Unequal Citizenships and Multiple Europes

Despite claims to modern, democratic, and egalitarian principles of inclusion in the political communities of nations, today’s citizenship arrangements are based on ascriptive principles. All modern states currently limit access to their citizenship by virtue of an individual’s birthright by granting automatic – i.e., ascriptive – entitlement to political and social rights as well as welfare benefits only to a select group of individuals according to either birthplace (jus soli) or bloodline (jus sanguinis). At the same time, the recent rise in citizenship-by-investment programs in Southern and Eastern European states in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis has increasingly offered very wealthy individuals access to European Union citizenships through market mechanisms. Drawing on previous work which advanced the notion of multiple Europes with different and unequal roles in shaping the hegemonic definition of modernity and in ensuring its propagation, the present paper argues that the steep increase in the commodification of EU-citizenship serves to reinforce the hierarchy between hegemonic Northwestern Europe (“heroic Europe”) and its Southern and Eastern “Others” (“decadent” and “epigonal” Europes). To this end, it looks at how recent programs granting (fast track to) citizenship and/or residence in Spain and Portugal as well as Hungary, Montenegro, Malta, Cyprus and Greece have met with resistance and have faced political and financial sanctions from the EU, while similar initiatives in the UK and Austria have been either sanctioned as legitimate or de-emphasized when compared with their counterparts outside of the EU core.