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The footnote given by the author was inadvertently missed in the previously published original version. The footnote is added as “* This blog posting was written in November 2014 and reflects events at that time.

The forum debate ‘Should citizenship be for Sale?’ collected comments representing a wide range of views and some highly original arguments. They can be summarised by distinguishing global, European and national perspectives.

Vogue predictions that citizenship is diminishing in relevance or perhaps even vanishing outright, popular among jetsetters who already possess full membership status in affluent democracies, have failed to reach many applicants still knocking on the doors of well-off polities. One can excuse the world’s destitute, those who are willing to risk their lives in search of the promised lands of migration in Europe or America, for not yet having heard the prophecies about citizenship’s decline. But the same is not true for the well-heeled who are increasingly active in the market for citizenship: the ultra-rich from the rest of the world. They are willing to dish out hundreds of thousands of dollars to gain a freshly-minted passport in their new ‘home country.’ That this demand exists is not fully surprising given that this is a world of regulated mobility and unequal opportunity, and a world where not all passports are treated equally at border crossings. Rapid processes of market expansionism have now reached what for many is the most sacrosanct non-market good: membership in a political community. More puzzling is the willingness of governments – our public trustees and legal guardians of citizenship – to engage in processes that come very close to, and in some cases cannot be described as anything but, the sale and barter of membership goods in exchange for a hefty bank wire transfer or large stack of cash.

Investor citizenship programmes are becoming increasingly commonplace in state practice. What was once the province of outlier Caribbean microstates is gaining traction among more substantial states. Cash-for-passports, as Ayelet Shachar labels the phenomenon, clashes with our received understandings of citizenship as a marker of social solidarity in a Walzerian sense. The emerging market for citizenship literally commodifies the status.But where Shachar sees investor citizenship programmes as a threat to robust citizenship ties, I see them more as a manifestation of citizenship that is already being hollowed out. In the old world, investor citizenship programmes would have been inconceivable.Today, far from inconceivable, they are becoming an accepted element of strategic immigration policy.

Citizenship-by-investment programs boil down to naturalizing for nothing but money. This is not unfair in itself. However, the amount of the prize reveals how difficult acquiring the citizenship through alternative procedures is. Unfairness is located here.

Selling citizenship, even if it (often) appears repugnant, pales in comparison to many of the other inequities attendant on the ordinary transmission of citizenship, as Shachar’s own work has forcefully hammered home. For all that selling citizenship troubles us, it might do us the considerable service of forcing us to think (more) about the way in which many people already obtain citizenship, and the way in which citizenship practices more broadly both feed off, and make it harder to tackle, underlying global inequalities. Writing better citizenship laws can only be part of the solution to that problem. There are many other important ways of tackling global inequalities that deserve at least equal attention.

The problem with investment citizenship ain’t that it is for sale, the problem is global inequality. Citizenship-by-investment schemes do not themselves produce injustice but they are unjust because they build on pre-existing large disparities in the world: If all countries were equal in living conditions would the scheme be objectionable? If the answer is no, as I think it is, then the source of injustice is global inequality rather than policies that do not themselves produce injustice.

Selling passports dilutes the value of citizenship to a tradable commodity, voiding it of the sense of rights and duties and undermining citizens’ solidarity. If states sell citizenship, what the buyer gets will no longer look like citizenship at all.

Citizenship has two faces: one directed towards other states, the other one directed towards citizens inside the polity. The policy of selling EU passports to investors disfigures both faces. Members states who do so cash in on the added value of EU citizenship created by all the member states jointly rather than by themselves. The global inequality of birthright citizenships will be exacerbated instead of diminished if the most valuable citizenships are sold to wealthy elites. Internally, selling citizenship corrupts democracy in a similar way as vote-buying and once again links the presumptively equal status of citizenship to social class, just as income tests for naturalisation do. As a union of democracies, the EU must be concerned when democracy is corrupted by the rule of money in any of its member states.

At bottom, what makes the golden passport wrong is that it undermines political equality, not that it puts closed communities in question, or shatters the separations between the spheres of justice. What remains priceless is the active face-to-face partaking and building of democratic institutions on the basis of principles of equality and solidarity: that is what money can’t buy.