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Passport island: The market for EU citizenship in Cyprus By TheodorosRakopoulos. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. 262 pp.

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/amet.13374

1548-1425

Nicole Constable,

Cyprus History, Politics, Society

All passports share similarities in appearance and in their purpose of facilitating international mobility. Despite their superficial commonalities, however, not all passports are created equal, and as this book shows, passports are often tools for the rich. The world's passports are subject to rankings; the wealthiest nations' passports allow visa-free access to about 200 countries, while the lowest-ranked ones (of poor and war-torn countries) offer far less access. One's citizenship, normally assigned by place of birth (jus solis) or one's blood ties (jus sanguinis), determines one's chance of acquiring a better or worse passport. As Passport Island shows, citizenship and passports are commodified such that the world's wealthiest people can acquire (in a sense "buy") citizenship and a higher-ranked passport (jus pecuniae), and they can thus acquire greater opportunities to move throughout the world for further investment and to hide and shelter their money. Passport Island raises fascinating questions about the shifting meanings and practices of global and national citizenship, social inequalities, and privilege. Anthropologists of migration have mainly focused on less privileged people who lack passports or meaningful citizenship, or who face passport and mobility problems, such as temporary or undocumented migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. By contrast, Theodoros Rakopoulos examines a less studied and highly privileged side of the passport story. Chapter 1 highlights the importance of Cyprus's specific geoeconomic and political history, which fueled the commodification of citizenship as an economic solution and as a last-ditch effort to save the country from economic collapse. Chapter 2 continues the discussion of "golden passports" and their acquisition through the Citizen by Investment Program (CIP) by wealthy, privileged people from anywhere in the world who desired (or needed) a second passport, especially one that gave them EU access. The program was discontinued in October 2020, after a major corruption scandal in which the president was discovered to have planted his own ill-gotten golden-passport proceeds in an offshore account. Using extensive field research in the Republic of Cyprus, in the city of Limassol, where the CIP's impact is most visible in the form of its high-rise "passport towers" along the coastline, Rakopoulos introduces us in chapter 3 to the "Makers," including local lawyers, brokers, and politicians, whom he meets and engages with in locations ranging from shiny modern office buildings to cafés. Many of them studied in Russian-speaking countries or spent time in the regions where their prospective clients come from. They introduce him to other colorful local characters and power brokers in the golden-passport industry. Rakopoulos is attentive and insightful about his interlocutors' language and diverse views, offering thoughtful interpretations of the varied and sometimes contradictory discourses that helped justify and promote the CIP. Chapter 4, "Takers," introduces readers to members of Limassol's large Russophone population, numbering 44,000 out of the city's total population of 200,000. Many members of this community are involved in the CIP industry in some way, offering banking, financial, and other services. They are immigrants (some going back decades) who acquired citizenship in the normal way, by working and fulfilling longtime residency requirements, and as such, they have different opinions about the CIP. Both the Takers and the Makers provide intriguing images of the golden-passport holders (including their corruption and crimes), but they are most striking in their absence from Limassol, and from the real estate they have invested in, which mainly remains dark at night while they are presumably traveling elsewhere. The elite golden-passport holders remain shady and sketchy characters in the book and they do not speak for themselves. Most rarely reside in Cyprus, but sometimes they park their family members there under various circumstances. Nonetheless, there are fascinating tales of disreputable characters from various continents, including a Chinese businessman who changed his mind about investing in a building after consulting a feng shui app. The wider global economy of passports and CIPs is the topic of "Markets" (chap. 5). This far-reaching chapter addresses the book's argument "that citizenship by investment is a national product addressing the global offshoring market regime" (p. 190). It discusses the ever-changing list of countries offering CIPs, their passport rankings (correlated with the "cost" of investment and the investor's freedom of mobility), and the various benefits they offer to wealthy clients who seek to relocate or hide and protect their businesses or financial capital, themselves, or their family members. Options include small island countries of the Caribbean; small EU countries, such as Malta and Montenegro; and countries with low passport value, such as Turkey, Egypt, Vanuatu, and Comoros. The required investments vary greatly, as do the additional fees and required "donations" and the potential benefits. Some locations are, for example, better suited for relocating families, for people to disappear, or to serve as tax shelters. Some of the author's most fascinating examples are the UAE, Kuwait, and Dubai, where the emirates refuse to grant citizenship to the local domestic population. Instead, they "offshore them" by "purchasing" citizenship and passports for them from the poor island of Comoros, in the Indian Ocean (pp. 206–7). Passport Island closely examines the specific context in which golden passports came to be produced and brokered in Cyprus, and how they were understood and rationalized in the industry and by politicians, by the local Russian community, and to some degree by "ordinary" locals. Theoretically, the book is informed by a wide range of literature in political and economic anthropology, including Marx and Polanyi. Echoing arguments about the commodification of intimacy, the author refers to the purchase of citizenship as "Polanyi's nightmare," in which things are commodified that should not be. The author engages with an array of scholarship about the state, global citizenship, and the political economics of the EU and Cyprus. He is highly attuned to various local arguments about the CIP and the golden passports. For example, advocates claimed that the program showed their lack of racism, since they welcomed anyone as citizens, regardless of their skin color. Critics respond to the program's purported color-blindness, pointing out that regardless of one's color, if they are poor and in need, they are indeed ignored equally. The book's key premise is that "national citizenship correlates with and exacerbates global inequality" (p. 10). Yet the author aims to steer a path between those who applaud golden passports to alleviate the inequality of the birthright lottery and those who criticize them as a threat to citizenship and as morally wrong. Instead, he proposes a more dialectical view of golden passports as a solution to "the problem they partly create: financially escaping political restrictions" (p. 41). A central theme involves the connection of CIPs to older forms of "offshoring." Brokers specialize in advising would-be customers on which CIPs would work best for them, depending on their needs and their finances. While some critics point to the criminality and corruption of this system, others see it as a pragmatic, positive, and even utopian approach to global citizenship. The author highlights the impact of the CIP on the Maker and Taker communities. But what about "ordinary" people who are not part of those two groups? While no book can cover everything, the focus on inequality and on the effect of the golden-passport program on the local community would benefit from a diversity of views from this community. Ultimately, we learn only briefly in the conclusion about the specific impacts on people not in the Makers or Takers category, an anti-golden-passport protest, the environmental impact of the passport towers, and the rent increases for locals. Including voices that speak directly to these issues might also diversify the predominantly "masculine" voices of the golden-passport program. One of the most interesting and provocative parts of the argument is Rakopoulos's engagement with Keshavarz's (2018) work on the market for forged passports as a means of addressing global inequalities of mobility. Addressing inequalities and economic globalization, Rakopoulos reflects on the ethical and practical implications of the purchase of golden passports and that of forgeries by otherwise immobile people who seek to migrate. Both reflect the globalization of citizenship, the commodification of passports, and a lack of commitment to a state. Overall, Passport Island makes critically important contributions to debates on the relationship between global and national citizenship, and between capitalism and the state, when citizenship becomes (or is reduced to) a mere commodity without connections or commitments to a community. The citizenship-by-investment scheme in Cyprus is fascinating alone. It gains even greater significance from the discussion of citizenship by investment offered by other countries, and the more subtle but related patterns of "residence by investment" with "golden visas" in other regions. This book should be of special interest to anthropologists interested in political and economic anthropology, citizenship, and migration. Anthropologists interested in the brokerage of citizenship in relation to the EU and to globalization more broadly will find this book especially compelling.