France: behind the expulsion of the Roma

By Olivia Miljanic and Robert Zaretsky
Le Monde diplomatique
September 3, 2010 

http://mondediplo.com/blogs/france-behind-the-expulsion-of-the-roma

On both sides of the Atlantic, commentators and activists
have reacted with growing fury to the French government's
expulsion of hundreds of Roma, or Gypsies, to Bulgaria and
Romania. Many critics liken these expulsions - as well as the
threat to strip lawbreakers of their French citizenship - to
the deportations of Jews organised by France's Vichy regime
during the second world war. It's hard to know what is more
outrageous: the policies practiced by President Sarkozy or
the analogies proffered by his critics.

Vichy has no monopoly on xenophobic reflexes and exclusionary
policies in the history of modern France. Over the course of
the 20th century, it was the French republic that laid the
administrative and legal foundations for official
discrimination against the Roma.

As in real estate, so in history: location-in this case,
temporal location-counts for a great deal. In 1912, the
French republican government passed a battery of laws
ostensibly aimed at vagrancy. Yet the government revealed its
hand when it created an identity card that specifically
targeted Gypsies. while the French law did not specify
'Gypsies' but instead used the term 'nomads,' the
instructions to local officials lent themselves to racial
identification. (This has recently been repeated in Arizona's
proposed anti-immigrant law.)

The identity cards allowed French authorities to track the
movements of Gypsies during the first world war, but they
were rarely interned in camps. This policy soon changed,
though. By the mid-1930s, with the great influx into France
of political and religious refugees from central and eastern
Europe, the republic created a new kind of identity card
that, as the historian Pierre Piazza notes, sought 'to
delimit more rigorously the contours [of the national
community] and to better locate those who did not make up
part of it.'

With relentless logic, there followed the creation of dozens
of 'special centres'-soon to become concentration camps-for
refugees recently arrived on French soil. At the same time,
the republic passed a law empowering officials to strip
recently naturalised citizens of French nationality. Finally,
shortly before the German invasion in the summer of 1940, the
republican government ordered local officials to herd
'nomads' into assigned areas. In justifying its action, the
government declared: 'Wandering individuals generally without
a home, a homeland, or an actual profession, constitute a
danger for national security - that must be removed.'

When Vichy came into existence a few months later, it built
upon policies and structures introduced by the now-defunct
republic. But the popular view of Vichy - as a rupture in
history, four years that had nothing in common with what went
before or what followed - cedes to a more accurate rendering,
which shows important and unsettling continuities between
democratic governments and authoritarian regimes in France.

Of course, the republic would never have applied a racialist
policy towards Gypsies and Jews as Vichy did, much less
participate in the systematic deportation of the two groups
to the death camps. In this respect, Vichy and the French
republic have nothing in common.

Nonetheless, the continuities between democratic and
authoritarian phases in French history lead to a more general
observation, often overlooked: the tendency of all
democracies to isolate and discriminate against certain
minorities. Democracies are as likely as authoritarian states
to practice xenophobic or racist politics. While Sarkozy's
policies may be unworthy of the French republic, as his
critics insist, they are not unprecedented.

Thinkers from Plato to Tocqueville have commented on the
dangers inherent in the rule of the majority - especially
when the majority is swayed by the passionate actions and
speeches of the few. The lot of the Roma in contemporary
France and Romania is a case in point. While these
democracies do not subject their Roma populations to the
punitive, at times fatal, policies pursued by Pétain's France
or Ceausescu's Romania, they do relegate them to the margins
of their societies.

In present day Romania, the Roma population has a poverty
rate three times higher than the national average, with low
life expectancy, low rates of literacy and 100% unemployment
in some areas. Since becoming a candidate and then a member
of the European Union, the Romanian government has
reluctantly designed initiatives aimed at facilitating
integration of the Roma. Affirmative action programmes and
the appointment of local level educational and health
mediators have been the most publicised. But the
effectiveness of these programmes has at best been limited,
and anti-Roma sentiments continue among Romanian policy-
makers, reflecting local public opinion trends.

Romanians now see the French expulsions as proof that
integration of the Roma into any European society is mere
utopia. So the actions of the French government are
undermining the already frail attempts at implementing
policies that would target Roma discrimination in Romania.

As for France, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the European
Green Party, says that Sarkozy has 'taken the French for
fools' in pursuing his anti-Roma policy. Perhaps. But
according to recent polls that reveal a nation evenly divided
over the issue, Cohn-Bendit's claim means that nearly half
the French population are fools.

We need only consider earlier republican laws aimed at the
Gypsies, passed in 1912, 1938 and 1940, to see that
xenophobia flared at those moments when France faced the
threat of war. Moreover, on the eve of both wars, France was
awash in fears over the nation's declining birthrate and its
capacity to maintain its historical legacy as a dominant
economic, cultural, political and military power.

While the French republic doesn't now face the prospect of
war, it does face other crises: economic stagnation, decaying
inner cities and a top-heavy state staggering under the
increasingly unrealistic expectations of the public. It must
also wrestle with perplexing questions of national identity
and national security provoked by an EU that continues to
extend its writ. Here's the rub for Sarkozy, and blessing for
the Roma: the EU, long criticised for its 'democratic
deficit,' may now become the defender of last resort for
Europe's last stateless people, the Roma.

[Olivia Miljanic is a lecturer at the University of Houston;
born and raised in Romania, one of her regional areas of
interest is Europe.

Robert Zaretsky is professor of history at the Honors
College, University of Houston, Texas, and author of France
and Its Empire Since 1870, with Alice Conklin and Sarah
Fishman, Oxford University Press, March 2010, and Albert
Camus: Elements of a Life, Cornell University Press, 2010.]

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