Perhaps more than any other minority group in Europe, the Roma have tried to reach beyond the boundaries of the national state to change local realities of marginalization. Roma activists have counted on the support of the EU to turn around the negligent attitudes of national governments. The further development of an EU framework that stimulates national states to design and implement social policies that protect Roma is no doubt necessary, but it may not be enough. In order to have real impact, the EU needs to address key obstacles of the area of social policy and human rights protection more broadly.
Introduction
Minority populations in Central and Eastern Europe often face challenges of socioeconomic and political exclusion, even if they are formally included in a state as national citizens. One response to this problem has been the establishment of separate institutions where minority representatives can critically engage with policymakers. The underlying idea is that such special channels for consultation and collaboration are needed to compensate for the lack of leverage minorities have through regular political participation. But is the increased presence of minority citizens in policy-making institutions sufficient to improve conditions for minority members in society more broadly?
The question is particularly relevant for the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe, a population that overwhelmingly belongs to the stratum of Europe’s socioeconomically most vulnerable citizens and suffers from rising hatred (EU Agency for Fundamental Rights 2012, 80–81; Rubin et al. 2014; Stewart 2012).1 The usual mechanisms of political participation have clearly left the Roma underrepresented. Even in the countries with the highest average estimated Roma populations in Central and Eastern Europe—Bulgaria (9.94 percent of the population), Slovakia (9.2 percent), Romania (8.63 percent), and Hungary (7.49 percent) (figures from the Council of Europe 2012)—the number of elected politicians on the local or national level who come from a Roma background, or have lived in a Roma community, is extremely low. National and local electoral campaigns by Roma activists have resulted in some small victories, especially at the local level, but the overall ethnic electoral representation of Roma is negligible, both in ethnic parties and in mainstream political parties (Barany 2001; National Democratic Institute 2009; Degro 2015; McGarry 2009). Mainstream political parties, local or national administrations, and governing bodies seldom have Roma members. Even if Roma organize activist groups on an ethnic basis, or, as happens in some countries, are allowed to elect ethnic minority representatives—in Romania, for example, through reserved seats in parliament, or in Hungary through a system of local and national minority “self-governments” responsible for some matters of cultural policy—their influence remains limited and their voice is usually on the margins, even in debates on policies that affect them.
Over the last two decades many Roma activists have tried to strengthen their local and national position by joining forces across national borders (Ram 2010; Vermeersch 2005), a practice that finds precedent in earlier traditions of transnational Roma activism in the 1970s and 1980s—for example, the International Romani Union (IRU) (Klímová-Alexander 2005). This emerging transnational movement has put high hopes on support from several Europe-wide structures and agencies, including the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and mainly the European Union (EU). In a way, the EU became for the Roma the most self-evident post-national avenue toward minority activism and “claims-making” (Koopmans et al. 2005). And the EU has indeed more or less accepted this role. Recent years have seen the establishment of various EU mechanisms that encourage EU member states to introduce better policies to improve the position of “their” Roma and ensure that Roma themselves become part of a conversation with national governments and local policymakers.
Can these EU efforts led to any meaningful change on the ground? Do the current channels for minority consultation at the level of the EU meaningfully increase the involvement of Roma in national policy formation? And is it likely that such involvement will help realize substantial socioeconomic and political change in the countries where the situation of the Roma is the most problematic?
I begin this paper with a section that outlines why the European integration process has become so important for the Roma. I focus on the role of the EU’s enlargement process and the EU’s social policy agenda. I also discuss the establishment of special consultative bodies for Roma at the level of the European Commission (EC). The section that follows addresses the limits of the EU’s post-national route toward a better position for the Roma. I discuss one important context-related obstacle hindering the potential impact of the current EU framework on the advancement of national policies that help Roma: the diminishing mobilizing power of the cross-border human rights ideals in the EU. In the last section I examine the ways in which the EU can still matter for the Roma, despite some remaining key challenges.
