Dangerous Liaisons: Money and Citizenship 15 it is not that € 1 million is too high or too low a price, but that placing a ‘for sale’ tag on citizenship, no matter what amount is written on it, has a corrosive effect on non-market relations, eroding the ties that bind and altering our view of what it means to belong to a political community. Just as we should be critical of granting citizenship according to nothing but the fortuitous and arbitrary circumstances of station of birth19, I believe we must resist, with even greater force, the notion that money can buy ‘love of country’ – or secure membership in it. If governments and activists are listening, they should heed the warning signs. The ideal of equal citizenship has been inflicted with many wounds over the past decades, and has always been more of an aspiration than a reality. However, the dangerous and increasingly frequent links between money and access to political membership reflected in the more calculated, mercantilist-­like perceptions of citizenship that have given rise to unfettered cash-for-passport programmes threaten not only the implementation of the ideal, but the ideal itself. Courting the world’s moneyed elite by relaxing standard admission and naturalisation requirements may enrich the coffers of a country in the short run, but in the long haul it risks cheapening something far more important: citizenship itself. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. 19 Shachar, A. (2009), The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Shachar, A. (2011), ‘Earned Citizenship: Property Lessons for Immigration Reform’, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 23: 110-158.