The Golden Passport ‘Russian’ Eutopia

Social Anthropology , 2022

In the face of utopian discussions on global citizenship and cosmopolitan identities, this article argues that the concept of off shoring provides insights into rising realities in elite mobility and the formation of expat communities. I do this in the context of the proliferation of 'golden passport programmes', through which rich people are naturalised as citizens in the countries where they invest. Showing how the global citizenship utopia is materialised locally, I argue that golden passports are the continuation of off shoring by other means. Presenting an ethnographic portraiture of those enabling Russians to acquire the Cypriot passport, as well as how the Russophone community takes shape locally in Cyprus, the article shows how 'expat communities' can form as enclaves of safety that off er off shore convenience for certain elite community members. It also shows that golden passports exacerbate local inequality, undermining the egalitarian utopia of citizenship at large, with detrimental eff ects on the local sense of civitas.

Citizenship Studies, 2020

This article conceptualises citizenship in Gramscian terms, as a contested element of struggles for hegemony within civil society. Based on ethnographic snapshots from Cyprus, it is shown how the agency of migrants from the nearby region not only subverts a restrictive border regime, but also challenges a hegemonic paradigm of citizenship shaped by colonialism, ethnic conflict, as well as crisis and austerity. At the same time, struggles for legal recognition occur in a state of relative autonomy from this social contestation of citizenship. They rather express a desire for freedom of movement as a right in itself, in a context where legal citizenship is becoming synonymous with mobility.

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

This paper explores how the non-resident citizenship made available for Hungarians living beyond Hungary's borders impacted the national identification of newly naturalised non-resident Hungarians. Through the analysis of 51 semi-structured in-depth interviews with recently naturalised Hungarians in Romania, Serbia, the U.S. and Israel, the paper compares how citizenship as a legal institution is perceived, practiced and consumed by Hungarians living in Hungary's neighbouring countries and overseas diasporas. Not denying the instrumental implications of the Hungarian passport, the paper argues that it is also an important means of constructing national identities. My empirical research shows that the passport strengthens the holder's sense of belonging to the national group. In addition, citizenship is also considered as a valuable symbolic asset which can be instrumentalised as means of social closure. Non-resident Hungarians use their Hungarian passports to prove their European ancestry and/or belonging to the Hungarian nation. At the same time, the passport also enables its holder to distance herself from the populations in their home-states in order to elevate the holder's social status.

Coercive Geographies, 2020

Global market integration from the late 1970s onwards was widely understood to be the catalyst for increased geographical, and by implication social mobility. The deepening of EU integration and the bloc's expansion was one of the political developments reflective of this optimism. Boundaries disappeared, giving citizens the right to live, work and even vote in other member-states. In the aftermath of the 2008 global economic meltdown, this optimism has faded away. 'Freedom of movement for EU nationals' has emerged as a contentious political issue in Brexit Britain. The so-called 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the partial suspension of the Schengen agreement by EU states, as well as the ongoing deaths by drowning in the Mediterranean Sea have exposed the limits of geographical permissiveness. Globally, new walls are being erected, such as in Palestine and along the US-Mexico border, while bordering practices are being steadily externalized (Casa-Cortes, Cobarrubias, and Pickles 2016). A consensus in public discourse dictates that a borderless liberal world order, so carefully crafted for half a century, is under threat by populists who engage in trade wars, appeal to racist instincts, reject cosmopolitanism, and preach isolation. Conversely, the pre-populist era has come to be associated with 'mobility,' understood as an expression of a yearning for self-fulfilment against the allegedly collectivist impulses of the populists. Thus, anti-Brexit imagery in Britain and elsewhere places heavy emphasis on positive experiences of once having been an erasmus student, striking friendships in other European countries, or even finding romantic love there. Mobility becomes detached from the social structures affecting it on a daily basis, while being reduced to a colorblind experience of individuals participating in society primarily as consumers, or 'market citizens' (Streeck 2016). Nevertheless, by disassociating mobility from structure, the former inevitably converges with 'expatriate,' a figure deriving from the colonial past, who is individualistic, skilled, cosmopolitan, adaptable, and more often than not white (Kunz 2016; Cranston 2017).

International Studies Quarterly

Recent research views the proliferation of citizenship-by-investment schemes primarily as a manifestation of the commodification of citizenship by states succumbing to the logic of the market. I argue that these schemes exceed mere processes of commodification. They are part of a neoliberal political economy of belonging. This political economy prompts states to include and exclude migrants according to their endowment of human, financial, economic, and emotional capital. I show how the growing opportunities for wealthy and talented migrants to move across borders, the opening of humanitarian corridors for particularly vulnerable refugees, and the hardening of borders for "ordinary" refugees and undocumented migrants all stem from the same neoliberal rationality of government. In doing so, I challenge mainstream understandings of neoliberalism as a process of commodification characterized by the "retreat of the state" and "domination of the market." I approach neoliberalism as a process of economization, which disseminates the model of the market to all spheres of human activity, even where money is not at stake. Neoliberal economization turns states and individuals into entrepreneurial actors that attempt to maximize their value, not just in economic and financial but also in moral and emotional terms. This process, I conclude, undermines political notions of citizenship grounded in reciprocity, equality, and solidarity, not by replacing these principles with economic ones but by rewriting these principles in economic terms.

