The Roma: Redistribution, Recognition and Representation in a Social Europe
21 June 2016
In this article, guest contributor Andrew Ryder argues that a dynamic civil society can play a key role in empowering Roma communities in the broad quest for social justice; that civil society can be the catalyst to prompt debate and dialogue about the nature of exclusion, and foster a form of critical pedagogy which transforms the social imagination and mobilises support for solutions which are grounded in the needs and aspirations of communities.
Today policies to address Roma exclusion are framed, in particular by the European Union, in the language of social inclusion. However, the term ‘social inclusion’ has proven to be rather elastic with associated strategies ranging from structural change to a need for individual reform and or acquiring new skills.
Policy solutions for the Roma and other marginalised groups often centre on preventing early school-leaving, reintegrating early school-leavers and supporting school-to-work transitions and active labour market policies. For individual Roma who are able to access such opportunities, the consequences can be life changing, but how might broader and deeper change facilitate and extend the chances all Roma have to overcome exclusion?
However, in Europe recession and austerity have led to cuts in education and training, and unemployment is high and new job opportunities are often part-time and precarious. Roma communities are amongst the most prominent victims of both poverty and xenophobia in Europe. Filcak and Skobla (2012) suggest Roma are the ‘canary in the mine shaft’, the harbinger of future crisis. In other words we can tell a lot about the climate of the time in how the Roma are treated and depicted. Roma have experienced acute forms of marginalisation in Central and Eastern Europe during the transition period to a market economy. Across Europe, as a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis and austerity policies, Roma marginalisation has been compounded.
Policymakers, most notably the World Bank have placed a growing emphasis on the economic advantages of Roma inclusion through productivity growth and welfare savings. Bolder alternatives to current policy trends might come about via the concept of ’Social Europe’ which is more interventionist and redistributive of power and resources and which promotes the development of national welfare states and their protection against the forces of globalization and international competition. A Social Europe stresses the value of increasing labour market participation, places much more emphasis on active welfare state measures, introduces supply-side efforts at job creation, seeks measures to provide security other than life-time job tenure and prioritises efforts to combat the structural causes of social exclusion.
Instead though there has been a preference for economic downsizing, the contraction of economic activity and laying-off staff, prompted by poor national economic performance but also competition and outsourcing in a globalised economy. It also has to be said that transformative visions of change run counter to currents of opinion which wish to see a focus on market rather than social matters, and question the degree and level of European integration. It is in this context that any debate on the economic and educational inclusion of Roma needs to take place.
We can distinguish various kinds of anti-poverty programmes which target Roma. There are those which target areas where large numbers of Roma live, but benefit all individuals living in that area, regardless of ethnicity. And then there are those which, by providing Roma mediators, seek to remove cultural sources of discrimination; and there are those which specifically target Roma by ethnicity. According to some, these Roma-focused measures can run the risk of creating a perception that there is something inherently at fault with the Roma, rather than in the structurally racist behaviour of many of the non-Roma population. In contrast, others argue that targeted measures can reach vulnerable Roma communities more effectively, and in time can be incorporated into mainstream approaches.
In a discussion of the Roma and review of initiatives to help them there is sometimes an assumption resting behind these measures that the problems of the Roma can be addressed if they are merely integrated into school and the labour market. Here policy is articulated into a narrow vision of social inclusion, where skills acquisition and personal reform are the prerequisites to achieve inclusion. The danger of such reasoning though is that it neglects the significance of macro policy actually being a central driving force in growing inequality but also fails to recognise the power of discriminatory and racist discourses such as ‘anti-Gypsyism’.
The intensity of anti-Gypsyism was clearly demonstrated in April 2016 when a violent attack on a 17-year-old Roma youth took place in Bulgaria. The Roma adolescent was beaten after telling the attacker that they are equal, despite their different ethnicities. The brutal attack was recorded on the assailant’s phone. In solidarity Roma activists posted pictures of themselves holding placards proclaiming #Roma Are Equal.
Additionally It was reported that on the 19th April 2016 in Zagreb, Croatia an unidentified attacker threw a hand grenade into the yard of a building that houses a nursery school for Romani children, the resulting explosion caused some structural damage. The Croatian Romani Association also has its office in the building and a second preschool facility is housed there.
Around the same date a Roma Holocaust memorial in the southern Poland was vandalised by an unknown person(s). The memorial commemorated the massacre of thirty Roma in July 1942, in a forest near the village of Borzecin.
The marginalisation, exclusion and demonisation that ethnic groups like the Roma are subject to is based on racism, ‘othering’ and projection of stereotypes that constitutes cultural ‘misrecognition’; and this is compounded by ‘maldistribution’ or what can be termed as a lack of services and resources, which further marginalises groups like the Roma. Nancy Fraser has argued that redistribution and recognition must be united in attempts to understand and challenge social injustice. However, such a course of action may require radical approaches favouring the deconstruction and destabilisation of existing identities, codes, and symbolic orders, and in place of assimilatory or liberal multicultural and narrow inclusion policies, new bolder strategies may be required which empower and intervene and correct where the markets and institutions of the state hinder and impede social justice for Roma communities. In terms of the process of mediating what social justice is and how it can be delivered we need to consider the importance and value of representation. Fraser has noted how status hierachies map onto class differentials to block groups like the Roma from participation in mainstream arenas of social interaction. In other words economic, political and cultural structures work together to deny participation.
In the broad quest for social justice, based upon recognition, redistribution and representation, I feel civil society has a key role to play. Critics have highlighted fears of a ‘Gypsy industry’ where civil society and service providers offer narrow, outsider-driven and ill thought-out initiatives. However, a dynamic civil society can play a critical role in empowering communities, and shaping policy and forming the bedrock of effective national and European advocacy campaigns, by ensuring that advocacy is grounded in the needs and aspirations of communities.
Despite the weaknesses of Roma civil society we should not forget that it has often provided the training grounds and platforms for the handful of younger progressive Roma lawmakers and artists that are now taking the political and cultural stage. Civil society has also played a pivotal role in nurturing one of the brightest features of the Romani movement, namely a feminist and critical wing which is increasingly recognising the value of wider alliances with other oppositional movements based not just on identity but also economic interests and which understands the intersectional (multidimensional) nature of exclusion.
Civil society can be the catalyst within communities to prompt debate and dialogue about the nature of exclusion but also devise and mobilise support for solutions. In this role civil society could also have a central role in research and monitoring, working in unison with researchers, to help include Roma communities in participatory ventures which develop community profiles (assessments of resources available or lack of) or evaluations of policy.
Civil society can thus foster a form of critical pedagogy which transforms the social imagination, creating a consciousness that has the power to transform oppression in a dialogic processes of inquiry that actively engages those at the margins in negotiating new forms of collective action which can secure concessions and reform but should ideally and ultimately achieve substantive and transformative change in terms of recognition, redistribution and representation.
For a fuller discussion see: Ryder, A. Cemlyn, S. Acton, T (2014) Hearing the Voices of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers: Inclusive Community Development, Bristol: Policy Press; and for a related overview see the PAL.eu discussion paper ROMA ARE EQUAL - Alternatives to Poverty, Racism and Exclusion in Education and Employment