The Importance of European Integration for the Roma
EU Enlargement
The EU would never have been as crucial for Roma activism as it is today without the enlargement process. The EC progress reports in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which reviewed candidate countries in Central Europe against a set of membership conditions, often highlighted the position of the Roma. There was a lot of normative pressure on prospective EU members during that period, and in response to this leverage the candidate member states were sometimes quick to review, revise, and strengthen some of their minority policies (Schimmelfennig 2010) or adopt international minority-protection legislation such as the Council of Europe’s multilateral instruments devoted to the protection of national minorities: the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Yet the story of enlargement is not all positive for Roma. Policy responses and legal regulations often turned out to be more symbolic and rhetorical than substantive and effective. Moreover, while some ongoing domestic reforms in the field of minority protection were no doubt given extra impetus by the EU’s membership conditionality and enlargement funding schemes, these reforms and legal adaptations often did not lead to any noticeable positive changes for Roma communities on the ground. Sometimes the developments were even negative: several communities became poorer and more socially excluded than before 1989 (Guy 2001).
This uneven result may in part have been inevitable given the EU’s strategy of setting broad preconditions for all candidate member states before entering into more specific negotiations with each of the states separately. As Heather Grabbe has argued, the EU did not have equal traction in all candidate states; there was more influence and leverage in places where EU demands were congruent with domestic priorities and where there was already a “national project” in place to “return to Europe” (Grabbe 2014). In addition, there remained general problems of implementation and backlash within the framework of the conditionality policy, especially in the field of human rights. Vague requirements and flexible membership preconditions provided ample maneuvering room to states that were criticized by the EC for failing to protect or to improve the situation of marginalized Roma. In some cases, politicians used the conditionality pretext to begin or continue to mobilize against the Roma. Among Roma activists there was a high level of uncertainty about whether the EU could really push states to pursue radical policy changes on this issue and many realized that the EU’s enlargement policies could only go so far in helping to change socioeconomic realities (Nicolae 2012).
The EU’s Social Policy Agenda
The situation of the Roma not only rose to prominence because of the enlargement process; there was also some attention from EU institutions because the EU, over the last two decades, has tried to promote the active inclusion of vulnerable citizens in governance structures (see, for example, Daly 2008; Bee and Guerrina 2014) and create more meaningful forms of European citizenship, also for minorities (Isin and Saward 2013). In the field of social policy in general, for example, we see the roots of such efforts in the early 2000s in the context of the social Open Method of Coordination, a process of voluntary cooperation between member states geared toward reaching common goals in social affairs (Frazer 2010). Since then, European policy-makers have used and promoted various participatory techniques to communicate and collaborate with secondary stakeholders, including organized networks or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as FEANTSA (the European Federation of National Organizations working with the Homeless) or EAPN (the European Anti-Poverty Network), and, to a lesser extent, with so-called primary stakeholders, usually selected people from the target group. In the latter case, for example, people experiencing poverty themselves have been involved in consultative conferences, deliberative events, and participatory processes. Such initiatives have fulfilled some important goals: they have kept social issues, including the position of vulnerable minorities, on the EU agenda and they have provided opportunities for policy exchange and learning (Frazer 2010, 20–21).
But here too, the story is not all positive. As the 2014 mid-term review of the EU’s jobs and growth strategy “Europe 2020” has revealed, such efforts have not been able to create the expected substantial progress. Policy initiatives have mostly addressed the preparatory phase or design of new social policies; implementation continues to be a problem (Frazer et al. 2014). Moreover, consultations (sometimes done online, see Quittkat 2011) and participatory processes often encounter problems of transparency and representation (Lord and Pollak 2013). It remains unclear what outcomes consultation and participation should seek to achieve, how exactly a vulnerable group should be represented or a sufficiently diverse set of representatives can be included, and how tokenism or stigmatization can be avoided.
Roma Consultation Mechanisms on the EU Level
In response to some of the disappointments associated with shortcomings of the EU enlargement policy and the social policy agenda, the EU has looked for new ways to prompt member state governments to take action on the issue of the Roma. Member state governments, for their part, have been increasingly interested in tackling the issue—even if only as a way to address (or in some cases avoid) intra-EU mobility of Roma (Nacu 2012).
