Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law

Henriette Asséo
In Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine Volume 51-4, Issue 5, 2004,
pages 71 to 86
Translated from the French by Cadenza Academic Translations

ISSN 0048-8003
ISBN 2-7011-3738-1

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 Round Table: Should One be Afraid of Cultural Studies?

Gypsy Studies
and European Minority Rights Law

Henriette Asséo

It is no surprise to see the reemergence of a “gypsy question” in Europe, provoked

by the breakdown of the economy of mobility and by the fear of uncontrolled
migration from the East. However, some widely accepted accounts of political
crises do not allow us to understand how the weakening of historical identity
in various constituent nations of the European area occurred simultaneously.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the transformation of the continental system
has revived the fantasy of a European principle of free movement in addition
to the building of national identities, but Europeans are hesitating between
the desires to reconsider historically well-established roots, on the one hand,
and to promote academic cosmopolitanism, on the other.1 Thus the internal
fronts of the pax europeana are not stabilized, and this period of uncertainty
has encouraged the ostracism of neighbors.
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The Gypsies are among the emblematic figures of the fluctuation of thought
on the shape of this gestating European civilization. They are simultaneously
perceived as an unjustly persecuted wandering nation, and as poor, prolific
families that are “useless to the world.” This way of viewing the Gypsies still
presupposes an ontological mobility, which it either considers indulgently as
the freedom to come and go at will or denounces as a form of social archaism.
Nothing has come along to push aside this illusory depiction – not even the
statistics confirming that, of the eight million Gypsies in Europe, three-quarters
have not “traveled” in centuries!
The Gypsies of Europe are therefore subjected to the contradictory pres-
sures of discussions about freedom of movement and of new administrative
norms. There is a great contrast between worsening social marginalization,
which borders on ethnic cleansing in all of the countries of the former Soviet
bloc, and the will of the members of Romani organizations to forge a common

1.  I thank Steven Kaplan for his invitation to Cornell University, a visit that enlightened me as
to the variety of centers of interest in cultural studies.
 II Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine

political expression, with the aid of European authorities. Thus, in a declaration

made in Strasbourg on April 8, 2003, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, Deputy Sec-
retary General of the Council of Europe, encouraged the Roma to participate
fully in the ongoing changes and thus to “take control of their own destiny.”
She therefore suggested that those “without rights” should seize upon politics
in order to claim minority rights. This particular circumstance explains the
emergence of Gypsy studies from invisibility and has stirred new interest in
the subject on the part of the social sciences.
It is greatly tempting, however, to apply a political conception of multi-
culturalism to this polymorphic, misunderstood population that defies the
rules of the ethnographic genre. This view affirms the primacy of identity
and attempts to preserve cultural and ethnic differences in a political program
aimed at institutionalizing cultural difference and slicing society into groups,
with a view to the peaceful expansion of open societies through the general-
ized exchange of people and ideas. However, the notion that an open society
is presumed to be superior to a closed society has a history tied to an analy-
sis of forms of totalitarianism that was led, after the Second World War, by
Hannah Arendt and, on the topic that concerns us here, by Karl Popper. The
latter affirmed in 1945, in The open society and its enemies, that a good society
had an obligation to be open and that its organization rested on a principle of
tolerance and pluralism.2 Theorists of multiculturalism wanted to get away
from the idea of tolerance as a mode of social organization, proposing instead
to replace the abstract realm of citizenship with a general mediation of the
individual rights of all cultural communities identifying themselves as such
in an open society. This undefined segmentation of the demands of mutual
political recognition goes even beyond the doctrine of Genossenschaftsrecht,
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which claimed to offer an idealized view of medieval corporations as modes
of social organization. Thus Giovanni Sartori has affirmed, and rightly so,
that the political uses of multiculturalism are not conducive to surpassing
pluralism, but, on the contrary, negating it.3
For about a decade, therefore, studies on the Gypsy world have been a part
of this rapidly expanding intellectual market, which Stuart Hall described in
1996 as “a veritable discursive explosion in recent years around the concept
of identity.” To the degree that “cultural studies” aims to go beyond the logic
of “dominant/dominated” and establish an interdisciplinary problematic to
study culture and that which is implicit in culture, it contributes to a defini-
tion of “the other.”
The Gypsies’ entrance into academia took place under the influence of a
politically oriented Anglo-Saxon concept of social modeling that has deviated

2.  Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945, 2 vol.).
3.  Giovanni Sartori, Pluralismo, multiculturalismo e estranei: Saggio sulla società multietnica (Rome:
Rizzoli, 2003) [Pluralisme, multiculturalisme et étrangers: Essai sur la société multiethnique, trans. J. Gay-
rard. Éditions des Syrtes, 2003].
 Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law III

from its original goal, along with the ruins of the critical perspective of Euro-
communism as understood by Richard Hoggart, Rolf Lindner, or Stuart
Hall.4 This is because the current vagueness in the field of cultural studies
marginalizes historical analysis and leads to the explosion of theoretical models,
even though the original ambition was to establish rigorous frameworks for
discursive analysis. This confusion of genres groups together applied history,
as inspired by Chicago fundamental sociology; the concept of the “borderline
object,” according to an attribution of “borderline identity,” borrowed from
Barth5; and experimentation of the “interaction orders” proposed by Howard
Becker and Erving Goffman, all thrown into a common pot of all sorts of
works with contradictory conclusions.

