Merit and reciprocity

At the core of the critique of cash for honours lay a defence of merit. The sale of honours precluded noble status from tracking merit exclusively. The association of birth with merit is at first puzzling: what does noble (hence inherited) status have to do with merit? But it becomes clear once we grasp the particular understanding the nobility had of “merit”, which was very different from our understanding of it.^{Footnote 14} Specifically, the nobles’ definition of merit went well beyond considerations of virtue [Smith Reference Smith1996: 21].

In France, merit could arise only from a long-term personal relationship with the Crown. The recognition of merit was the unique prerogative of the king [ibid.: 7]. A man of merit^{Footnote 15}—a nobleman that is—was worthy of his status as recompense for past services he and his ancestors had provided to the king. Merit was thus grounded in a longstanding gift relationship with the king. Noble status (as inherited status) was a proof of strong bonds and entrenched obligations to the Crown created by past services and gratifications.^{Footnote 16} The sale of honours was bound to clash with the nobility’s very specific understanding of merit. To be sure, giving the king money in exchange for a noble title might be termed as “granting him a service” or “doing him a favour”. But it did not say anything about past commitments and services to the Crown—which alone could evince merit, in the common understanding of the time.^{Footnote 17} Important was the timing of such exchanges: to confer merit, as the nobles understood it, such exchanges had to have taken place on repeated occasions spanning hundreds of years. Becoming a nobleman immediately upon the first payment of cash failed to say anything about the past. And most importantly—taking the longstanding past to be the only true indicator of what was to come—it failed also to say anything about the future of these relationships.

In England too, noble status was a hallmark of personal merit [Stone Reference Stone1958: 60]. Its sale was seen to deprive “the Crown of the fairest means of rewarding deserving servants by making nobility appear cheap” [Mayes Reference Mayes1957: 36, my emphasis]. Even those engaged in the practice were aware of this moral pitfall. One purchaser of honours defended his new acquisition as follows: “he observed merit to be no medium to an honorary reward, that he saw divers persons who he thought deserved it as little as he (either in their persons or estates) by that means leap over his head, and therefore seeing the market open and finding his purse not unfurnished for it he was perswaded to ware his mony as other men had done” (ibid.).

So money did not make one worthy of noble status. Does money make one worthy of citizenship? We might think not. Like the old nobles, we might well take merit to arise from a longstanding relationship to a community. Such relationship would presuppose repeated interactions and exchanges spanning generations, or at least many years for non-birthright citizens seeking to be naturalized. Under this understanding of “merit”, conferral of citizenship would recognise robust relationships (social, political, and economic) to a community of citizens. Just as one’s longstanding commitments and services to the Crown made one worthy of nobility, so do one’s longstanding commitments and relationship to a community make one worthy of citizenship.

Indeed, an important role of naturalization tests is to prove the existence and robustness of these relationships. Residence requirements, in particular, place emphasis on their duration.^{Footnote 18} Merit might be subject to a test of time, today just as it was in the 17^th century. Here is why it arguably should be. Robust relationships to a community are a measure of equal standing in that community and surely it is equal standing that citizenship should ultimately reflect, not big purses. Status (whether noble or citizen status) should always mirror social realities [Carens Reference Carens2010]. Yet, as there are no “robustness tests” in investor citizenship (beyond that of the pocket), formal status becomes a broken mirror of these realities.

Besides merit, the old nobles had an additional reason for insisting on duration. Longstanding gift relationships would bind one to the Crown by duties of reciprocity. The duration of relationships mattered because only the passage of time permitted repeated interactions, which were the true test of reciprocity [Trivers Reference Trivers1971; Axelrod and Hamilton Reference Axelrod and Hamilton1981]. Cash transactions are, of course, one-off interactions in a spot market. There was thus a worry that the “pocket nobility” would fail to reciprocate the king for its new privileges. If privileges were bestowed in exchange for money, then there would be no room for debts of gratitude. This point did not go unnoticed.

