Dr.

Yasemin Soysal
BA (Istanbul) PhD (California)

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY. UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

Previously John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate of the
Center for European Studies and the Center for International Affairs at Harvard
University. Has been German Marshall Fund Research Fellow, National Academy of
Education Spencer Fellow, National Endowment of Humanities Research Fellow, Jean
Monnet Fellow, visiting scholar at Max Planck Institute, Berlin, and visiting professor
at Juan March Institute, Madrid.
Much of her research and writing have related to the historical development and
contemporary reconfigurations of the nation-state and citizenship in Europe; cultural
and political implications of international migrations; and international discourses and
regimes of human rights. Her teaching includes courses on the nation-state, citizenship,
and collective identity; immigration; European integration and globalization.

She is the author of Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in

Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1994), and has articles in such journals as
American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, Sociology of Education, and
Ethnic and Racial Studies. Her current research project (funded by the Economic and
Social Research Council, with additional funds from Leverhulme Trust and British
Academy) is on the postwar reconfigurations of nation-state identities as projected in
secondary school history and civics textbooks http://www.one-europe.ac.uk.

Yasemin Soysal is the president of the European Sociology Association

http://www.europeansociology.org, member of the Scientific Committee of the Center
for Advanced Study in Social Sciences, Juan March Institute, and board member of the
Research Committee on Migration, International Sociological Association. She is also
the member of the editorial board of Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the member of the
international advisory board of Ethnicities. She will be a fellow at the
Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, for the academic year 2001-02.
Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational
Membership in Europe. xii, 244 p., 17 tables. 1994

LC: 94016331 Class: JN94.A92

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.

Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
1: Introduction
2: International Migration and the Nation-State System
3: Explaining Incorporation Regimes
4: Discourses and Instruments of Incorporation
5: The Organization of Incorporation
6: The Collective Organization of Migrants
7: The Membership Rights and Status of Migrants
8: Toward a Postnational Model of Membership
9: Conclusion
Appendix A: List of State Agencies, Organizations, and Migrant Associations at which
Interviews Were Conducted
Appendix B: The Organizational Structure of Incorporation
Appendix C: List of International Instruments that Provide Standards Applicable to
International Migrants
Appendix D: List of Intergovernmental and Nongovernmental Organizations Concerned
with International Migration and Migrant Workers
Subjects:

 Sociology: General Sociology. Political Science: Political and Social Theory