What Is Wrong with Selling Citizenship? It Corrupts Democracy! Rainer Bauböck Like the Roman god Janus, whose head was displayed above city gates, citizenship has two faces: one looks outwards, the other one inwards. 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. The internal face speaks to citizens as members of a democratic community. 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 two faces belong to the same head, but sometimes the stories that they tell become dangerously disconnected. The European Union has strongly increased the external value of its member states’ citizenships. It has expanded the right to return into freedom of movement throughout the Union. The EU passport is, moreover, a key that opens the doors of a large number of third countries for visa-free entry. Finally, EU citizenship offers now also diplomatic protection by other member states to EU nationals residing in third countries. 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. It is not hard to understand why this irritates EU institutions and other member states. Malta behaves like a member of a cooperative that sells membership to outsiders at a price that in no way reflects her own contributions. Beyond 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. 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. 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. What the Maltese and similar programmes do is to transform an inherited privilege of co-ethnic populations residing abroad into a global commodity. © 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_8 37