Ask why someone wants a second citizenship and the answer often names a side rather than a country. People want citizenship of a Western country, or of a country outside the West, or of one in a bloc they expect to grow.
That instinct assumes an alliance gives something to the citizens of its member countries. The alliances people name most often give them nothing at all.
BRICS, NATO and the Commonwealth grant an individual no right to enter, live or work anywhere. The rights people think they are choosing come from a smaller set of agreements, and those agreements do not follow the geopolitical map.
Four rights, and why the difference decides everything
What a bloc is worth to a person comes down to four rights. They are the right to enter, the right to reside, the right to work, and the right to set up a business.
Treaties separate these carefully, and an agreement can grant a short tourist visit and nothing beyond it.
Passport indices measure entry alone and ignore the other three, which is why visa-free travel numbers are not a mobility plan.
The European Union is the case everyone knows, and even there the rights are narrower than the reputation. Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union establishes citizenship of the Union, and Article 21 gives every Union citizen the right to move and reside freely across the member states.
The right to work comes from Article 45, which secures freedom of movement for workers as a grant separate from the residence right in Article 21.
Residence past three months is conditional. Directive 2004/38/EC gives Union citizens an unconditional right of residence for up to three months, and after that a person must be working, self-employed, or able to support themselves and pay for sickness insurance.
Five years of continuous legal residence converts that conditional right into a permanent one.
Even the strongest bloc in the world asks something of you for the first five years.
The West, where two blocs overlap
Ireland is the best citizenship in the Western alliance, because it belongs to two settlement blocs at once. IMI reached the same country from a different direction in its region-by-region picks for the best citizenship in the world.
An Irish citizen has EU rights across the 27 member states, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the European Economic Area, and Switzerland through a bilateral agreement the two signed on 21 June 1999.
Ireland is also inside the Common Travel Area, so its citizens can live and work in the United Kingdom on terms that survived Brexit.
Those rights come from two agreements a reader can look up, and NATO membership contributes nothing to either one. Without Irish citizenship, you would need two citizenships to get both, which is why the best citizenship can be a combination of two.
The difficulty is acquiring it. Ireland shut its investor route years ago, and its government is now drafting a bill that lengthens the residence requirement for naturalization.
The Irish Times reports the proposal as two years of continuous residence before applying, plus six of the preceding ten years, which comes to eight. That bill has been drafted and never passed.
For anyone who wants to acquire an EU citizenship rather than inherit one, the direct route is gone. Malta’s own citizenship agency records that its investor citizenship framework was repealed following the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 29 April 2025.
No EU member state grants citizenship by investment in 2026.
Portugal was the fast way in through residence until Organic Law 1/2026 took naturalization from five years to ten for citizens of other countries. Portuguese-speaking and EU nationals wait seven.
Descent claims are unsettled as well. Italy’s Constitutional Court upheld a restriction requiring a link to Italy in Judgment 63, then referred the underlying question to the Court of Justice in Luxembourg and suspended its own proceedings by Order 147.
BRICS, where the instinct fails hardest
Neither of the bloc’s recent summit declarations creates a right for an individual.
The Kazan Declaration of 2024 and the New Delhi Declaration of 2026 mention mobility twice between them. One reference encourages cooperation on recognizing academic qualifications, and the other concerns urban transport planning.
A summit declaration is a political communiqué agreed by heads of state. It is not a treaty, and neither document attempts to create a right that a person could claim.
So the best BRICS citizenship is decided by what a country gives you on its own, or by what a different bloc gives you. On that test the United Arab Emirates wins, and what it wins on is Gulf Cooperation Council membership.
Counting the members is harder than it looks. India’s Press Information Bureau, and India chairs the bloc this year, lists 11 countries: Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE.
Saudi Arabia was invited in 2023, has never formally accepted, and attended the New Delhi summit as an invited country. The membership count is therefore ten or 11, depending on how Riyadh is classified.
The Gulf, the broadest rights you cannot acquire
Article 8 of the GCC Unified Economic Agreement, signed in Riyadh in 1981, is the most generous bloc clause in this article.
It commits the member states to agree on executive principles under which each of them grants the citizens of the others the same treatment as its own citizens, on freedom of movement, work and residence, on ownership, inheritance and bequest, and on economic activity.
That is national treatment, which on paper puts a Qatari in Bahrain on the same footing as a Bahraini.
Read the wording again and the limit shows. The Article commits the six to agree on how to deliver that treatment, which is a weaker thing than the directly enforceable rights an EU citizen can assert in a national court.
The obstacle is admission. Every Gulf state offers an investor residence program, and naturalization across the bloc is discretionary, which is why no Gulf golden visa leads to citizenship.
