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Paper short abstract:

Can citizenship be sold? How is selling it morally legitimised? This paper looks into Cypriot society’s reckoning with selling their passport, between a nationhood-charged lexicon moralising citizenship and a (more popular) crisis-laden discourse emptying citizenship out of any ethical content.

Paper long abstract:

Offshoring morality: Russian elites, Cypriot passports, and a banking crisis

Can citizenship be sold? Was there not supposed to be an inalienable moral underbelly to it? Or is claiming an ethical underpinning in one’s relation to the state a mythos of modernity? The conflation of a morality-charged positionality and economic transaction is palpable in the contemporary surge in citizenship by investment programmes. Through such programmes, rich people can literally walk into a political community by buying the passport of the country in which they invest.

This paper looks into one society’s reckoning with selling their passport to foreigners (specifically, rich Russians). This reckoning oscillates between a nationhood-charged lexicon moralising citizenship and a (more popular) crisis-laden discourse absolving society of a moral responsibility towards their own passport. I do this in the context of the small EU country of Cyprus, a post-colonial, post-conflict, and post-crisis society, where I pursued fieldwork in 2019, one year before its successful citizenship by investment programme was terminated, amidst a global scandal (and six years after its banking system collapsed).

I argue that golden passports are the continuation of offshoring 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 paper shows how it is ideas and historical practices of offshoring that can morally legitimise the practice of selling citizenship.