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Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe
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Soysal et al. as mentioned in this paper compare the different ways European nations incorporate immigrants, how these policies evolved, and how they are influenced by international human rights discourse, and suggest a possible accommodation to these shifts: specifically, a model of post-national membership that derives its legitimacy from universal personhood, rather than national belonging.Abstract:
In many Western countries, rights that once belonged solely to citizens are being extended to immigrants, a trend that challenges the nature and basis of citizenship at a time when nation-states are fortifying their boundaries through restirictive border controls and expressions of nationalist ideologies. In this book, Yasemin Soysal compares the different ways European nations incorporate immigrants, how these policies evolved, and how they are influenced by international human rights discourse.
Soysal focuses on postwar 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 noncitizen. 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.
This fresh approach to the study of citizenship, rights, and immigration will be invaluable to anyone involved in issues of human rights, international migration, and transnational cultural interactions, as well as to those who study the contemporary transformation of the nation-state, nationalism, and globalization.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Intersectionality, Citizenship and Contemporary Politics of Belonging
TL;DR: The authors examines the effects of intersecting social divisions on constructions of multi-layered citizenships and the politics of belonging in contemporary Britain, focusing on the current debate on the death of multiculturalism and on social cohesion.
Book ChapterDOI
Integration nations: the nation-state and research on immigrants in western europe
TL;DR: Despite its somewhat old-fashioned, functionalist air, integration is still the most popular way of conceptualizing the developing relationship between old European nation-states and their growing non-European, “ethnic” immigrant populations as discussed by the authors.
Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the possibility of post-national forms of citizenship and question whether national conceptions of citizenship deserve the presumptions of legitimacy and primacy that they are almost always granted.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mutations in Citizenship
TL;DR: In this article, the elements of citizenship (rights, entitlements, etc.) are becoming disarticulated from each other, and becoming re-articulate with universalizing criteria of neoliberalism and human rights.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Transnationalization of Social Inequality: Conceptualizing Social Positions on a World Scale
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that methodological nationalism is increasingly inadequate in a globalizing world and argue that highly skilled migrants who possess cultural capital that is transnationally recognized are not located in only one nation state.