Magazine / Society / Roma in Europe / Debate | 02/10/2007

The Roma in Europe

Following the accession to the EU of Bulgaria and Romania the gypsies or Roma have become the EU's largest ethnic minority. An estimated eight to ten million Roma live here – most of them in Eastern Europe. While on paper they enjoy the same rights as other citizens, their social and political situation remains precarious.

"If health standards, malnutrition, illiteracy and petty criminality were anything to go by, the Roma wouldn't be anywhere in Europe, they'd be somewhere in Africa,” Christian Schmidt-Häuer wrote in Die Zeit back in March 2004 when the EU was undergoing its first phase of expansion.

Georgeta Lambru, a Romanian gypsy, with her daughter Mariana in front of their home.
Photo: AP

This gloomy assessment still remains pretty much valid today. While the Copenhagen Declaration of 1993 officially obliges all EU members to protect ethnic minorities, in reality the overwhelming majority of Roma, particularly those in the countries of Eastern Europe, live in dire poverty and are excluded from key areas of society like education, employment and the regular housing market.

Ghettoization and Segregation

Even under communism the gypsies were one of the ethnic groups worst affected by poverty and minimal opportunities for education. The official state policy of assimilation and making gypsies settle in one place, which declared the special features of their culture backward, led to the emergence of segregated living areas. However, the transfer to a market economy was to make the situation of the Roma even worse. They were the first to be dismissed from run-down state enterprises, and the progressive flight from the countryside led to the further growth of ghetto-style Roma settlements in the towns.

According to a study conducted by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in Prague, in the Czech Republic a third of all Roma live in closed ghettos. As Vojtech Blazek noted in the Czech newspaper Hospodarské Noviny on 7 September 2006, "This figure has surprised even the experts, who had previously assumed the existence of a dozen such ghettos." According to a report by the World Bank, infant mortality in Eastern Europe's Roma ghettos is at least twice as high as that among the majority population, while life expectancy is ten or fifteen years below the average.

One main cause of the Roma's poor employment prospects is the early discrimination against Roma children in education. Often they are sent to separate schools or transferred straight away to special schools – often because parents among the majority population refuse to have their children taught in the same class with Roma children. The Hungarian leader of the opposition, Viktor Orban, earned strong protests when he expressed sympathy with this attitude in a speech in February 2006.

The Decade of the Roma

In order to counter tendencies of this kind the World Bank and the Open Society Institute launched a decade of Roma integration starting in 2005. They assume that any plan of action to systematically improve the living conditions of the Roma will need to transcend national borders. The ten-year program aims to remove obstacles for Roma in the fields of education, housing, employment and health. The governments of Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia-Montenegro, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary will be responsible for implementing the program.

So far, however, there has been no substantial improvement to speak of. Shocked by violent clashes between skinheads and Roma in the Krasna Palyana quarter of Sofia, the writer Georgi Gospodinow wrote in the Bulgarian daily Dnevnik in August of this year: "Although we've been living in the same country for decades, we have always looked down on the Roma; they were always pushed aside.”

The Schizophrenia of the West

Similar discussions have taken place in West European countries. In mid-August of this year a heated debate flared up in Italy about the living conditions of gypsies after a fire in a gypsy camp near the city of Livorno killed four Roma children. Gad Lerner commented on the problems of unemployment and criminality in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on 13 August 2007, saying they led to "generalizations that would be unthinkable if applied to anyone else. They are all considered guilty, because of the way they act, their cultural tradition.” And Mario Marazziti, the spokesman of Sant'Egidio, the community where the fire occurred, lamented a day later in La Stampa: "The west has not paid its dues to the gypsy Holocaust. And yet 300,000 to half a million of them were swallowed up in the Nazi extermination camps (the very doubt concerning the exact figures goes to show the indifference of historians).”

The Hungarian sociologist Angela Kocze commented on the "strange schizophrenia” of European policy towards the Roma, saying that while the EU was demanding that its new members observe the rights of minorities, it was not making the same demands of its older members: "EU member states haven't even reached a consensus on how to define the term 'national minority,' or whether immigrants with a common cultural background, for example Arabs, Kurds or Roma, belong to one.”

Exodus in Kosovo

But the situation of the Roma in Europe is most precarious in the very region that has been under UN administration for the last eight years: Kosovo. Shortly before the end of the war in Kosovo - and in some cases before the eyes of the NATO troops already stationed there - Albanian nationalists set fire to entire gypsy settlements. Only about 30,000 of a once 150,000-strong Roma population still live in Kosovo – often in makeshift refugee housing. Yet little of what the European Roma Rights Centre calls "the greatest tragedy for the Roma since the Second World War” has become public knowledge. Moreover, it has no role to play in the international negotiations currently under way about the future status of the southern Serbian province, Stephan Müller, the former OSCE official for minorities in Kosovo, wrote in a critical article in the Austrian Standard on 22 February.

Cultural Recognition

Although the Roma in Europe are subjected to structural exclusion and discrimination, their contributions as musicians are admired. Since the collapse of communism Roma music has experienced a new wave of popularity. Contemporary Roma bands not only keep alive traditional music but also mix their style with flamenco, Cuban rhythms and elements of jazz, even working together with western DJs, who combine Roma music with house or dub remixes.

Beyond the issues of poverty and discrimination, the question of Roma identity, particularly their cultural identity, is being readdressed. This year the Venice Biennale for the first time included a pavilion exhibiting art by gypsies living in several different European countries. One of those present was Daniel Baker from Britain, probably the most well-known contemporary Roma artist. "I am a Roma, there's no doubt about that, but at the same time I'm an Englishman. But that's the way it is for everyone, isn't it?” he said on 8 August 2007 in an interview with Agnes Bihari for the Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság. "Our identity is composed of several elements, one of which pushes itself to the fore... I paint on mirrors, not canvases. The mirrors point to an imaginary place which society has allocated to the Roma.”

A Nation Without A State

For the European majority societies, the Roma have always served as an object onto which to project their own desire to travel freely and escape the constraints of bourgeois society. It was thus not surprising that the journalist Antoine Maurice, writing in the Swiss newspaper Tribune de Genève on 31 August 2006, saw the Roma as the epitome of a globalized people: "Lacking a national aspiration of their own, they are able to slip, like genuine globalized people, into a number of different cultures without ever losing their Tzigan identity.”

The Roma themselves have different political priorities, however. Their initial goal is to have the same rights as other citizens of Europe. But there is some argument about whether they should attempt to achieve this in individual European states in which they are national minorities or whether they should form themselves into a transnational nation. But can the Roma become a nation, and is this what they actually want?

"To date no Roma activist has considered taking such a step,” the German historian Wolfgang Wippermann declared in an article for the German weekly Freitag on 9 February 2007. "But there is an idea circulating of declaring a non-territorial Roma state and pressing for recognition of the Roma as one of the constituent nations of Europe (in other words, a European nation). Perhaps the Roma are cleverer than all the other peoples of Europe because they are leapfrogging the nation stage and becoming Europeans straight away.”

Dirk Auer

Dirk Auer studied social sciences and subsequently became a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Universiy of Oldenburg. He currently lives in Sofia ...
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