In early 2010, media reports in my native Montenegro announced the arrival, on a private plane from Dubai, of a new citizen. His name was Thaksin Shinawatra and he was the prime minister of Thailand until 2006, when he was ousted from power by a coup. Ever since, Shinawatra has been on the run, avoiding the two-year prison sentence for corruption and abuse of power in his country (MacDonald 2010). As Interpol had not circulated the Thai arrest warrant against Shinawatra before he was granted a Montenegrin passport, his criminal record check appeared clear. Thanks to a promise of a multimillion investment in the Montenegrin economy, Shinawatra found a safe haven in the small Balkan state, which was under no obligation under international law to extradite its new citizen to Thai authorities. A year later, Montenegro adopted a plan to open up a programme for the sale of passports, based on legally defined investment amounts rather than the state’s discretion. This project was halted following the European Union’s (EU) Member States’ reminder of the precariousness of the country’s recent removal from the Schengen ‘black list’ and the abolition of tourist visas. The Montenegrin investor citizenship scheme was held in abeyance until October 2018, when the government announced the launch of a new programme. The halting of the scheme did not mean, however, that in the meantime a wealthy investor could not obtain the Montenegrin citizenship. An investor could benefit from the state’s prerogative to naturalise individuals who offer an exceptional contribution to the country of less than a million inhabitants—just as Thaksin Shinawatra did.

Meanwhile, between 2009 and 2013 Austrian politics were deeply shaken by two instances of the exchange of passports for investment, also enabled through legal provisions granting the state the power to naturalise those who have made ‘extraordinary achievements in the interest of the republic’ (Austrian Nationality Act, Article 10(6)). In 2011, the Provincial Court of Klagenfurt sentenced the head of the Carinthian Freedom Party (FPK) and deputy governor of Carinthia Uwe Scheuch to six months in prison and another twelve months on suspension for accepting a gift as a public official (The Economist 2013). Scheuch was prosecuted after the leak of a taped conversation of him offering Austrian citizenship to a Russian billionaire as ‘part of the game’. To receive Austrian citizenship, the Russian was required to invest €5 million in the province of Carinthia and make a donation to Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ), a splinter group of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) to which the FPK was allied and for which Scheuch served as provincial chair. After several rounds of appeal, the Regional Court of Graz sentenced Scheuch to a suspended seven-month sentence and a fine of €7500 (Kärnten-News 2012). He has since resigned from all political functions.

This story was nothing like that of Frank Stronach, a Canadian-Austrian billionaire for whom the above-mentioned legal provision was a way of buying into the country’s politics. Stronach, who was born in Austria, immigrated to Canada at the age of 22 and made his fortune there. He acquired Canadian citizenship, which resulted in the automatic loss of his Austrian nationality. Upon establishing the European headquarters of his auto parts company in Austria, Stronach was able to regain his citizenship on the grounds of ‘extraordinary achievements in the interest of the republic’. He subsequently started recruiting former politicians through his company. This enabled him to buy political influence and establish, in 2012, a political party—Team Stronach. In the 2013 Austrian parliamentary elections, Team Stronach won 11 seats becoming the fifth largest party in the country’s parliament. Due to the drop in public support, the party established by this investor citizen dissolved after the 2017 legislative elections.

The sale of passports has not been unknown in the rest of the world and in fact has been a common practice in the Caribbean islands of St Kitts and Nevis and the Commonwealth of Dominica for decades. Due to adverse climate conditions, and the fall in the price of sugar, these countries sought economic salvation in the business of selling passports. Since 2008, a similar practice has been ongoing in the Union of the Comoros. This small volcanic archipelago in the Indian Ocean has been troubled by a history of coups, and political and economic instability ever since its independence from France in 1975. A fragile economy coupled with political instability pushed the government of the Union of the Comoros towards arranging the sale of passports with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait, both of which have large stateless populations (‘Bidoons’). Once they acquired the Comorian passport, the Bidoons ceased to be stateless, but were explicitly barred from entering their new country. The use of the Comorian passport by UAE and Kuwait to manipulate a statelessness problem has raised a number of human rights concerns. The media described it as a ‘barbaric and inhuman operation that resembles the displacement of Palestinians, Armenians and the Falash Mura, among others. This is not only a plan against human rights and humanity, but also a case of human trafficking’ (Kareem 2014). It has also raised concerns over the Arab influence on the Comorian politics.

Yet, not all the sales of passports have been used for buying political influence. In August 2017, the British media covered the story of Amar Al-Sadi, who has escaped the war atrocities in Yemen and is now a citizen of Malta (Tulett 2017). Unlike other Yemeni families who fled the war as refugees or remained in conflict areas, Al-Sadi was able to apply to Malta’s Individual Investor Programme (IIP), and now also benefits from the rights of EU citizenship. This programme, established in 2014, opened the possibility for wealthy investors to acquire the citizenship of the small Mediterranean island in exchange for slightly over €1 million, deposited in three parts: direct investment, property investment and donation (Identity Malta 2017).¹ Following the intervention of the European Commission and concerns expressed by several EU Member States over the sale of Maltese and thus EU citizenship, the IIP beneficiaries are required to attest to a genuine connection with Malta. This is done through a one-year ‘effective residence’ condition, which does not entail continuous physical presence, but rather membership in sports, medical or other associations in Malta (Dalli 2015) and by taking an oath of allegiance to the country.

These are but a few examples of the recent wave of ‘passports for sale’ programmes, which have sparked vigorous academic and public debates on whether citizenship has become a good that can be bought and sold. Yet the possibility of obtaining membership in exchange for money dates back as far as ancient Rome and has persisted, in some form, throughout centuries. So, why do so many find the idea of selling citizenship intuitively disquieting? Why some countries resort to the sale of citizenship and others do not? How is it done in practice and who takes part in this global market for citizenship? Responding to these questions, this book explores how states remodel the rules for joining their community in response to growing economic interconnectedness. It highlights the discrepancies between citizenship policies aimed at immigrant integration and defence of the cultural elements of nationhood (e.g. integration tests, oath of loyalty, language knowledge, residence) and those such as the sale of passports, which create ‘long-distance citizens’. The book further examines the interests and strategies of not only states, but also of companies and individuals as participants in the nascent ‘citizenship industry’. The imminent transformation of citizenship through globalisation is illustrated by an analysis of the sale of citizenship in the EU, where the value of Maltese and Cypriot passports in the global citizenship market is notched up by the much higher value of EU citizenship.