When the French actor Gérard Depardieu collected his Russian passport this week, the English language media erupted with puzzlement and mockery. One online commentator called the corpulent defector “shameless” for becoming “a citizen of a dictatorship just to avoid taxes.”
Tax exile is nothing new, of course. European countries have a long history of wooing one another’s rich with offers of bigger salaries and smaller government. Last year, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain announced that he would “roll out the red carpet” for any French businessmen willing to take up his country’s lower tax rates.
Yet while few batted an eye when a slew of prominent Parisian financiers moved their families (and bank accounts) en masse across the channel in December, Depardieu’s action seems to have crossed an imaginary line in many people’s minds.
For if by moving to Belgium or Britain the actor could be criticized merely for valuing money over motherland, in decamping to authoritarian Russia he seems to have placed money ahead of even democracy itself. In this way, he might be said to have forsaken not just his country, but also the fundamental Western notion that rights and freedoms are inalienable and non-negotiable.
Yet in another sense, it’s odd that people should feel so shocked by Depardieu’s decision. After all, in escaping from a messy, expensive democracy to a cheaper and simpler autocracy, the actor is only doing what thousands of Western multinational corporations do every day by moving their factories to China, and their management to the United Arab Emirates.
For example, when it invests in China, a company like Apple can reap all the benefits of totalitarianism — streamlined governance, low wages and no labor unrest — at the same time as it opts out of the abuses, restrictions and indignities faced by ordinary Chinese people.
Depardieu has done the same thing. In Russia, he can benefit from the double standards the country affords members of the pro-government elite vis-à-vis the general public. Due to his personal friendship with President Vladimir Putin, Depardieu will benefit from the country’s low taxation and other perks of dealing with a democratically unaccountable system, such as having his citizenship fast-tracked by presidential decree while ordinary people have to wait years to get their passports.
Such ability to opt in or out at will is a defining feature of neoliberalism, as is the persistent race to the bottom in terms of the prices countries and people are willing to charge to attract investment. Democracy and human rights are not cheap: So it’s not surprising that countries like Russia and China enjoy an advantage over their Western competitors.
Some of Depeardieu’s critics on the French left have characterized his behavior as motivated by greed. Such reactions are not dissimilar to those widely applied to Wall Street bankers in the wake of the financial meltdown. Both explanations, however, conflate symptom with cause.
As the political philosopher Michael Sandel suggests in his latest book “What Money Can’t Buy,” “we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale.” It is a world in which “the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone,” but “increasingly governs the whole of life.” This includes both citizenship and labor rights.
Thus it is markets, rather than human greed or even Depardieu’s stomach, that have expanded beyond all boundaries, creating a kind of commercial panopticon. As long as more and more previously un-commodified things — such as citizenship in a tax haven or labor rights in a totalitarian country — come up for grabs, it is difficult to blame a man, or a company, with the means to acquire them for doing exactly that.
Vadim Nikitin is a freelance journalist and blogger based in London.
AGENCE GLOBAL