The Power of Your Passport by Michael Genovese
Ah, to be a Roman citizen at the height of Imperial Rome’s global dominance (“global” to the Romans at least). The world was your oyster, and to utter the phrase civis Romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen) meant that one was virtually guaranteed safety wherever you roamed (no pun intended).
So widely recognized and influential was the announcement that you were a citizen of Rome, that in 1963, President John Kennedy, used the phrase to claim brotherhood to the beleaguered people of Berlin when he announced that “Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner.”
While the United States does not bestride the globe as Rome did at the height of its imperial power, the U.S. has nonetheless been ‒ at least since the end of World War II ‒ the dominant or hegemonic power of the West, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War in 1989, the “lone superpower” in the world.
Today, China is making concerted efforts to replace the US as global leader, and while President Trump’s “America First” approach has deliberately ceded power to China (e.g. pulling out of TPP, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Control agreement), the United States remains ‒ at least at their writing ‒ the most powerful and important nation on the globe.
And what do we get for this (waning) global leadership? Power? Prestige? Status? The gratitude of a thankful world?
One measure of international prestige and impact can be seen in the power of the passport one carries. Think of a passport as a form of currency, important for what it can buy. A passport, long viewed as one’s ticket to the world, varies in clout and importance from country-to-country. The more countries that accept your passport without visa restrictions the more powerful (and attractive) your passport is said to be. A U.S. passport is less powerful today than it was five or ten, or twenty five years ago (Due largely to reactions against the Trump administration’s efforts to make more difficult, entry into the United States).
In two highly regarded 2017 passport rankings, the US ranks far from the top. Global Passport ranks Singapore as number one (measured by how many countries your passport allows easy entry into), the first Asian entity to gain the top rank. Germany is number two, followed by Sweden, South Korea, and others. Ranking in the fourth category (beyond numbers 1, 2 and 3, the rest of the categories contain several countries each), are Denmark, Finland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Japan and the United Kingdom, among others, while France, Switzerland, and Austria among others are in the fifth category. The United States, along with Ireland, are in category 6. Israel is in category 17, Mexico in 19, Russia in 40, and China, 67 (ahead of Sierra Leone, and Ghana, but below Uganda, Zimbabwe and Tanzania).
The nomad passport index (using a more complicated rating matrix) ranks Sweden number 1, followed by Belgium, Italy and Spain (tied at 3), Ireland at 5, Finland and Germany tied at 6, Denmark, Switzerland, and Luxembourg tied at 8. The United Kingdom is at 16 Singapore is at number 19, and the United States is tied with Slovenia at number 35! Israel is at 53, Mexico is at 55, Russia is at 82, Cuba at 136, India at 160, and China is at number 164, just behind the Central African Republic, but before Gabon, Chad, and a few others. North Korea is at 189, and in last place at 199 is Afghanistan.
Of particular note from these passport power rankings are the (perhaps) surprisingly low ranking of the United States, but also noteworthy is the very low power and prestige of a Chinese passport. This demonstrates that while in a number of key areas, China is challenging the U.S. for global leadership, in passport power as well as a number of other measures of what is called, “soft power”, China has a very long way to go.
Michael A Genovese is President of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of 50 books, and often appears as a political commentator at CNN.