Lost in Europe: Roma and the Search for Political Legitimacy

Abstract

In trying to locate/identify avenues for political representation and contestation in Europe, this chapter examines four discrete approaches that in various ways and guises have animated (and continue to animate) Romani mobilization (and the Romani movement) over the past few decades. In no particular order, these are: nationalism, transnationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism. The argument hinges on two assumptions: (1) the European Union, and Europe generally, has the institutional capacity to accommodate a non-territorial, post-Westphalian, form of belonging and representation and (2) Europe’s largest contiguous minority, Roma, could realize enhanced political legitimacy and efficacy through one of the suggested models. An important caveat to the discussion at hand is that “institutional capacity” is not the same as institutional willingness or desire, and the gulf between what could work and what lawmakers are prepared to endorse is, at this point, sizable. Various attempts to integrate Roma have failed, and it looks like that without a significant change in how Roma interact with politicians and jurists, at the EU and state level, they will remain peripheral and disenfranchised, and politically lost.