The Price of Selling Citizenship Chris Armstrong Malta’s decision to sell citizenship triggers strong reactions in many of us. It appears to wrongfully connect the awarding of citizenship to ability to pay. And as Ayelet Shachar’s contribution points out, it disregards the other things that theorists often emphasise as key to citizenship acquisition: rootedness in a community, interaction with its institutions, long-standing residence, or participation in its political life. On the other hand, we might ask, can these other things always be necessary criteria for awarding citizenship? Imagine that our country is waging a desperate war of self-defence. Just when defeat – and the collapse of our community – appears inevitable, a force of foreign volunteers enters the fray and swings the result in our favour. These volunteers have performed a tremendous service to our community – perhaps the greatest service we can imagine. Imagine, next, that we decide to thank the volunteers by offering them citizenship in our country. Would this be morally repugnant? Far from it: the decision would, I think, be perfectly appropriate. What, then, of rootedness, interaction, residence, or participation? If giving citizenship to our imaginary volunteers is appropriate, then those things cannot be as important as we thought. Perhaps a massive, one-off contribution to the polity can be enough. We might think the Maltese example is very different, of course. Perhaps what we object to here is the selling of citizenship, because this rides rough-­ shod over the morally significant connection between citizen and community. Perhaps such ‘deals’ should never be made. I’m not so sure. We can tweak the war example so that volunteers are not forthcoming, and our country still faces annihilation. We then ask for volunteers, promising to grant citizenship as a reward for their services. Obviously, this looks less palatable than the original example, because instead of a selfless sacrifice we now have a rather self-interested deal. Still, would it be wrong for our country to offer this deal? It seems to me that, though it might make some of us uncomfortable, the answer is no. Perhaps a country can be © The Author(s) 2018 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating Transformations of National Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92719-0_5 25