Tom asked:

Should the citizens of a country have to have an official passport to be able to roam the world freely?

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It seems to me that a passport would destroy the notion of free travel, since it would burden one with
the contingent label of 'being from ...' to the exclusion of everywhere else. This is a costly situation
since then we are confronted with borders, inside's and outside's, interiors and exteriors. Travel,
movement is then not a freedom, but a courtesy, granted or not by those who stand guard at these
borders. Think back to the diversion between East and West Germany, or the road stops in Israel/
Palestine. With 'official' papers, passports, visas were citizens of a country able to roam freely? Is not
this freedom a suspicious, curtailed freedom? It is a not very welcoming freedom, perhaps not a
freedom at all but gratitude a favour done by those on the inside to those on the outside.

Derrida talks about Hospitality, an unconditional openness to whoever comes along. Of course this
has risks we can never be sure just who will arrive at our door step, and yet this risk seems to be
what is demanded by the ethical. Of course international movements of citizens is not merely an
ethical matter, it is political and economic, yet the same demands apply. See Derrida's essay 'On
Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness'. Passports seem to grant freedoms, yet this is the illusion of
freedoms; what passports serve is the continuation, enforcement and protection of boarders, of
exclusion and segregation. Witness the world wide political minefield of asylum and refugee issues (a
basic human right under the Universal Declaration of 1948). A true freedom to roam the world would
have to see the elimination of passports and of borders, of courtesy giving way to hospitality.

Brian Tee