Opinion | Columnists
Shutting out the Roma
With its immigration policy marked by an unwillingness to assert national interest, France needed a pretext to crack down on gypsies
- By Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times
- Published: 00:00 August 30, 2010
- Image Credit: AFP
- A woman runs during the visit of Versailles bishop Eric Aumonier in a Roma camp on August 28, 2010 in Carrieres-sous-Poissy, west of Paris, after France launched a country-wide crackdown on Roma earlier this month after a group of gypsies allegedly attacked a police station.
Last week in Lille a Catholic priest announced that he was praying that French president Nicolas Sarkozy would have a heart attack. The priest, Arthur Hervet, who has since retracted his words, is passionate about fair treatment for immigrant gypsies (or Roma, known in France as Roms).
They are currently in the French president's line of fire. In the Loire in mid-July, a group of French gypsies (known in France as ‘travelling people') attacked a police station with axes.
Two weeks later, in Grenoble, Sarkozy launched an ‘offensive securitaire'. He would break up 600 illegal encampments and squats, many of them occupied by immigrants from Romania, and repatriate the inhabitants.
The result has been outrage from the church, from the Socialist opposition and from the Romanian government. Disquiet has also arisen inside Sarkozy's party.
One does not want to stoke prejudice against a people who were victims of a Nazi genocide. But there are dangers in being complacent. There are about 10 million Roma in Europe. Although the vast majority are not itinerants, any country that shows itself inclined to accommodate their informal living arrangements will doubtless receive an influx, and Roma communities have high crime rates.
France claims it is abiding by European Union rules in managing the expulsions. It has a point. The majority of Roms are citizens of Romania, a newly admitted European Union country.
During a transitional period until 2014, Romanian citizens can settle in France for only three months, unless they have work. Those being sent back are violating the law. Many have been building homes without permission, on property that doesn't belong to them.
The problem is that Sarkozy's measures are being carried out against a backdrop of opportunistic bluster. Of late, Sarkozy has suggested establishing a list of crimes for which French nationality can be stripped from newly naturalised immigrants.
Impractical decision
These include female circumcision, polygamy and "domestic slavery". Stripping citizenship for such things is pointless and impractical, and presumably aimed only at riling people up.
France needs a pretext to crack down because its immigration policy is marked by an unwillingness to assert national interest. European governments squeamishly claim to be acting in the name of universal principle, or even in the interests of immigrants themselves.
The French government describes its expulsions of Roma as an "action humanitaire", while its Europe secretary, Pierre Lellouche, calls them a blow against "human trafficking".
According to the government, most of the expulsions are "voluntary" — France pays the expellees 300 euros per adult and 100 euros per child to help them get a start back in their native countries. Those who start small businesses in Romania are eligible for up to 3,600 euros in grants.
But these transfers are the sign not of generosity but of a guilty conscience. If there actually is a security rationale for breaking up Roma camps, shouldn't the violator be paying the government?
When people talk about the Roma as ‘stateless', they are only half correct. No individual Rom is stateless in the way those fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s were. Any adult Rom can vote in Romania. But as a people they are stateless. And there can be little doubt that they are a people, their identity formed by centuries of cultural choices.
That is why suggestions that France ‘integrate' the Roms — by, for instance, giving them more access to educational opportunities — get the wrong end of the stick.
Integration as policymakers understand it is not necessarily what the Roma want. Where nation-states are strong, such questions are easily resolved — the state decides what newcomers can aspire to. But as individual EU nation-states have given up their monopoly on government, new crypto-national claims are being asserted within them.
The question that will have to be addressed before long is whether Roma folkways deserve special respect as part of what the Pope calls "human diversity" — and where.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
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