I think it would be both evasive and intellectually dishonest of me to write anything about the citizenship scheme without first saying where I stand. I’m in favour of the scheme, just about.
My main drift is that I have always been uncomfortable with borders, and with the use of paper – or the lack of it – to contain people (be they asylum seekers or Chinese tycoons) within them. Anything that desecrates, or at least forces us to think critically about, passports, visas, and such repressive regimes is welcome as far as I’m concerned.
My irreverence in this respect will come in handy next time a boatload of asylum seekers shows up. I will be able to argue that, with things like citizenship, one is either practical or principled.
The scheme as proposed is practical and desacralises citizenship. The practice of locking people up for 18 months just because they don’t have a piece of paper isn’t and doesn’t. Such double standards lend themselves to easy attack.
That said, I don’t have a strong opinion on this one. On the one hand, my antipathy toward notions of sacred, inviolable, and exclusive ties between individuals and nations is very great indeed. I honestly don’t see the logic of linking citizenship to blood and soil but not to resources, for example.
On the other, I resent the narrow meaning of ‘resources’ as defined by the citizenship scheme. While the Prime Minister may go on about ‘talent’ and the finance minister about ‘calibre’, it’s actually hard cash they have in mind all the way. I don’t see any allowances for individuals who excel in some field of science, for example.
I also think that schemes like this contribute towards the gulf, ever-widening by some accounts, between a tiny elite of super-rich individuals for whom the world is a kind of playground, and the rest of us. In this sense, the citizenship scheme is simply another instance of the use of paper (of a different kind, this time) to construct and fortify borders. These are the double standards I mentioned earlier.
Finally, I dislike the rhetoric about how kind and considerate we will be when we eventually feed the funds into social welfare. Assuming it’s not simply a dishonest sugar-coating exercise, what that babble implies is that welfare can be relegated to windfall economics rather than linked directly to fiscal capacity and the social responsibility that nourishes it.
All of that aside, I’m fascinated by what this whole citizenship business tells us, first, about the EU itself and, second, about our dealings with it.
It turns out the EU has a soft underbelly when it comes to citizenship and its corollaries. There is such a thing as a common EU citizenship as established by the Maastricht and subsequent treaties. It is supplementary to national citizenship, which basically means that it can only be acquired via individual member states. The whole thing thus respects and preserves national sovereignty over matters of citizenship and nationality.
Problem is, different member states operate different citizenship regimes, as well they might given their sovereignty, which is a recipe for disaster of the schizophrenic kind. It simply doesn’t make sense to have a common EU citizenship and no common policy for its acquisition.
It wouldn’t matter all that much if EU citizenship were a symbolic and inconsequential matter. Only it isn’t. Thanks also to a set of directly- and indirectly-linked agreements and treaties (Schengen, for example) EU citizenship comes with a stack of rights and obligations. The former explain why there are people who will pay a cool million to have a passport that looks like mine.
It’s almost impossible to detach rights and obligations from the mechanisms by which people come to have claims over them. To claim, say, human rights, one must first be human. As long as bonobos keep their opinions to themselves, the specifics are clear enough.
No such consolation with EU citizenship. In that case, the formula is: to claim EU citizenship rights one must first be an EU citizen, whatever that means. Not terribly useful I’d say.
There’s a reason why the problem isn’t likely to go away soon. Simply put, the survival of the EU depends on how well it manages to co-exist with the principles, passions, and consequences of national sovereignty.
I’m in favour of the scheme, just about
One way to circumvent that is to invoke some notion of loyalty – to say, in other words, that while countries may not be bound legally, they are bound morally. This I think is what Peter Xuereb had in mind in his perceptive interview with Times of Malta last Monday.
Still, it’s not at all clear that loyalty will get us very far. The upshot at present is that while the EU can decide whether Maltese hunters may bag one or two quail a day, it has no say over whether or not the Maltese government may sell citizenship.
As is the case with underbellies generally, this one lends itself to much maverick play. One thing I find intriguing, for example, is the way we commute, at leisure and according to perceived advantage, between externalist and incorporative models of the EU.
Take burden sharing. On that one, the Maltese government is at pains to explain that we are an intrinsic part of the EU, that ‘our’ asylum-seekers are properly not ours at all.
The equation is simply stood on its head when David Casa and Roberta Metsola speak in the European Parliament. In that case, they ‘jagħmlu ħsara lill-Malta barra’ (damage Malta’s reputation abroad), even though, by the logic of burden sharing at least, that barra (abroad) is actually ġewwa (home). Go figure.
I wouldn’t fret so much if the acrobatics were uniquely Joseph Muscat’s or the Maltese government’s. But they aren’t. The Nationalist Party has played the game on numerous occasions, and a number of EU countries have perfected it to a fine art.
Perhaps the real reason why the vast majority of MEPs are so uncomfortable with Malta’s citizenship scheme is that it tells an inconvenient truth about themselves and their own countries.
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