The European L aboratory: Minority R ights and Multiculturalism

Cultural sociology thus came upon the Romani world in the testing ground of
minority rights in Europe. While the Gypsies had lasted for centuries without
provoking any particular interest, aside from permanent suspicion on the part
of police, their emergence from invisibility constitutes both the subject and
the analysis thereof, in one action. The stated goal is to promote the trans-
formation of the unknowable world of the Gypsies into a coherent political
community with competent representatives. These authorized spokespeople
must be responsible for the interface between the creation of a transnational
law and the regional stakes at play in social emancipation.
However, the developing politics of Europe is also seen to be a vast intel-
lectual testing ground, and it practices all of the variations on Anglo-Saxon
culturalism, because its élites have quietly converted to the dynamics of identity
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allocation. This headlong rush toward culturalism can be explained by the
decision to build a European empire on the rejection of its political traditions,
so as to prevent the development of a superior sovereign power from eventually
destroying the leadership of national governments. This aggiornamento among
the Commissions, Governments, and Parliament facilitates a perfectly surreal
and opaque regulatory excess.
Some proponents of the Open Society and of multiculturalism were then
invited, each in turn, to offer the indispensable benediction of the humanist
political scientist, as well as democratic “certification.” Will Kymlicka’s theories

4.  See Eric Hobsbawm’s memoir, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Penguin,
2002).
5.  At the intersection of criminology and cultural studies, as well as in the field of women’s stud-
ies. See, for example, the figures presented in Eammonn Carrabine, Maggie Lee, and Nigel South,
“Social wrongs and human rights in late modern Britain: Social exclusion, crime control, and prospects
for a public criminology.” Social Justice 27 (2000). See also Chapter 11, devoted to “Gypsy Women
in English Life and Literature,” in Marilyn Demarest Button and Toni Reed, The Foreign Woman in
British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
 IV Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine

on international law and minorities became the bible of the International

Centres for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations.6 And a criticism
of cosmopolitan law, which argues the existence of the Gypsies as a transna-
tional minority, took shape in the inner circle of prestigious international law
institutes. Thus, in 1993, W. Michael Reisman published an article in the Yale
Law Journal on cross-cultural studies, taking the example of the Vlax Roma
community in the United States.7 The author is a professor of international law
at Yale University and a member of the task force on international terrorism;
he maintains a particular attention to the fate of European Gypsies and, in
particular, the dramatic plight of Gypsy refugees from the former Yugoslavia,
driven out by all of the stakeholders in the war and currently residing, with no
hope of return, in camps in Montenegro and Macedonia.
This theoretical reflection on cosmopolitan law goes along with the
complex movement for the defense of human rights. This movement draws
from various origins, all of which exploit the European Gypsies. Thus, Adina
Preda has shown how the change-over to self-determination for the peoples of
Europe in application of Resolution 1514 in December 1960, along with the
October 1970 resolution and the Human Rights Covenants of 1966, led to the
development of a “self-decolonizing” mentality in European peoples and the
inflation of claims for reparation. The High Commission on Refugees includes
the Roma in the list of what it calls “at-risk minorities,” and a March 1993
report asserted that the Roma were “the untouchables of Europe”! Presenting
a vast health program called Romeurope, the effectiveness of which has yet
to be proven, Médecins du Monde published a report portraying the Gypsies
as “a minority in distress.” Finally, this sad statement justifies the numerous
affirmative action initiatives led by George Soros’s foundation.8
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The basis for support and development programs entailed a culturalist
approach that justified the competence of the requested experts. However, the
lack of academic knowledge led to an increased demand upon the numerous
self-proclaimed experts. Thus the leaders of Romani communities sought in
turn to justify their legitimacy to European institutions on the grounds of
affiliation.
The field of international public law is very representative of the evolution
in legal views of the Gypsies, while the nature of the status that they should