Reciprocity was a key value in the relationship with the king. Nowadays reciprocity is a key value in the relationship with the state. A lack of reciprocity may lead to the dissolution of the state or to the breakdown of state institutions in times of hardship. One task of citizenship is to promote reciprocity among community members. But if we want citizenship to foster reciprocity, then granting citizenship to investors might be a bad idea.

First, investors will generally try to maximise their profits, either in the short or long run [Hall and Soskice Reference Hall and Soskice2001]. According to mainstream economic theory, this is the main goal of economic activity [Hicks Reference Hicks1939]. Rational choice inspired economic theorists assume [Smith Reference Smith, Campbell, Skinner and Todd1776; Friedman and Friedman Reference Friedman and Friedman1980; Sen Reference Sen1977], and empirical analyses [Jorgenson Reference Jorgenson and Ferber1967; Reference Jorgenson1971] confirm, that entrepreneurs generally do just that. If citizenship comes to reward investors, then indirectly it comes to reward the pursuit of self-interest. Second, a history of past interactions creates robust obligations and a sense of responsibility towards one’s peers. Special relationships create special duties [Scheffler Reference Scheffler1997]. These are lacking in the case of someone just deciding to buy citizenship one day (whereas such relationships are much more often present in the case of someone following the standard naturalization route). Citizens-by-investment can, and many will, retain their original residences abroad, not relocating to their new state of citizenship. The lack of interactions (past or future) with the new community could prevent the emergence of any obligations or any fellow feeling toward the investor citizens’ new co-nationals.

But the problem may lay not with investors per se, but with market relationships. Markets reward reciprocity only indirectly, via self-interest. And the logic behind the mode of distributing a good may contaminate its mode of use. Having acquired their citizenship through the market, investors might follow the same market logic in their citizen capacity. If so, in times of hardship, when citizenship is no longer profitable to them, investors could simply defect. They may likely transfer their capital elsewhere and forget all about the special duties they have qua citizens. In the market, dissatisfaction is expressed by exit. In democracies it is supposed to be expressed through voice. Investors will prefer exit to voice if they act as consumers, not as citizens [Hirschman Reference Hirschman1970].

A similar worry was expressed with respect to the pocket nobility. Was the cash bond sufficient to ensure that a nobleman would remain loyal to the king in case of war, sacrificing himself if necessary? So if the king thought that by selling honours he was potentially increasing the ranks of his supporters, he was obviously wrong. Instead, it put him in an even more precarious situation, making him reliant on people who had little incentive to help.^{Footnote 19} Perhaps it is worth noticing that selling honours was self-defeating for the other party as well. Nobility was first and foremost a state of distinction—of being born into a noble family. Scarcity made nobility highly valued and desired. Those buying noble titles were doing it partly with the intention of distinguishing themselves from the masses. They wanted to purchase a status of distinction. But their plans backfired. Commodification led to an inflation of honours, depreciating nobility to the point that it was no longer the state of distinction it once was.

Similarly, a community might try to increase its wealth by selling citizenship [Peter Reference Peter2013]. This could be profitable, at first. But that community would, arguably, be selling citizenship to the wrong people: individuals whose main reason for buying it would be pure profit maximization. If so, they will make use of this citizenship to improve profits, possibly transferring them to offshore accounts to escape taxation, for example. Therefore, while the nation might be better off economically at the start, in the long term it might well be worse off. The typical investor will try to cover his initial costs of buying the citizenship and make profits beyond that in ways that could be detrimental to the national economy. Both cases illustrate how market exchanges can be self-defeating, and this could be one good reason for blocking them.

However, markets may not be altogether incompatible with reciprocity. They might simply promote a different kind of reciprocity. Return transactions extinguish all standing debts of gratitude. Contrary to gift giving, no subsequent duties of reciprocity survive the return transaction. Yet this does not mean that there is no reciprocity in market relationships. Quite the contrary. One instantly reciprocates for what one gets. As Marx [Reference Marx and Martin1973: 244] put it, in the market, reciprocity is a “natural precondition of exchange”. What then is the problem?

