The post‐nationalization of immigrant rights: a theory in search of evidence 1

In her contribution to this issue, Yasemin Soysal makes a brave stand for her theory of post-national rights, even in the face of changed circumstances. Originally (Soysal 1994), the theory was designed to account for the extension of all kinds of civic and social rights to immigrants in Western Europe, in spite of the fact that most immigrants had not naturalized to become citizens, not least because European immigration countries were not always keen on making immigrants into nationals. Extending the world-cultural institutional perspective of John Meyer and his associates (e.g., 1997) to the realm of immigrant rights, Soysal placed this apparent anomaly in the context of the spread of supranational human rights discourses in the postwar period, pushed forward by the mobilization of non-governmental organizations, and backed by international treaties and supranational forms of governance. Through a combination of self-commitment to these international human rights norms, pressure by national and supranational immigrant and human rights organizations, and if necessary binding rulings of supranational courts, Soysal argued, nation-states had come to embrace, sometimes willingly, sometimes grudgingly, a highly universalist and individualized notion of rights, leading to a strong decoupling of rights from national citizenship, which, in her words, had become ‘in terms of its translation into rights and privileges . . . no longer a significant construction’ (Soysal 1998: 208).