Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal – författare

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.

Textbooks in history, geography and the social sciences provide important insights into the ways in which nation-states project themselves. Based on case studies of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Turkey Bulgaria, Russia, and the United States, this volume shows the role that concepts of space and time play in the narration of ‘our country’ and the wider world in which it is located. It explores ways in which in western European countries the nation is reinterpreted through European lenses to replace national approaches in the writing of history. On the other hand, in an effort to overcome Eurocentric views,’world history’ has gained prominence in the United States. Yet again, East European countries, coming recently out of a transnational political union, have their own issues with the concept of nation to contend with. These recent developments in the field of textbooks and curricula open up new and fascinating perspectives on the changing patterns of the re-positioning process of nation-states in West as well as Eastern Europe and the United States in an age of growing importance of transnational organizations and globalization.