Markets do not have a primary and direct concern with reciprocity. Reciprocity appears spontaneously, but purely as a by-product of the pursuit of self-interest. In Marx’s words, “the common interest which appears as the motive of the whole is recognised as a fact by both sides; but, as such, it is not the motive, but rather it proceeds, as it were, behind the back of these self-reflected particular interests, behind the back of one individual’s interest in opposition to that of the other” [ibid.]. The problem of markets is—in Marx and later in Cohen’s view—that they fail to promote “communal reciprocity” [Cohen Reference Cohen2009; Vrousalis Reference Vrousalis2012]. Communal reciprocity entails yielding one another mutual services, as in a gift relationship (“I care that you care for me”). If market reciprocity is ensured by cash rewards, communal reciprocity in contrast is ensured uniquely by a caring for human beings. It turns on the relationship with the other members of the community—with the other members of the jazz band, in Cohen’s example. In this sense, communal reciprocity is a club good—a good belonging to members only [Buchanan 1965]. To be sure, gift relationships are characterized by uncertainty: we do not know if, how, and when the other will reciprocate. Also, there are no mechanisms for enforcing reciprocation. Gift relationships are based on trust, and communal reciprocity requires mutual trust. In the market, by contrast, little interpersonal trust is required: we know how and when the other will reciprocate; there are clear rules and mechanisms for enforcing reciprocity (as in contracts, for example). Market reciprocity is less about mutual trust and more about mutual satisfaction of interests. But trust being hard to gain is what makes it so dear to us. And for this precise reason communal reciprocity may be more valuable than its market counterpart.

Selling citizenship suggests that we are equally content with one type of reciprocity (market) as another (communal). Yet there may be good reasons for not being so. First, surprisingly, gift relationships might promote a better satisfaction of needs. The world is uncertain: we cannot know what exactly we will need, and when exactly we will need it. Gift relationships are not tightly specified, which is a comparative advantage they have over contracts in that connection [Simon Reference Simon1951; Williamson Reference Williamson1985; Goodin Reference Goodin, Shapiro and Hardin1993]. For example, the king was often not sure whether he would need an army or a shelter, and when. Entering a gift relationship with the nobleman was thus more useful to him than entering a cash one (the nobleman reciprocating instantly and in cash necessarily in the latter). Analogously, when citizenship is sold, the list of expectations has already been drawn and satisfied on both sides.

Second, market reciprocity (as a by-product of the pursuit of self-interest) cannot prevent the dissolution of societal bonds or the state in times of hardship when individual survival is at stake. But communal reciprocity might. So if citizenship must further promote reciprocity, citizenship cannot be put on sale. The investor’s relationship with the community will be eminently contractual. As such, it could be vulnerable to the dangers discussed above. In particular, market reciprocity would not be able to prevent the citizen-investor from defecting (with all his capital) when times are hard.

Fairness

The sale of peerages can also be thought of as unjust given that all commoners did not have an equal opportunity of availing themselves of it. Only rich commoners did. By the same token, investor citizenship might also be thought unjust insofar as putting citizenship on sale discriminates against the poor. All otherwise identically situated individuals should arguably have an equal opportunity of becoming citizens, regardless of their financial situation.

While it is true that the poor might not have the same opportunities to acquire citizenship (i.e., via investment), they nonetheless have other opportunities to do so (via standard naturalization). So in the end, a defender of investor citizenship might say, both rich and poor can naturalize one way or another. But selling citizenship may still be problematic in two ways. First, investor citizenship makes available only to the rich an additional naturalization route, over and above the standard one which is available to the rich and poor alike. Second, the naturalization-by-investment route waives important requirements, such as residence, language, or renunciation of existing citizenship. Those requirements loom large in the standard naturalization route, the only one available to the poor. Not only do the rich have more naturalization routes available; they have also smoother routes.

