6

International Cooperation
on Travel Document Security
in the Developed World
Mark B. Salter

Introduction

The international travel system is regulated by three inter-related

techniques: documents, border examinations, and international agree-
ments. International cooperation is not limited to document security and
border examinations; other chapters will analyze international agreements
on global mobility. The contemporary version of globalization has been
characterized as a “space of flows,”1 and states are caught between the Scylla
of the benefits and necessity of increased migration and the Charybdis of
dispersed, nontraditional security threats. Government agencies face two
internal drives: making borders “smarter” by adopting risk-management
models and methods, and making borders more secure by displacing the
site of decision or policing out from the actual territorial line. Within a
general climate of neoliberalism, states have engaged “risk management”
as the primary frame through which to manage mobility: Known, low-
risk travelers are facilitated, while known high-risk and unknown travelers
are subject to much more attention. We must understand cooperation
on the international security to be as much about the transfer of knowl-
edge as it is about the transfer of individuals. As with other aspects of
international relations, security policies are often about the projection
of particular images to an international audience as much as the meeting of
domestic concerns: Nowhere is this truer than integration into the global

R. Koslowski, Global Mobility Regimes

© Rey Koslowski 2011
116 MARK B. SALTER

economy. Developed countries must demonstrate to their partners that

they are taking mobility and international migration security seriously.
Developed states therefore seek to increase their own travel document
security and to be able to validate the security of the travel document of
others, which leads to the two areas of focus for this chapter: the devel-
opment of biometric standards and the international exchange of personal
data. By examining common state policies, this chapter identifies several
large-scale trends in mobility management, though more can be said about
each of the particular examples.2

Context

As discussed in Chapter 1, the frame of global mobility is analytically much

more useful than the model of global migration. It encompasses inter-
national travel, which is not migratory, and enables one to distinguish
between the different kinds of movements: refugee, economic, network,
elite, and casual as well as the formal and informal regimes that regulate
them. Although the contemporary international travel regime is disaggre-
gated, essentially a set of national requirements and technical standards,3
its founding norms were established by the League of Nations immedi-
ately after World War I.4 These norms reflect a nostalgia for the nineteenth
century: Visa and passport requirements were only temporarily necessary
until the European system returned to the civilized model of free circu-
lation; the burden of proof for the risk of the traveler shifted from the
issuing country to the receiving country; and the problem of refugees was
seen to be a natural product of the formation of national states—in short,
that all peoples had states and it was simply a case of moving lost popu-
lations around until they found their home. It is worth reflecting if these
assumptions remain valid. The persistence of passports, visas, and fron-
tier controls indicates that national anxiety about borders and populations,
understood through political, economic, and societal security, outweigh
any idealist desire for global free movement. This is evident in the interna-
tional law that grounds international migration. While there is an absolute
right of exit, as affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and
a right to return to one’s own state, there is no right of entry.5 Only refugees
may invoke a right to enter another country, but only when the status of
refugee has been granted by the recipient state. As Arendt argues, human
rights are effective only when authorized by states.6 Developed states have
repeatedly chosen to increase migration and mobility controls, rather than
eliminate them. In the original 1922 Conference, members of the League
of Nations Technical Sub-Committee decided that the default norm would
be to honor passports, and that the refusal of passports or authorization