Dangerous Liaisons: Money and Citizenship 13 Even staunch defenders of the market approach to citizenship understand that they are facing a hard sell. Becker, for one, admits that ‘people object to the sale of permits because, as they say, “citizenship is not to be for sale’”12, and this is a moral intuition that runs deep. As evidenced by recent debates over the instalment of cash-for-passport programmes, most people have strong reservations against attaching a price tag to citizenship13. The reasons are many. As already mentioned, such a move may cause irreparable harm to the vision of citizenship as grounded in long-term relations of trust and shared responsibility and may prefigure the conflation of the political and ethical with the economic and calculative. It may also undermine membership bonds grounded in co-authorship, cross-subsidisation of risk, and even sacrifice that might be expected in times of need. What is more, citizenship currently involves making collective decisions, and translating those decisions into binding commitments, in the context of a political project that is far larger than oneself, and that extends well beyond the lifespan of each generation of members – a time horizon that will be extremely hard to sustain under a regime of strategic transactions, according to which ‘wealth buys membership.’ Turning citizenship into a money-based prize also contradicts any notion of complex equality through blocked exchange according to which advantage in one sphere (here, wealth) cannot be legitimately transferred to another (in this case, membership)14. This makes the idea of selling membership unnerving for anyone who objects to the ultimate triumph of economics over politics, the reduction of our public life and ethics into mere pecuniary transactions, or the imperialistic idea that ‘trades’ occupy the full terrain of human value and meaning15. Another set of concerns arises in the context of supranational citizenship, as in the derivative structure of European citizenship. The actions of those member states that take the liberty to put their national citizenship ‘on sale’ indirectly affects the supranational political membership good that is shared by other countries, which may resist such commodification. There are also complex questions about to whom (beyond its own citizenry) the transacting 12 13 14 15 Above n. 7. Borna, S. & J. M. Stearns (2002), ‘The Ethics and Efficacy of Selling National Citizenship’, Journal of Business Ethics 37 (2): 193-207, at 197. Walzer, M. (1983), Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books. Radin, M. J. (1987), ‘Market-Inalienability’, Harvard Law Review 100: 1849-1937; Sunstein, C. R. (1997), ‘Incommensurability and Kinds of Valuation: Some Applications in Law’, in R. Chang (ed.), Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason, 234-254. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Sandel, M. J. (2013), What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.