To insist that citizenship should not be granted in exchange for a significant investment is to ignore the randomness underlying all awards of citizenship. Those in Paraguay boasting Italian great-grandparents; members of Polish diasporas in Australia and elsewhere; large benefactors and talented sportsmen – all these people can become members of the European Union today, demonstrating the randomness of the rules.

The popular critique of the moment focuses on those countries that offer citizenship for a significant investment in the country in a perfectly transparent way. This critique is misjudged, for there is no other principle other than outright randomness at the core of the assignment of citizenship in today’s world.

People worry about discrimination at the point of acquisition of citizenship, yet discrimination is the main function of citizenship: to exclude other parts of society. Crucially, both actual and lawful aspects of exclusion must be taken into account. Many lawful citizens are, regrettably, in actual fact, stateless, in the sense of not receiving protection from their state of origin or enjoying substantive rights to return there. Promoting idealistic images of a citizenship of the past is to misrepresent today’s social facts, where plenty of people are failed by their states, day after day.

Real citizenship starts with an actual extension of rights and giving a voice to those who are already formally included. Naturalisation is a second step which serves three functions: providing citizenship status to long-term resident immigrants; respecting and recognising citizens’ family ties through special naturalisation rules for family members; and reinforcing a society with talent, money, inspiration and diversity – which translates into inviting the rich, the beautiful and the smart (sometimes these three categories overlap, of course).

There should be no differentiation between these different groups of applicants. Arguing for making the rules as strict as possible for all misses the different purposes of conferring nationality in the first place. Be it sports, science, money or family, it is up to the national democratic process to determine the criteria.

Crucially, there is no ethical point to be made in arguing against money when inviting a new citizen if an expensive education or muscular power or simple marriage can also do the trick. Money is no less random a criterion, and this is exactly what citizenship is about. Unacceptable would be to sell a partial rather than full citizenship.

Maltese democracy should be respected and it should be for the Maltese alone to set the price

There are already multiple ways in which to acquire EU citizenship. It is highly unlikely, nearly impossible, that the number of the new Maltese citizens will represent a problem within the EU context, as the scale will remain small. This is particularly true compared with other current extensions of EU citizenship where a connection with the state itself is unnecessary, such as turning hundreds of thousands of Argentinians into Italians based on the romantic concept of inter-generational continuity, or distributing Hungarian passports in the Serbian province Vojvodina, or Romanian passports in Moldova.

Importantly, there is nothing wrong at all with all these practices, which are both democratic and legal, and thus supply a strong argument in support of the Maltese law. Indeed, investing in your nationality is at least as sound as investing in a lawyer to rediscover your Italian heritage for the sake of claiming an Italian passport.

It is clear that Maltese citizenship’s greatest value for those who invest in it is the visa-free travel it brings. The many rights associated with it should not be forgotten either, however: to work and live in Malta and the EU, non-discrimination in the EU and diplomatic protection in the third countries are among such rights.

Clearly, there is no breach of EU law here, since member states are fully competent in this field, as both international and European law teaches us, and now as we have seen, the European Commission even formally agrees with this practice. The wealthy, newly-minted Maltese will, in fact, satisfy all the formal requirements of the EU Citizenship Directive 2004/38, and may go on to become ideal EU citizens in London or Paris. Where is the problem?

EU citizenship itself provides the most vivid demonstration of how citizenship has changed to become a more ethically acceptable institution. Non-discrimination on the basis of nationality is at the very core of EU law. France is prohibited from treating its own nationals differently from, say, resident Estonians or Maltese. Any EU citizen can move to Malta, and Malta has to treat them like its own citizens.

The very existence of the EU disproves the validity and relevance of the various language, culture and other tests that incomers are subjected to. Indeed, if a Romanian is good enough to be embraced by British society as equal, subjecting a Moldovan to any kind of tests is utterly illogical: the arguments of the protection of culture and language are simply devoid of relevance when more than half-a-billion EU citizens are exempted from them.

For these reasons, I do not find the arguments against Malta’s Citizenship-by-Investment programme convincing. Moreover, Maltese democracy should be respected, and it should be for the Maltese alone to set the price.

From a legal perspective, Malta’s case is solid: EU law, as now fully recognised by the European Commission, is unquestionably on its side and even protects new citizens under the Malta programme from the legally baseless idea of withdrawing citizenship at some future point in time.

Dimitry Kochenov is chair of EU Constitutional Law, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

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