Of course, discrimination of some sort is inherent in standard naturalization as well, for example, in the case of language or history tests. Highly educated people are surely advantaged, yet that is not considered problematic. Quite the contrary, some voices claim that the tests should be made more difficult to pass, with the positive consequence of “adopting” better-quality citizens. So, if it is not a problem to discriminate on the basis of education, why should discrimination on the basis of money be an issue? Why object to discrimination against the poor, but not to discrimination against the uneducated?

The two forms of discrimination are different in relevant respects. First, discriminating on the basis of education is less degrading than discriminating on the basis of money: at least education is an enduring attribute of the person, rather than a merely contingent and perhaps fleeting fact about the size of his pocket. Second, there are good reasons to discriminate on the basis of the first, which do not apply to the second. How well one performs in naturalization tests is an indicator of that person’s capacity to integrate into the community; competence in such tests is the best proxy we have for such capacity. Money might guarantee that one is a successful entrepreneur.^{Footnote 20} But money alone is not a good indicator of an individual’s capacity to fit into that community in many other respects. Third, one does not get citizenship for education directly, as one gets citizenship for money directly in investor citizenship. Education will undoubtedly make it easier to pass the naturalization tests. But one gets citizenship exclusively for performing well in naturalization tests, not directly for the diplomas hanging on one’s wall.

Some might argue, however, that money is indeed a good indicator of one’s qualification for citizenship. There are financial requirements in the standard naturalization route too, after all. A significant fortune can guarantee that that individual will be able to contribute to his and his fellow nationals’ welfare. And contributing to the common good is surely a factor that makes one a good citizen. There was even a time, not so long ago, when property and financial status uniquely qualified one for holding political rights. If money does matter, why is investor citizenship a problem? First, nowadays we no longer think that voting rights should be conditioned upon property holdings: why then provide a fast track to citizenship on the basis of money? Investor citizenship might have made sense in the political context of the 19^th century but not in that of the 21^st. Second, the aim of financial requirements in standard naturalization is to prove economic integration in the labour market and financial independence (that someone will be a contributor to the community, not a drain). But in standard naturalization, the financial requirement is of a cloth with the other requirements that one has to meet. Together with those other requirements, it is a measure that that individual is on equal footing with the other members of the community. In investor citizenship, by contrast, financial requirements go well beyond what is minimally required for economic integration. Furthermore, they take precedence over (if not displacing altogether) other naturalization requirements, like language or culture tests. Money does not guarantee integration in those other respects, of course. Nor does a major fortune guarantee that the individual will necessarily contribute more economically, if tax avoidance is on that individual’s agenda.

Signalling

At this point we might wonder whether citizenship, or honours before it, really “say something” about their possessor. Honours certainly did. Allowing wealthy commoners (like merchants, traders and pirates) to easily join the ranks of the nobility thus created two problems.

First, noble status no longer testified to particular features, long time associated with it. The true gentilhomme had to be detached from all things material—money included—and animated only by higher pursuits. The main quality of the nobility was magnanimity (libéralité in French, i.e., freedom from selfishness)—the capacity to give “when giving is called for and without self-interest” [Smith Reference Smith1996: 29-31]. If the First Estate served God, and the Third Estate its own interests, the Second Estate was supposed to serve the sovereign [ibid.: 43]. For that, the nobleman had to be generous and capable of great sacrifices. In the case of the birth nobility, ancestry was proof of the lineage’s past generosity, and a promise of future generosity. Commoners lacked such ancestry and generally, it was thought, used their talents only for their personal advantage, in particular for increasing profits [ibid.]. Conferring noble title on someone who could not rise to the moral expectations associated with it was thus a bad idea. The “moral community” constituted by the old aristocracy felt threatened by the sale of honours [Le Roux Reference Le Roux2011]. Honours could be acquired, they worried, by individuals of dubious character not just dubious origins. In England, for example, the old aristocracy objected variously: to the ennoblement of Philip Stanhope, convicted for sodomy and pardoned for murder; to that of Robert Lord Rich, a famous pirate; and to that of Sir William Grey, involved in a customs-evasion scandal [Mayes Reference Mayes1957: 24-29]. The House of Commons complained that honours were abused by “people most odious to the commonwealth by their extortion, usury, and other ungodly kind of getting” [ibid.: 36].

