I suggest that it is useful to consider the external and internal perspectives separately. Armstrong and Barbulescu look instead at citizenship through a lens of global (in)justice and conclude that the sale of EU passports is merely one instance – and not the most significant one – of how citizenship policies ‘both feed off, and make it harder to tackle, underlying global inequalities.’ This echoes Shachar’s initial comment that we should be equally critical of the comparatively rare practice of putting up citizenship for sale and of ‘granting citizenship according to nothing but the fortuitous and arbitrary circumstances of station of birth’. While the instrumental value of citizenship of an EU member state for transnationally mobile populations has increased, citizenship as a ‘sacred bond’ between an individual and a state has unravelled. Spiro regards the sale of citizenship as yet another symptom of its inevitable decline due to globalisation, alongside the increasing toleration of dual citizenship, as he has argued previously. This makes it quite natural to consider the external value of citizenship from a global perspective, as Spiro, Armstrong and Barbulescu do in different ways. What the Maltese and similar programmes do is to transform an inherited privilege of co-ethnic populations residing abroad into a global commodity. In this respect, Italy, Hungary and Romania, whose ethnic citizenship policies have created hundreds of thousands of new EU citizens abroad, are worse sinners than Malta. As Shachar and Dzankic point out, these people are likely to use their passports for other purposes than a ‘return’ to the state whose citizenship they have obtained. Malta behaves like a member of a cooperative that sells membership to outsiders at a price that in no way reflects her own contributions.īeyond the obvious unfairness in the division of monetary gains from the value of EU citizenship, member states also have reasons to be concerned about any one of them naturalising persons born and residing abroad without genuine links to the country. It is not hard to understand why this irritates EU institutions and other member states. When selling its passport for € 650,000 to non-resident foreigners, Malta intends to cash in on this European added value of its external citizenship.
Finally, EU citizenship offers now also diplomatic protection by other member states to EU nationals residing in third countries. The EU passport is, moreover, a key that opens the doors of a large number of third countries for visa-free entry. It has expanded the right to return into freedom of movement throughout the Union.
The European Union has strongly increased the external value of its member states’ citizenships. The two faces belong to the same head, but sometimes the stories that they tell become dangerously disconnected. It tells them that, in spite of their different interests and identities, they are equal as individuals and collectively govern themselves through their right to vote. The internal face speaks to citizens as members of a democratic community. The external face turns to other states and demands that they recognise the country’s passport as well as to citizens living abroad whom it promises the right to return and diplomatic protection. Like the Roman god Janus, whose head was displayed above city gates, citizenship has two faces: one looks outwards, the other one inwards.
0 kommentar(er)
