League of Nations Passport Conferences: 1920 & 1926
The Year Two League of Nations Conferences Invented Your Modern Passport
Nineteen twenty was the year Europe’s map got redrawn in instalments, and by autumn the League of Nations had finally admitted that no two countries’ passports looked, felt, or functioned alike.
A continent rebuilt one plebiscite at a time
The chaos wasn’t abstract. It shows up right in the League’s own 1920 timeline, and it’s worth walking through because it explains why passport standardization stopped being a bureaucratic nicety and became urgent.
On January 10, Britain formally took over administration of the former German East African mandate, renaming it Tanganyika, sending German settlers home, and selling off their estates. A month later, on February 10, voters in the northern Schleswig zone chose reunion with Denmark by 74 percent, while the southern zone (March 14) went the other way, 80 percent for staying German. In between, on February 12, Allied forces backed by French occupation troops took control of Upper Silesia amid German-Polish fighting, and on February 15 they occupied the Memel district and its port. On February 26, the League itself took over administration of the Saar from Germany for fifteen years, with a plebiscite promised at the end of that term.
By June and July, Denmark had formally absorbed northern Schleswig, and Britain had renamed British East Africa as Kenya, folding in the coastal strip it had leased from the Sultan of Zanzibar back in 1887. Further afield, the United States and Siam signed a treaty on September 1 in which Washington gave up its extraterritorial rights in exchange for Siamese tariff autonomy. Then on November 9, Danzig was declared a Free State under League protection, per the Treaty of Versailles.
Redrawn borders, new administering powers, plebiscite zones, mandate territories: every one of these events meant a traveler’s documents had to answer a question that hadn’t existed five years earlier, namely which state now claimed them. That’s the backdrop against which the League convened its first passport conference, and it’s why the surviving passports from successor states like the Free City of Danzig or the Saar territory are some of the more sought-after pieces among collectors today.
Paris, October 1920: the week delegates invented the modern passport
The Paris Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets ran from October 15 to 21, 1920, and it produced the first internationally agreed passport standard in history. Before this meeting, there were no internationally agreed standards for passports because they were not generally required for travel until World War I. Delegates from 22 nations, working under the League’s Provisional Committee for Communications and Transit, set out to fix that, as I’ve covered in more depth in my broader history of the modern passport. 1920 Chronology
What they produced was the “International Type” passport, and the specifications were remarkably concrete for a diplomatic gathering. The document was to take the form of a booklet, cardboard-bound, 32 pages, measuring roughly 15.5 by 10.5 centimeters, with the issuing country’s name at the top, its coat of arms centered, and the word “Passport” at the bottom. The first four pages were reserved for the bearer’s identifying details, the remaining 28 for visas. Text had to appear in the holder’s national language alongside French, still the working language of diplomacy at the time. Governments were urged to have the new format in circulation by July 1, 1921. The League’s own conference records, still held today in the UN Archives at Geneva, also set out recommendations for exempting certain travelers, such as railway officials and holders of marine identity papers, from passport formalities entirely between neighboring states.
The League framed the problem in stark economic terms: the tangle of mismatched national passports was, in its own words, a serious obstacle to the resumption of normal international relations and to postwar economic recovery. That’s worth remembering when you’re holding a 1920s passport in hand. It isn’t just a travel document. It’s the physical output of a specific diplomatic fix for a specific postwar crisis.
Geneva, 1926: the conference that nearly abolished the passport
Six years later, the League reconvened in Geneva, from May 12 to 18, 1926, for what’s usually called the Second International Passport Conference, and this time the mood in the room was strikingly different. Where the Paris meeting had been about building a standard, the Geneva meeting opened with a Polish delegate arguing the standard shouldn’t exist at all. Franciszek Sokal opened proceedings by asking the parties to adopt “as a general rule that all States Members of the League of Nations should abolish passports.” A representative of the International Chamber of Commerce backed him, arguing that even a resolution contemplating eventual abolition would be read by the public as genuine progress. Foundation for Economic Education
It didn’t happen, and by 1926 it was arguably too late to happen. Most member states had already adopted the uniform booklet from the Paris conference and, more importantly, many governments had come to see the passport as protective rather than merely restrictive, particularly for the wave of emigrants and stateless persons the war had produced. The Geneva conference ended up refining and extending the 1920 standard rather than dismantling it, which is precisely why the “International Type” booklet format survived, largely unchanged in its basics, for decades afterward.
Why this matters if you collect
For a collector, these two conferences are the dividing line in the hobby. A passport issued before October 1920 can be almost anything: different sizes, different layouts, sometimes a single folded sheet rather than a booklet. A passport issued after the standard took hold starts to look recognizably modern, which is exactly why the transitional pieces, especially anything tied to a mandate territory, a plebiscite zone, or a short-lived Free State like Danzig, carry so much historical weight. They’re artifacts of the exact year the passport as we know it was born.
If you’ve come across a passport from Tanganyika, the Saar, Danzig, or another of these 1920 territorial reorganizations and want a second opinion on it, reach out through my contact page; I’m always glad to take a look.
Further reading: The rare League of Nations ID of Jane Smith 1922
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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