Moreover, sold honours associated noble status with qualities that were profoundly anti-noble. Materialistic pursuits (now suddenly rewarded by grants of noble title) had been long considered incompatible with the noble condition. In France, for example, the reaction against the cash nobility was largely anti-bourgeois in form. Anti-bourgeois satires, like Boileau’s Fifth Satire or Molière’s plays [Alter Reference Alter1970], repeatedly emphasized the stark contrast between the true noble and bourgeois qualities (e.g., egoism, opportunism, ambition, entrepreneurial spirit). When bourgeois commoners became noblemen the result was hilarious and often grotesque. Wealth (and its display in one’s desire to emulate noble life) did not make one a true gentilhomme. Nor did it grant one equal standing among noble peers.

It is more difficult to determine what citizenship says today about one’s character in a way that is similar to how noble status spoke about character in the 17^th century. Talk of “citizenship virtues” easily leads to murky waters. There is only one instance in which naturalized citizenship does speak of character (or at least should): penal clearance, the main aim of which is to ensure that citizenship is allocated to those of “good character”.^{Footnote 21} Naturalization procedures aim to do more than establish good character. They also aim to track certain competences making one fit to be a citizen. Language tests, as well as history and culture tests, ensure the applicant can easily integrate into that community. But standard naturalization requirements are waived when citizenship is acquired upon investment. In this latter case, citizenship can no longer convey reliable information about the character or civic competence of its holder. At most it may convey information about his fortune or his entrepreneurial skills; yet money alone does not guarantee good character or civic competence.

Second, selling honours created confusion. The “inflation” of titles made the nobility practically undistinguishable from the richer elements among the masses. One could not know, from one’s title, who was a true noble and who was not. All group memberships, indeed all social labels, act as markers [Gintis, Smith and Bowles Reference Gintis, Smith and Bowles2001; Bowles and Gintis Reference Bowles and Gintis2011]. The main use of such markers is to facilitate social cooperation by imparting information. Often we need to interact with people without having much information about them. In cases of uncertainty, labels (memberships included) reduce information-seeking costs and risks, provided they impart some relatively reliable information about their holders. An important guarantee of the reliability of the information conveyed is the mode of distribution of those memberships. Groups devise various tests and procedures for ascribing membership. Their role is to track certain qualities or features of individuals, considered important by the group, and which are widely associated with that membership. The problem arises when one membership, usually associated with certain qualities and features, is distributed in a way tracking other unrelated qualities and features. In the case of honours, for example, their sale made it difficult for noble title to convey reliable information about the title-holder. It cast doubt on what information was conveyed by an individual’s title, for it was no longer possible to know whether any given nobleman’s title testified to noble qualities and a longstanding relationship with the Crown, or merely to a major fortune.^{Footnote 22} That explains why distinctions between old and new nobility were staunchly retained, if only at the symbolic level (in dress codes, seating rules, and so on) [Bitton Reference Bitton1969: 100-101].

Therein lies the analogy to citizenship. As one marker among many, a newly acquired citizenship also says something about the individual bearing it (about character or competence, at least in standard naturalization).^{Footnote 23} When travelling, we clearly see how citizenship acts as a marker. Persons entering a country are asked to show their passports. While citizens can enter unconditionally, additional guarantees or information (visas or other special provisions) are requested from non-citizens. States take citizenship and the information it conveys seriously. Indeed, they owe special protection to their citizens: international law bans states from denying access to their own citizens. The problem is that in allowing different modes of distribution of citizenship, each tracking different qualities and features in an individual (as with naturalized and investor citizenship), citizenship ceases to be a reliable marker. Investor citizenship might be a reliable marker of wealth. But we can doubt it is also a reliable marker of good character or civic competence, as citizenship is generally taken to be. If so, citizenship could easily convey false information about its holder: in everyday interactions, simply knowing that one is a citizen will not tell us whether one is of good character or competence or just plain rich.