It is in this context that we have to understand the series of European Roma Summits that the European Commission organized in 2008, 2010, and 2014. These highly visible meetings brought together a broad range of representatives from EU institutions, national governments, regional and local public authorities, and (Roma) civil society organizations, and were meant to provide a public forum for various stakeholders in order to increase general political awareness about the situation of Roma in the EU, especially among high-level national policy-makers. Some specific outcomes followed from this large-scale participatory effort. The first Roma Summit, for instance, concluded with the creation of the European Platform for Roma Inclusion, a smaller and more focused deliberative forum that, since 2010, has regularly facilitated meetings between state representatives, Roma activists and experts to identify promising developments and stimulate cooperation where needed. Among other things, these meetings worked out the basic principles guiding the European Commission’s action in this field. The EC tries to strike a balance between highlighting national accountability and stimulating European monitoring, on the one hand, and advocating special measures to support Roma and propagating a mainstream approach, on the other. These meetings have also encouraged member state governments to provide quantifiable targets to reduce the employment and education gaps between Roma and other sections of the population, offer Roma access to micro-credit, or employ more Roma as qualified civil servants in the public sector.
The culmination point of this phase came in April 2011, when a Communication of the European Commission (no. 173) announced an overall European framework for demanding clear policy commitments on Roma from all EU member states. Since then, member state governments have been urged to draw up “national Roma integration strategies” (NRISs). The logic here was that bringing such national policy plans together under the umbrella of a coordinated European effort would make it easier to compare national policy ideas, practices, and commitments, and create new pathways toward more robust monitoring by independent agencies and civil society actors.
Since 2011, the European Commission has reviewed policy progress and examined more closely the ways in which member states have used (or failed to use) European Structural and Investment Funds for projects in which Roma are involved—all of this in order to ensure that the budgetary opportunities for Roma inclusion policies that come with European membership are not squandered. Through the European Social Fund (ESF), the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EARDF), relatively large budgets are now available for tackling various aspects of the situation facing the Roma, and conditions have been put into place in order to avoid such funds being used to segregate the Roma even further. In the case of the ERDF, for example, projects that are not explicitly aimed at desegregation—such as those that seek to improve housing conditions in a segregated area—will not be eligible for funding (Vermeersch and Sobotka 2012). In response to such monitoring and reviewing efforts by the European Commission, several member states have revised their national strategies or action plans and set up consultation forums on the implementation of these plans. Expert reports and independent shadow monitoring by NGOs (e.g. Rorke 2012) try to push this development further.
The Limits of European Post-National Citizenship for the Roma
These European consultative efforts, which amount to a certain type of Europeanization for the Roma—that is, they address the problems that appear in separate national contexts indirectly, by giving the Roma a European voice in a set of transnational institutions and initiatives—present both an opportunity and a challenge for Roma activists. The Europeanizing of policy demands and deliberations certainly has advantages over promoting policy ideas and discussions only locally or nationally. European awareness-raising campaigns can have more clout than local or national ones; individual, local, and national activists now find support from cross-border NGOs that are not only working on issues related to Roma, but are active in more broadly defined fields such as human rights and anti-poverty, and on this basis, build new transnational European alliances. However, this must be weighed against the risks. For instance, the European institutionalization of Roma policies and the actions on Roma issues by transnational human rights networks has led some politicians to reinforce the idea that Roma activism is by necessity a practice of “post-national citizenship” (Tambini 2001)— rather than one of national citizenship—and that Roma are therefore best served by EU institutions rather than national ones (Vermeersch 2012). Such a post-national conceptualization of a group’s identity should, in theory, perhaps not be entirely problematic (indeed, there have been calls to think in these terms about other social groups as well), yet, in the absence of a substantial legal and political European citizenship regime, it can, in practice, be used to frame the Roma as only European, and therefore not national or local. This informal status reifies the Roma as a group that is somehow separate from the national population of a state and does not share interests with so-called “regular” citizens of that state, who are still overwhelmingly viewed and defined on the basis of their national citizenship: unlike the minority, they are not framed or understood as “European.” Moreover, the structures that are needed to improve the situation on the ground for the Roma (social welfare systems, redistribution mechanisms, and anti-discrimination policies) fall primarily under the authority of national states, not the European institutions (see, for example, Schall 2012).
There are several ways in which the risk of the Europeanization of the Roma can be understood. One way is to consider the previously growing but now diminishing power of post-national and universal human rights standards as a basic f...
