48 V. Paskalev flocked to the Bulgarian consulates to apply for a passport. Suddenly, thousands were claiming that they are ‘of Bulgarian origin’. Very few of these people had any actual bonds with Bulgaria and it is difficult to believe that anyone had suddenly woken up to her or his true Bulgarian identity. Apparently their Macedonian self-consciousness was in harmony with a Bulgarian passport and the opportunities it gives to ‘Bulgarians abroad’. I hasten to add that Macedonia tolerates dual citizenship; if people had to renounce their Macedonian citizenship in order to obtain a Bulgarian passport, the numbers could be very different. Yet, the story is telling. It shows how easy it is for people to claim certain origins when this is convenient despite of firmly holding on to a different identity, which in the Macedonian case has been explicitly constructed as excluding the Bulgarian one. For all the value we attach to citizenship, the relative weight of its internal aspect is by far superseded by that of its external dimension. When asserting that a passport is more about travel than about anything else I am not being cynical – most citizens do care about membership, too. But when your passport matters so much outside of your country, you are under pressure to adjust your priorities. Thus, in the extreme case, your passport may be completely unrelated to your emotional belonging. Virtually all countries in the world discriminate among those wishing to enter on the basis of the completely arbitrary facts of their birthplace and descent. It is this arbitrariness which corrupts the value of citizenship (and by implication of domestic democracy), not the availability of a bypass or two for a tiny minority, be it rich or poor. So what should an EU Member State do in the face of the Maltese scheme if it is concerned with rescuing the value of citizenship as Shachar pleads? For sure, trying to prevent the Maltese from making some cash from a system which is already so unjust and distortive would not help much. Yes, selling citizenship does not do anything to help either, but if a wealthy European democracy is truly appalled by the idea of selling passports to the rich, why not start giving its passports for free to a more deserving crowd? The only decent response to the opening of a mobility corridor for the rich would be to open mobility corridors for the righteous – those who have shown exemplary civic virtue, have made sacrifices for democracy or human rights or are subject to outrageous persecution. A tentative list of candidates would include convicted Russian punks, jailed Egyptian protesters and Chinese dissidents, American whistle-blowers, Iranian adulterers facing stoning, etc. Certainly, one can immediately think about a number of problems that such a policy could create, yet if Raoul Wallenberg took the risk of