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21St Century Exclusion: Roma and Gypsy-Travellers in European

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21St Century Exclusion: Roma and Gypsy-Travellers in European Angus Bancroft (2005) Roma and Gypsy-Travellers in Europe: Modernity, Race, Space and Exclusion, Aldershot: Ashgate. Contents Chapter 1 Europe and its Internal Outsiders Chapter 2 Modernity, Space and the Outsider Chapter 3 The Gypsies Metamorphosed: Race, Racialization and Racial Action in Europe Chapter 4 Segregation of Roma and Gypsy-Travellers Chapter 5 The Law of the Land Chapter 6 A Panic in Perspective Chapter 7 Closed Spaces, Restricted Places Chapter 8 A ‘21st Century Racism’? Bibliography Index Chapter 1 Europe and its Internal Outsiders Introduction From the ‘forgotten Holocaust’ in the concentration camps of Nazi controlled Europe to the upsurge of racist violence that followed the fall of Communism and the naked hostility displayed towards them across the continent in the 21st Century, Europe has been a dangerous place for Roma and Gypsy-Travellers (‘Gypsies’). There are Roma and Gypsy-Travellers living in every country of Europe. They have been the object of persecution, and the subject of misrepresentation, for most of their history. They are amongst the most marginalized groups in European society, historically being on the receiving end of severe racism, social and economic disadvantage, and forced population displacement. Anti-Gypsy sentiment is present throughout Europe, in post-Communist countries such as Romania, in social democracies like Finland, in Britain, in France and so on. Opinion polls consistently show that they are held in lower esteem than other ethnic groups. Examples of these sentiments in action range from mob violence in Croatia to ‘no Travellers’ signs in pubs in Scotland. This book will examine the exclusion of Roma and Gypsy-Travellers in Europe. The rationale behind it is that there is a set of processes that connect these phenomena together beyond the fact that they involve groups of people who are called, or call themselves, ‘Gypsies’ in different parts of Europe. Historically, there have been times when they have been more explicitly targeted as outsiders, by states and settled populations. These periods seem to be associated with major developments in the emergence and consolidation of the modern, centralized bureaucratic nation-state in Europe – for instance, in the period following the First World War. Europe is currently going through one of those periods in which there is a reordering of nations and states, this time in the context of a supranational body, the European Union, which is developing its own state structures and symbols, along with the globalization of flows of information and capital that revalues space and place. Outsider groups that appear to devalue space and transgress or disturb the meaning of place are reviled and rejected. In this case there is a particular uncertainty and ambivalence. Outright expressions of racism are considered inappropriate, but hostility is present and unashamedly expressed towards these internal groups that are placed on the moral and political margins. It is vital to develop a sociological perspective on this form of exclusion, what might be called ‘21st Century racism’. More so, this has to be done in a European context, because many 2 Roma and Gypsy-Travellers in Europe of the developments that affect Roma and Gypsy-Travellers and other outsider groups take place at this level. It is becoming more and more important to adopt a perspective that can link pan-European developments in exclusion and racism to global and local changes. There are many groups of people living in the European continent who are excluded from the ideological and geographical ‘place’ of Europe. I will examine the exclusion of one such outsider minority in Europe, Roma and Gypsy-Travellers. Roma and Gypsy- Travellers in Europe have been, and continue to be, the object of assimilation, state coercion, discrimination and racial violence. They have been subject to a variety of regulatory surveillance techniques and structures produced by various institutions of modernity. This book uses their experience to illustrate how certain outsider groups are constituted and excluded within Europe. Its central argument is that the construction of space and identity within Europe as it is constituted excludes outsider groups from a stake in the ‘place’ of Europe, and this emerging form of exclusion differs in some ways from the racial and social exclusions that have characterized Europe in past decades and centuries. This calls into question the inclusive nature of a common- or pan-European identity, citizenship and rights, by which progressive thought has set much score. The key themes of the book are: narratives of race and ethnicity and nation; legal sedentarization and criminalization; socio-spatial segregation at a local level; the policy of ‘fortress Europe’ at a national and supra-national level; and the interaction between constructs of globalization and locality. I place the experiences of Roma and Gypsy-Travellers within the context of recent developments in European