Limits of Citizenship

In this work, Yasemin Soysal compares the different ways in which European nations incorporate immigrants, how these policies evolved and how they are influenced by international human rights discourse. Soysal focuses on post-war international migration, paying particular attention to "guestworkers". Taking an in-depth look at France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, she identifies three major patterns that reflect the varying emphasis particular states place on individual versus corporate groups as the basis for incorporation. She finds that the global expansion and intensification of human rights discourse puts nation-states under increasing outside pressure to extend membership rights to aliens, resulting in an increasingly blurred line between citizen and non-citizen. Finally, she suggests a possible accommodation to these shifts: specifically, a model of post-national membership that derives its legitimacy from universal personhood, rather than national belonging.