look like the image in his passport - moreover, without a mustache he strongly resembled one notorious swindler.

It was only in 1920 that the League of Nations began to develop uniform standards for international passports. Among the requirements were: 32 pages, the use of at least two languages, the name of the state on the cover at the top, the state's coat of arms in the center and the word "passport" at the bottom.

This is what almost any modern passport looks like.

The quintessence of statehood

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialized agency of the UN, is now responsible for passport standards - size, format, technologies used. But none of these standards dictate the color of the cover. Most passports now come in three colors: red, blue and green. Why such a limited palette?

It so happened that blue passports are issued in the countries of the New World, the Western Hemisphere, red ones hint either to the communist present or to the past, and green ones often indicate Muslim countries. Some other colors, such as light cherry, are considered frivolous for a state passport, although many like them.

(As for frivolity and playfulness, here I immediately remember the Slovenian passport, which can be used as a flipbook showing the semblance of a cartoon drawn in a notebook. Quickly turn the pages and you will see a galloping horseman, whom evil tongues immediately dubbed a frightened cowboy, the bird that chases him.)

The uniformity of design sometimes leads to confusion. Immediately after the referendum to leave the EU, the British government announced that the passport will again be blue. But the fact is that the European Union never required a British passport to have the current burgundy color. The decision that the passport will be a deep wine color was made by the British themselves in 1988.

On the inner pages of their passports, states try to reflect national peculiarities as fully as possible, depicting famous monuments, natural wonders and famous citizens there, as if compiling a textbook for those who get to know the country.

For example, a Japanese passport contains no less than 24 works by Katsushiki Hokusai, famous for his beautiful engravings, and 36 views of Mount Fuji.

And the latest version of the American passport (2007) contains images of the battle, during which the Stars and Stripes flag was first used, and Mount Rushmore, with its sculptural portraits of four US presidents.

Sometimes passport pictures carry far from the message that designers expected. Almost 100 years have passed since married American women received the right to travel with their own passports (and not those entered in the husband's passport). However, among the 13 inspiring quotes from influential American citizens on the pages of the modern US passport, only one is from a woman.

But the Gabonese passport, until the latest redesign associated with the introduction of biometrics, could be considered one of the most gynocentric (representing a view of the world from a female point of view) - its cover depicted a breastfeeding mother with her breasts exposed.

However, no matter how concerned the designers are with the patriotic message, the main factor is not aesthetics, but safety. Simply put, the more carefully thought out the passport pages are, the more details they contain, the more difficult it is to forge the document. And some of the most expressive and striking modern passports are so precisely because of the concern for their security properties.

This is the Canadian passport since 2015: if you illuminate its pages with ultraviolet light, the skies in the pictures will explode with fireworks, bright constellations or a rainbow.

In addition, in the new millennium, a biometric chip icon is increasingly appearing on passport covers.

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Similar in differences

The new (2014) Norwegian passport has a distinctive look: the design by Neue Design Studio uses Norwegian landscapes in a color scheme of white, turquoise and red-orange. Inside, the passport looks minimalist in Scandinavian style, but ultraviolet light reveals the lights of the northern lights on the pages. For now, this passport is an exception. As a rule, passports from different countries have much more similarities than differences.

Their strict, rational design emphasizes the very purpose of the passport, in which the emphasis is not on the individuality of the issuing state, but on the similarity of all countries for which prestige, significant position in the world, and the presence on the map that history has endowed them with are important.

In our world, where coats of arms are rarely used, passports look very similar to each other, despite the fact that they contain images of flora and fauna, crocodiles and ponies, chrysanthemums and cedars. All these intricate and decorative patterns on the pages, gold embossing on the covers are nothing more than a game of the bureaucratic mind. That is why they are so strikingly similar to each other.

A passport has always had different meanings for different people. Some people are lucky to be born in a prosperous country, and for them a passport is, first of all, an opportunity to travel, a hint of adventure. But someone is fleeing disasters and wars in their homeland, and a passport for them is a symbol of hope, a promise that the troubles will someday end.

The situation in the world is such that the passports of some countries open up much more borders than others. However, the pandemic that has now swept our entire planet has made any travel incredibly difficult. And in this sense, COVID-19 added another meaning to our passport: now we remember this booklet with border marks on small pages with nostalgia for travel.

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