societies, institutions and politics that contribute towards new and ‘new-old’ forms of exclusion, new-old forms of exclusion being those that combine old methods in new forms. The book employs the concept of modernity, understood as a set of systems and sub-systems such as the nation-state based on specific forms of time- spatial order and control, as a theoretical framework with which to investigate their position within European society and to understand recent social changes. Using fieldwork conducted in Britain and the Czech Republic and documentary research, it describes some of the regulatory discourses and exclusions to which Roma and Gypsy- Travellers are subject. It places their experience within the wider contexts of race and ethnicity, changing institutional structures and developing globalization-localization processes. The book is written from the point of view that it is essential to develop a theoretical perspective that extends past the – important – specific concerns of racial violence, discrimination and so on, expounding on what the most important questions facing Roma and Gypsy-Travellers in Europe are. In spite of the varied nature of the groups discussed in the book, their experiences are connected in important dimensions, both historically and in the present. My premise is that the problems and challenges they faced are different expressions of a common problem or set of problems. The book takes the perspective that regulatory functions and narratives make and remake Europe as a restricted ideological space and geographic entity. It is a space from which ‘outsider’ minorities like Roma and Gypsy-Travellers are excluded. This involves processes of race and racialization occurring across the continent; the development of socio-spatial segregation; legal exclusions; the division between mobile objects and restricted subjects; the relationship between globalized space and localized place; and Europe and its Internal Outsiders 3 the construction of networks of dark and light zones by socio-economic forces and state practices. Specific issues considered include: the resurgence of anti-Roma violence, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe; the impact of the Criminal Justice Act 1994 on Gypsy-Travellers in the UK; the treatment of Roma asylum seekers in Britain; and the historical criminalization of activities associated with Gypsy-Traveller life. Race, Space, Modernity and Backwardness: Key Themes Outsider populations in Europe have been and are racialized, but in different forms at different times and places. Anti-Gypsy action in the Czech Republic has implications for sociological understandings of racism, as well as the concept of backwardness and white identity. An examination of the function of racism in Western and Eastern Europe leads me to suggest that racism in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe is understood in Western Europe as an example of the backwardness of those states, whereas it is in fact intimately associated with their modernization. Western European nations use evidence of racism in Central and Eastern Europe to ‘orientalize’ racism, in an analogous manner to the way Roma and Gypsy-Travellers are orientialized. Space is an important factor in the interaction between outsider groups and the institutions and practices of modernity, nation and state. The experiences of Roma and Gypsy-Travellers are examples of struggles over the control and management of space in modernity. In the book I consider processes of spatial management and ghettoization in the Britain and the Czech Republic. In the Czech Republic ghettoization is a factor in the racialization of the Roma. It is a legacy of the Communist era and is fuelled by the ambitions of local politicians in the post-Communist period. In Britain, local politics is also an important factor in the creation and locating of caravan sites for Gypsy- Travellers. The system of local authority sites for Gypsy-Travellers itself has an important role in the sedentarization of nomadic Gypsy-Travellers. Some of the struggles over control and management of space are played out in the arena of law. Here the focus is on Britain, where a series of legal statutes have been enacted over the course of the 20th Century which have had a severe impact on the lives of Gypsy-Travellers. The law functions to establish moral and social norms and pathologize aspects of Gypsy-Traveller life. Legal principles, sedentarist discourses and bureaucratic agencies combine to construct Gypsy-Travellers as deviant with regard to the moral and social order. Ingrained assumptions about what constitutes a normal way of life leave them out in the cold and often ‘on the verge’. In addition to struggles over local space, there are struggles – even more one-sided – over national and continental space. This can be seen in the experience of and reaction to Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and other Roma who seek asylum in Britain. Amidst the arrival of Roma in the UK and Canada seeking asylum during 1997 the media, public and politicians rushed to label the Roma as ‘economic migrants’ as opposed to ‘genuine refugees’.
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