Social values and meanings

Putting honours on the market inherently downgraded noble status. When subjected to “undignified haggling”, honours seemed “cheap” [Mayes Reference Mayes1957: 35]. Commodification dislodged the particular values and meanings that nobility used to have. It could no longer be seen as a status of distinction, associated with spiritual virtues or indicating the existence of a meaningful relationship with the Crown, for example. The reason for that is that different types of transfer (gift, exchange, cash transaction) attach different values and meanings to the same good. “Given freely” a good may convey one meaning; “given for money” it may convey another. By introducing new values or meanings for a good, commodification can undermine the old value and meaning the good had when otherwise distributed. For example, some object to prostitution for implicitly devaluing the desired good (“bought sex is not the same”) [Hirsch Reference Hirsch1977: 87]. Freely offered sex has a different meaning from sold sex, one that we particularly value.

Similarly, selling citizenship may change its value and meaning. Citizenship is a human right; indeed it is the right to have rights [Arendt Reference Arendt2004; UN 1948; Perez v. Brownell 1958]. We are all entitled to a citizenship as equal human beings. The right to have rights is not only inalienable (one cannot sell or renounce it); it is also unconditional and universal. As such, we need not buy this right; there is no point buying something we already have.^{Footnote 24} This is not to say that, when being sold a citizenship, the investor’s human right to citizenship is violated. It is not, assuming he was granted citizenship somewhere or other upon birth. Rather, it is just to say that the second citizenship he buys does not have the same value because it does not serve the same purpose of giving one the right to have rights in at least one place in the world. Citizenship granted to birth citizens or stateless refugees is importantly different, in that respect.

Perhaps the purely economic valuation embodied in investor citizenship might simply coexist with other different values and meanings that citizenship may have in other instances. Food, for example, may be valued both as a means of subsistence and as a means of pleasure. The value of food for a Swiss citizen eating caviar is certainly different from the value of food for a Biafran eating rice. In the case of the Swiss citizen, food does not fulfil its value as a means of subsistence, but as a means of pleasure. And while we might well think that the former meaning—of food as supporting life—is more important that the latter, both meanings coexist peacefully. What might be the problem with investor citizenship, then?

First, there is some added value to having all members of the community share a common meaning and value of citizenship—of what unites them, after all. The meaning of citizenship would then have to be the same in all instances. This could be a good idea insofar as allowing different values and meanings for the same good might create confusion or problems of coordination. Common shared meanings and practices (conventions) ensure collective coordination by creating concordant mutual expectations [Lewis Reference Lewis1969: 24-51].

Second, where different meanings exist, one meaning of the good may slowly contaminate the others or have a “domino effect”, in Radin’s [Reference Radin1996] words. In the example of food, the danger of primarily thinking of food as satisfying the gluttony of the rich would be to forget that it is also needed for the survival of the poor. The conflation of meanings can easily have unwanted practical consequences. In the case of citizenship, thinking of it as satisfying the desire for profitable investment opportunities may lead us to forget that it is first and foremost a human right. States might become reluctant to grant citizenship to stateless refugees, and more inclined to grant it to rich investors. Assuming that each state can grant a limited number of additional citizenships, and that it must make a decision as to whom to distribute them, such value shifts may have serious negative effects on respect for human rights.^{Footnote 25} Markets are blind to the reasons (need or desire) for seeking to acquire a good [Anderson Reference Anderson1990b]. If backed by larger purses, desires may take precedence in the distribution of some goods, whose primary purpose and value (like food or citizenship) come from serving needs.

