liberal citizenship: ambiguities and inconsistencies41 profiles of indigenous and minority groups, though these various legal categorizations are important, they may not always be so distinct so as to imply greater or lesser legitimacy in their claims to specific rights and obligations. Racial State, Racialized Citizenship The mode of incorporation, combining both formally written or legal principles and informal political practices, is defined by Yasemin Soysal as an incorporation regime (Soysal 1994, 36). One of the most important studies of contemporary migration, Soysal’s Limits of Citizenship, Migration and Post-National Citizenship in Europe (1994) examines the substitution of national civic personhood with universalized human rights and the formation of a new incorporation regime. A defining feature of this regime is the displacement and unfastening of the nation-state and nationhood as a defining element of citizenship. The incorporation regime, Soysal asserts, refers to “patterns of institutional practices and more or less explicit cultural norms that define the membership of individuals and/or groups in the society and differentially allocate entitlements, obligations and domination” (Soysal 1994, 36). In other words, an incorporation regime is a regime of social, political, economic, and cultural institutions that stratify the assumed equal or universalist citizenship of the state through a differential dispensing of rights, benefits, and obligations to various communities. Here the dynamic of incorporation is neither limited to the actual interaction of civic subjects with the policies and practices of the nationstate nor to the extent of their integration. Instead, incorporation refers to the actual organizational arrangement of membership and its institutional modes within which the civic subject is placed. Thus, Soysal contends that every host nation-state maintains specific juridico-political policy regulations according to which the condition and status of the civic subject is defined. Taken together, the degree of incorporation into a society therefore depends not only on the socio-cultural attributes of an ethno-national community, a minority group, or an immigrant collective, but certainly also on the ideological foundations, and complex norms and practices (i.e. the incorporation regime) of the host society. It is the interaction between these two forces that constitutes the particular kind of incorporation that is realized. Soysal’s study supports the position that, for the most part, the concept of citizenship is comprised of various articulations of membership and its