This paper examines how transnational migration, understood as cross-border social fields formed by migrants with their community of origin, impacts on the contours of liberal democratic citizenship. I examine citizenship in terms of membership, rights and identity and I focus on the normative argument made by liberal political philosophers regarding the appropriate response to immigration by the receiving state and contrast this with the notion of transnational migration. This finds that the liberal prescription of facilitating their access to membership of the polity commonly misunderstands what transnational migration actually is, i.e. the ongoing allegiance of emigrants to their communities of origin. This situation places strain on the hyphen between the nation and the state. In the receiving country the liberal argument calls for citizenship to emphasize the individual's relation with the state where they reside and to downplay the national dimension. From the perspective of the sending country the opposite holds true, transnational migration is based on the notion of citizenship as membership of a nation –even when the individual is absent from the state's territorial borders. Transnational migration thus brings out the disjuncture between the notions of citizenship and nationality. This paper explores how the contours of liberal democratic citizenship are affected by the transnational dimension of contemporary migration. There have been two distinct areas in which the term 'transnational' has been applied to citizenship in political philosophy, the first involves normative discussions on the liberal democratic response to the presence of foreign nationals in the national polity, and this is what this paper concentrates on. The other dimension is not directly concerned with migration and instead enquires about citizenship under conditions of globalization (Held 1999, Slaughter and Hudson 2007) as well as cosmopolitanism (Linklater 1999). I will discuss the normative debate on how citizenship policies should accommodate immigration and how transnational migration impacts on the notion of citizenship. Concordantly my research questions have been: how does transnational migration apply to the concept of citizenship –in both receiving and sending countries? Following this, what dimension of citizenship is brought to the fore? This study has undertaken a text analysis of academic material in English using the keywords citizenship and transnational migration. A notable limitation is that these studies concentrate exclusively on the receiving countries of the Western world, although the ongoing role played by the countries of origin is a defining facet of transnational migration studies (Basch et al. 1994, Levitt et al. 2003). Unfortunately, no studies were found from developing countries that focused on how their nationals abroad impact on notions of citizenship. The ontological position of this paper is the continuous

Approaching Transnationalisms, 2003

http://eudo-citizenship.eu/commentaries/citizenship-forum/citizenship-forum-cat/990-should-citizenship-be-for-sale?showall=&start=4 Published in in EUI WP 1/2014 Should citizenship be for sale? Ayelet Shachar and Rainer Baubock (eds), Robert Schuman for Advanced Studies, Florence. http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/29318/RSCAS_2014_01.pdf?sequence=1

Elite migration, 2022

The final panel considered whether it was productive to approach migration from the perspective of a global middle class, a concept first advanced by economists in the early 2000s (Milanovic & Yitzhaki, 2002). While they defined it in quantitative terms, does such a class carry distinctive qualitative traits or a shared identity or set of values that apply across borders? Do we see evidence for the theory that 'postmaterial' values are becoming global as middle-class lifestyle spread (Inglehart, 2018), and how does this relate to migration? Can it be linked to particular temporal (present-oriented) and spatial (downscaling) aspirations? How does migration both reflect and constitute social stratification? Does the migrant middle class develop new class sensitivities that could be critical of sending-country class structures or are class identities transplanted seamlessly? If there is a global middle class, does it reconfigure global racial hierarchies? Theodoros Rakopoulos My paper loosely correlates with the conceptual context of social reproduction, but it is not particularly focusing on it. I am inspired instead by the idea of offshoring. I am studying citizenships solutions, 'golden passports' that are part of a broader framework of offshoring services. I am presenting two of the many people that I have been working with in Cyprus: brokers who call themselves facilitators, providers, or being involved 'in the passport business'. One of them is a real estate agent, the other is an accountant for one of the Big Four companies. A citizenship-for-investment program in Cyprus was terminated after a huge backlash that touched several people in the higher echelons of the establishment. Cyprus is not unique in providing this framework of 'exceptional naturalization'. Targeted foreigners are high-income people, 'elite migrants'. What I am trying to unearth is whether these people are migrants in the traditional sense. What was offered to international investors, entrepreneurs buying 'real estate solutions' from places like Cyprus or Malta, or Montenegro, or Moldova, is a service that leads to naturalisation for them and their families, hence the connection with social reproduction. The programme ran for 13 years. But especially after the banking crisis in 2013, it ran amok. Within the years 2013-2020, an estimated 6500 investors were naturalised (Al-Jazeera, 2020). They came with extended families, not only children but in some cases parents and siblings. So, we might be talking about 50,000 people, interlocutors in the golden passport industry roughly estimate. There are no official data from the government, which cites personal privacy theodoros rakopoulos, sarah kunz & john osburg