But selling citizenship might be demeaning in other ways too. The nobility, for example, saw the sale of honours as a blow to its dignity as a group. Today’s citizens may be attached to and proud of their citizenships, just as noblemen were attached to and proud of their noble titles. Selling citizenship may then be damaging the self-esteem of the citizen community. By reducing group membership to a pile of money when selling it, citizens may feel they are reducing themselves qua group members to a pile of money. The issue is not that they are selling themselves too cheaply but rather that there is a price tag attached at all—some things like self-esteem or dignity are above price [Kant Reference Kant and Mary2012: 42]. A state selling citizenship risks undermining its citizens’ respect for it and their self-respect as members, just as the sale of honours undermined the nobility’s respect for the king and for itself.

Political consequences

Last but not least, selling honours raised two additional problems to those already mentioned: it involved corruption and implied the dangerous trade of political power. Take first corruption. Profits often went into private hands. As offensive as the sale of peerages was to the old aristocracy, it was all the more galling when the fees went to courtiers instead of the exchequer.^{Footnote 26} According to this view, commodification (of noble or citizen status) would be permissible if pursued for a good purpose, like boosting the king’s treasury or boosting national budgets, but not for boosting private fortunes.

In the sale of honours, the perceived moral problem may have had two sources. First, the noblemen may have had a problem with honours being sold by intermediaries (favourites) and not by the king himself. Here, the problem was not that noble title was commodified (sold), but that its sale was intermediated. Second, the nobility may not even have had a problem with the sale of honours being intermediated per se, but with something different: abuse of power by those intermediating its sale, i.e., corruption. These favourites may have had the king’s permission to negotiate and sell honours on his behalf. Yet, often enough they cashed in the fees themselves instead of transferring them to the treasury; they were abusing their power to traffic in honours. Commodification can easily be accompanied by corruption, especially when no clear rules are set. The sale of peerages was not a formally institutionalized practice. It was a disorganized trade, often contaminated by favouritism, and often going on without the king’s knowledge. The bulk of the sale of peerages was intermediated by the royal camarilla, who—in the absence of clear rules or supervisory agencies—would also pocket the money for itself [Mayes Reference Mayes1957: 26-29].

Now consider the sale of citizenship. First, just like the king’s favourites, state officials and bureaucrats may intermediate the sale of citizenship to investors. This may or may not be a problem in itself. Yet, not all states have clear and precise citizenship-by-investment schemes. Sometimes literally everything is left to the discretion of the authorities. In other cases, the rules are fuzzy. All this, in turn, favours abuse of power and corruption. In the absence of clear rules surrounding investor citizenship, state officials and bureaucrats could easily abuse their power to sell citizenship in order to derive personal profits or promote their narrow political interests.

Consider next the trade of political power. Ennoblement did more than grant symbolic status. It granted political power: the right to sit in the House of Lords or in the Estates. Noblemen also sat in the king’s law courts and at council meetings. They were in a position to dispense justice and to block the king’s edicts. For these reasons, in England, the nobility feared that its new “additions” would deprive it of respect and support in disputes with the Crown [Mayes Reference Mayes1957: 35].^{Footnote 27} Indeed, it did not take long for the Commons to complain that honours were abused in their “mercenary acquisition” [ibid.: 36]. The sale of peerages was dangerous for putting “mercenaries” in positions of exercising political power and of administering justice.

Similarly selling citizenship entails more than selling mere formal status. It amounts to the actual sale of the rights and duties attached to that status. Some of the rights and duties that citizens have are generally thought to be inalienable, for example, military duties, juror duties, voting rights, and so on [Walzer Reference Walzer1983; Radin Reference Radin1987; Rose-Ackerman Reference Rose-Ackerman1985]. We generally think that such rights and duties cannot (or should not) be put on the auction block. But if such rights and duties entailed by one’ citizenship cannot be bought and sold, then by extension it should follow that citizenship itself cannot be bought and sold. This would obviously be the simplest and cleanest way to object to investor citizenship.

