What are the ethical and sociocultural repercussions of a policy that officially sells passports in the international market? How are non-elite, middle-class persons the vectors and channels for the commodification of citizenship?
This set of questions, around which my ethnography on the golden passport industry in Cyprus works, is informed by what I call the nightmare of Karl Polanyi. While much of the existing discussion among Polanian anthropology has considered the historical solidification of the market, there is a need to further assess the ethical aspects of its expansion. In fact, some of Polanyis legacy in anthropology is indeed about the constant encroachment of the market into new areas of potential marketization, the market principle being a term used to denote commodification, especially of land and labor (Hann and Hart 2011, Hann 2019: 43). The globality of the market condition cannot be overlooked. Historically, commodification has been related to global trading, a condition applied even to money: token money have been used for local marketing purposes, while commodity money were used in long-distance trade (Polanyi 2001, 62; Hart 2008, 1138). This paper will tackle the above conceptual problem at a time of intense liberalization: a wave of deregulating citizenship, with countries putting their passports in the global market. Drawing from findings in Cyprus, I argue that this middle-class driven Polanyian nightmare is an extreme version of economic liberalization, which is continuing offshoring policies by other means.