No Gulf state lets an investor apply for citizenship. The UAE comes closest, because Article 9 bis of its nationality law names investors among those who can be granted it, and grants arrive by nomination through the rulers’ courts with no threshold to meet and no channel to apply through.
The best GCC citizenship is the best one to be born with. On tax and on mobility that is the UAE, which is the same reason the UAE wins BRICS.
Mercosur, a continent for a clean record
Mercosur grants individuals something, and the grant comes from a 2002 agreement signed alongside the trade bloc.
The Residence Agreement of 2002 lets a national of one member state apply for temporary residence of up to two years in another. That residence converts to permanent status on application in the 90 days before it expires.
Under Article 8, that person can take up any activity, employed or self-employed, on the same conditions as nationals of the receiving country.
The requirement is a clean criminal record, which is a lighter test than any investment threshold in this article.
Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay founded the bloc, and Bolivia joined in 2015. Venezuela was suspended from all the rights and obligations of membership, a status the member states can lift whenever they choose to.
IMI has scored this bloc against its two closest rivals in a side-by-side comparison of the EU, Mercosur and OECS.
The Caribbean, where two treaties disagree
The Caribbean has two overlapping blocs, and they promise different things to the same person.
CARICOM’s Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas states free movement as a goal in Article 45. Article 46 does the operative work, and it grants the right to seek employment to five named categories of person.
Those categories are university graduates, media workers, sportspersons, artistes and musicians.
The list has grown since the treaty was signed. The CARICOM Secretariat listed 12 categories in August 2024, adding nurses, teachers, artisans, people with associate degrees, domestic workers, agricultural workers and private security officers.
The Eastern Caribbean states go further. Article 12 of the Revised Treaty of Basseterre secures freedom of movement for citizens of Protocol Member States across the OECS economic union, and abolishes discrimination on nationality in employment and pay.
On 1 October 2025, four CARICOM states began full free movement among themselves: Barbados, Belize, Dominica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Their nationals can live, work and remain indefinitely in any of the four without a work permit, according to the CARICOM Secretariat.
Breaking Belize News reported in July that no additional member state had publicly announced plans to join. IMI covered the launch in its report on Dominica joining the free movement pact.
Citizenship of a CARICOM state outside the OECS and the group of four gives less regional mobility than most people assume, unless you qualify under one of the 12 categories.
Dominica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines are in the OECS and in the group of four. Their citizens can live and work across the OECS and in Barbados and Belize, which makes these two the best Caribbean citizenships for movement.
Of the two, Dominica has an established citizenship by investment program. The government of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines said it would launch one by mid-2026.
The blocs that promise the least
NATO’s founding treaty has 14 articles, and none addresses movement, residence or work. Article 5 commits the parties to treat an armed attack on one as an attack on all, which is an obligation between governments.
The word individual appears once in the entire treaty, in a preamble reference to individual liberty as a shared value.
The Commonwealth spans 56 countries and its Charter is a statement of shared values. Searching that Charter for movement, residence, migration or visas returns nothing.
ASEAN promises less than any other bloc in this article that promises anything. Its Framework Agreement on Visa Exemption grants a short visa-free visit for tourism, and anyone entering to work or to settle applies under the host country’s own law.
The Eurasian Economic Union grants less than it first appears to. Article 97 of its treaty removes the work permit requirement for nationals of its five member states, and ties the length of a worker’s residence to the term of their employment contract.
Pensions are excluded from that equal treatment, and retirement remains governed by the law of the worker’s home state.
The African Union’s Protocol on Free Movement of Persons would grant entry, residence and establishment across the continent. On the AU’s most recently published status list, which it has not updated since 2023, 32 of 55 states had signed it and four had ratified it.
A protocol that four states have ratified governs almost nothing.
What this changes for your own choice
Start from the rights you want and work backwards to the citizenship.
If the goal is to live and work in several countries, four blocs can deliver that, and no power alliance can. The EU and the EEA states give the broadest access to a wealthy market, and they ask for five years of conditional residence first.
Gulf citizenship grants the widest rights on paper and admits almost nobody.
Mercosur lets you live and work in its other member states if you have a clean criminal record. Those states have lower incomes than the EU, and their passports give visa-free entry to fewer countries.
The OECS is the quickest of the four to enter, because a Caribbean citizenship by investment application can conclude in months and brings OECS free movement with it.
Geopolitical weight does buy something when a region destabilizes, and IMI has argued that case in what a second citizenship is worth when its bloc is under pressure. What it buys is consular help and a way out, and it grants no right to live anywhere.
None of this is decided by which superpower a country stands beside.
Before you choose a second citizenship for a country’s politics, read the treaties behind its blocs. Most power alliances have no treaty that lets an individual live or work abroad.
