Citizenship: Commodification to Cosmopolitanism

This paper investigates and places into perspective the legal- and constitutional nature of high in demand cash-for-passport programs in contrast to existing forms of citizenship. It identifies the erosion of State citizenship, as well as impacts on State sovereignty within a process of deconstitutionalization. It understands this process as a chance to opening a cosmopolitan perspective of pan-constitutional essential factors required for global citizenship. At first, this paper introduces commodified national citizenship within the global race for wealthy and skilled migrants, allowing the fusing of global market rule with national interests. This development is in contrast to the conventional identity- and domestic policy laden understanding of citizenship. State and global market forces are now becoming intertwined, affecting the conventional constitutional theory and perspective of citizenship. Market rule is gaining entry into the constitutional sphere, replacing ´constitutionalism with consumerism´, allowing those that enter as investors access to the body politic, without (at least initial) need for political participation in- or identification with the national sphere. Migration criteria are then formulated less by local policy makers, but in view of the interdependence of competing States situated in a common market demand for wealth and talent. Secondly, building on the above, this paper then understands commodification as a chance to transition from a changing, transient and fragmented national citizenship to a more coherent and consistent cosmopolitan global citizenship theory, whether integrative, co-existing-, or exclusive to eroding national citizenship. This paper points here at the transformative role of commodification for the development of a post-national citizenship as an aspect of global constitutionalism. Findings include that legal rights- and other values contained in national citizenship theory and constitutionalism may then become transferable, detached, function both as stateless commodity, as well as constitutional pillars, paradoxically, at the same time. The reason for this may be seen in common, global constitutional values existing beyond the State. The development of commodification appears to be self-initiated by the States and thus reversible. It may pose as a chance, and less as a challenge. With the change of citizenship as one of the core constituants of the State, and with States actively involved in the erosion of their own constituant element of national citizenship, can or should constitutional values still be vested solely on state level or are better placed onto a cosmopolitan sphere? The conclusion of this paper is that there is a need for a further development of global cosmopolitan citizenship theory, complimentary to the existing system of domestic citizenship. Cosmopolitan citizenship may then contain and preserve constitutional values that define and make up the common conception of citizenship, the foundations of the concept of citizenship, and are then placed beyond the state. Cosmopolitan constitutionalism, freed from the conceptional demands of the nation state, may then preserve constitutionalist values that may in turn contribute to the formation of a cosmopolitan identity.