Identity Cards and Identity Romanticism

Abstract

Abstract “National ID cards” are scare words in the United States, in England, and to a degree throughout the common-law world. If the instinctively negative reaction to ID cards were only an American phenomenon, one might dismiss it as yet another example of American exceptionalism—or, perhaps, another example of the U.S. failure to learn from foreign experience. But this powerful popular distaste for government-issued ID cards is not limited to the U.S. Similar and powerful reactions are found in England, Australia, and Canada. Indeed, in 2000, one could say that only four common-law countries had adopted ID cards in peacetime: Cyprus, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. Meanwhile, however, ID cards are a routine and often uninteresting fact of life in the democracies of the civil-law world. That difference deserves exploration. (Some might argue that ID cards are inescapable, and that even the U.S. has them although it does not admit it, but this makes the difference in popular attitudes even more difficult to understand.) This chapter suggests that the U.S. hostility to ID cards is based on a romantic vision of free movement, and that the English view is tied to a related concept of “the rights of Englishmen.” I then suggest that these views distract from the real issues raised by contemporary national ID plans in the common and civil-law worlds. Today’s issues, I suggest, involve a complex set of data protection issues that have little to do with romantic stories of cowboys and motorists talking back to policemen, and a great deal to do with data storage and access.