A longer route would be to point out the ways in which selling political rights violates democratic equality and is utterly inefficient. It is generally thought that certain commodities—life, heath, and citizenship included—“should be distributed less unequally than the ability to pay for them” [Tobin 1950: 264]. So too, implicitly, the political rights and duties attached to citizenship. Economic inequalities are ubiquitous, to be sure. Yet, as ubiquitous as they are, it is often thought that they should not be allowed to spill over into political inequalities as well. A market in political rights would, on one hand, concentrate power in the rich [ibid.: 269]. A market in political duties would, on the other, concentrate burdens on the poor. The distribution of resources would then dictate the distribution of political power, and public matters would become private business [Walzer Reference Walzer1983: 99].

Selling political rights and duties would also be politically inefficient. Blocked exchanges (such as of money for votes or the right to vote) serve the important function of controlling the externalities some exchanges can produce [Epstein Reference Epstein1985]. Political power is, after all, power over the commons. The logic of the market (exalting the pursuit of self-interest) is likely to endanger a “we” approach to the commons, worsening thus the tragedy of the commons [Hardin Reference Hardin1968]. Those having “bought” their political power are likely to relate to their newly-acquired political power in the same purely entrepreneurial way in which they acquired it in the first place. An economistic approach to political power, as promoted by the sale of citizenship, could encourage the depletion of the commons by shifting attention from common to private concerns.

Selling citizenship could also be seen as “selling out the nation” in another way. Political rights and duties are relational and thus generally thought to be inalienable [Tribe Reference Tribe1985: 33]. They are rights and duties to someone, not something. When voting or when holding political office, we are exercising political power over our fellow national peers. Our political and civil duties (to vote, to serve as a juror) are duties toward significant others. Such relational rights and duties arise from a special relationship with particular other individuals. They cannot be bought and sold because they cannot be transferred to someone else.

I have examined the sale of honours to show mutatis mutandis that investor citizenship might be problematic. Although some authors [e.g., Carens Reference Carens1987] have already argued that present day citizenship is very similar to feudal membership, the analogy might still seem ill judged. A clarification is thus in order.

The article does not aim to defend or glorify in any way the ancient honours system, or to demonize or idealize citizenship systems before the inception of investor citizenship. The recourse to the historical case of selling honours is purely instrumental. By resorting to this analogy, the article aims to show that the market logic undermines values which are (at least purportedly) common to both systems––values such as merit, reciprocity, or political efficiency. Paradoxically, the old honours systems was, in many ways, founded on values akin to those that ground our political systems today. Democratic and national revolutions have simply extended the relationships to which these values apply—from relationships between members of the same social group to relationships between diverse social groups composing the nation.

Our ideal of democratic citizenship is rooted in values and principles such as reciprocity or equality. Yet, our practice of democratic citizenship today is far from this ideal in many ways. Its reliance on birth circumstances is just one of them [Shachar Reference Shachar2009]. Yet, just because our practice of citizenship has colossally failed to match the ideal does not mean that we must abandon it altogether or move entirely to the opposite direction. To be sure, investor citizenship is a step back from our ideal of democratic citizenship, seriously prejudicing values such as fairness and equality. It is not the first and probably not the last; but that does not mean that we should not be concerned about it. We should be concerned about it, just as we should be about all other steps away from our citizenship ideal.

I should also emphasise that the comparisons between investor citizenship and customary naturalization requirements are not in any way prescriptive. By the comparison I do not imply that current naturalization requirements are in line with our ideal of democratic citizenship. Far from it. Yet if naturalization requirements deviate (to a greater or lesser extent, just how much being beyond the scope of this article) from our citizenship ideal, investor citizenship goes entirely off track, as argued. Given that things are bad as they are, why make them even worse?