Linking Citizenship to Income Undermines European Values. We Need Shared Criteria and Guidelines for Access to EU Citizenship Hannes Swoboda The decision by the Maltese Parliament to offer Maltese citizenship – and consequently – EU citizenship to third country nationals who can afford to pay € 650.000 comes as a closure of the EU year of citizens and reflects a worrying trend in the conception of all those rights related to EU citizenship, including above all freedom of movement. Malta is not an isolated case, though. As highlighted by other contributions to this Forum, other EU Member States have in time come to link access to residence and hence – albeit indirectly – to citizenship to income or to economic investment, although the Maltese proposal goes a step further by introducing a direct and free gateway to citizenship purely based on a monetary payment. Some may say that access to nationality is an exclusive competence of Member States and that the European Union has no right to interfere in these choices. From a purely legal perspective I would agree, but I believe we would miss the point if we did not see that, behind monetization of citizenship and residence, there is a vital political issue for the European Union to face, if we believe that Europe is more than just a wide single market. The political debate about the so-called ‘poverty migration’ in the EU and on limitations to free movement for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens is just another side of the same coin. The supporters of the idea that ‘free movement has to be less free’ base their belief on the assumption that free movement should be free for those citizens who have a suitable income and less free for those who have not. This questions the idea of citizenship as the core of a society, as the set of rights and duties defining active participation in the political, social and economic life of a community on an equal basis. And it questions the very idea of a European citizenship as a set of special rights connected to being a member of the European Union as a political Union, where individuals, ­notwithstanding their income and social position, can on an equal footing © 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_14 65