6.  Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See, for example,
Patrick Thornberry’s International Law and the Rights of Minorities (Oxford University Press, 1991);
see also the articles in the special issue of Dialectical Anthropology 27 (2003), “Revisions of Nationality
and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Europe.”
7.  W. Michael Reisman, “Autonomy, Interdependance, and Responsibility,” Yale Law Journal 103
(1993).
8.  Christophe Delclitte, under the direction of Eleni Varikas, was the first to describe the initial
public statements of Europe’s Gypsies. I would like to remind readers of his maîtrise thesis. See also
Morgan Garo, “L’émergence de la nation rom: De l’ostracisme à la reconnaissance nationale, utopie
ou combat politique?” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris VIII, 2004).
 Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law V

be granted has not won unanimous agreement. Proponents of minority rights

laws emphasize the advantages of recognition of a particular status, forgetting
that this formula consigns Romani families to permanent “otherness,” which
eventually reinforces their total isolation.
The texts produced by European institutions show significant evolution
on this topic and, through the definitions used, reflect profound theoretical
changes in the notion of ethnicity.9 They propagate a hybrid vision of cultural
minority, blending ethnic and social aspects.
Until the 1980s, the terms used were “nomads” or “travellers.” Resolution 563
(1969) of the Council of Europe considered the Gypsies a group character-
ized by nomadism. Economic and social integration could be obtained only
through settlement and the abandonment of the nomadic way of life. The social
department of the European institutions emphasized the fact that “permanent
residences for Gypsies and other travellers are almost necessary conditions to
enable them to receive a proper education and to adapt to modern society.”10
Resolution (75) 13 of the Committee of Ministers, adopted May 22, 1975
by the Committee of Ministers regarding the social situation of nomads in
Europe, imputed their general poverty to unsuitability for an urban, industrial
society, and attributed acts of discrimination to the strength of popular preju-
dices regarding the itinerant lifestyle, recalling that “prejudice or discrimina-
tory practices on the part of the settled population against such persons have
not entirely disappeared in member states.”11
Beginning in 1989, the term “European minority” became prevalent in
writings on the subject, along with “non-territorial minority,” but the authors
of the proposals did not ponder the true nature of this change in terminology.
The general observations presented by Mrs. Verspaget, in her report in favor of
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Recommendation 1203 (1993) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council
of Europe regarding the Gypsies of Europe, served as a model for all subse-
quent texts. After recalling that one of the objectives of the Council of Europe
was to promote the formation of a “genuine European cultural identity,” she
asserted that “A special place among the minorities is reserved for Gypsies.
Living scattered all over Europe, not having a country to call their own, they
are a true European minority, but one that does not fit into the definitions of
national or linguistic minorities.”12
Thus, in the name of a good European society acting as an “open society,”
the Gypsies were frozen in a transnational situation that flouted historical
realities. This political reconstruction furthered the myth of Indian origins,

9.  Marielle Dandakli, ed., Textes des institutions internationales concernant les Tsiganes (Paris: Centre
de Recherches tsiganes and CRDP, “Interface,” 1994).
10.  September 30, 1969 debate in the Parliamentary Assembly, report of the Committee on
Social and Health Questions, text adopted September 30, 1969; see Marielle Dandakli, ed., Textes des
institutions internationales, p. 114-115.
11.  Marielle Dandakli, ed., Textes des institutions internationales, p. 111-113.
12.  Marielle Dandakli, ed., Textes des institutions internationales, p. 116-119.
 VI Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine

supporting all the manipulations of identity. It contributed to the reinforce-

ment of a culturalist origin myth that sometimes used a biological marker
of identity, sometimes a linguistic marker. Thus, a report for the Fondation
Maurice Schumann on the foundations of the legal status of the Gypsies in
international law present the history of the Gypsies according to this evanes-
cent formulation, often repeated: “The Gypsies are a group from India who,
since appearing in Europe in the fourteenth century, have gradually dispersed
throughout the continent.”13
Their statelessness and dispersal “distinguish them from all other minori-
ties and classify them as a European minority.”14
However, rather than promoting political autonomy, these theoretical
choices prompted the historic “deterritorialization” of the Gypsies compared
to existing nations, yet did not lead to the bestowing of actual rights.
Indeed, the evident simultaneity of the reorganization, along ethnic lines,
of the states being formed from the former Eastern bloc and of the creation of
particularist identities in the West favored the establishment of minority rights
with only a secondary role for Gypsy representation. At best, they were used in the
ethnic competition for political leadership, as in Hungary; at worst, they became
the “absolute victims” of the transition, as in Yugoslavia. Here as in other cases,
the loss of historic memory is strictly proportionate to the inflation of legacy.
In turn, the leaders of Romani organizations sought to circumvent the
disdain with which they were held locally, by very intelligently playing three
legitimizing cards: first, they leaned on international organizations to fight
against local discrimination, publicizing the sad litany of exactions perpetrated
against persons and goods; second, the transitioning countries’ race toward
“democratic recomposition” required them to seek the support of the states
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that directed the entry process for new countries, and thus to slip into their
patterns of thought; and finally, they took into account local confusion born
from power struggles (in the ambient corruption of the institutions financing
the transition). Thus, the Romani leaders simultaneously claimed the prin-
ciple of transnational recognition and demanded local representation. They
were located precisely at the intersection of the centrifugal forces linked to
the confrontation between the culturalist discourses. They were, therefore,
obligated to take the real Gypsy communities hostage, using the argument
of their relative demographic weight (up to 10% of the overall population of
Romania or Slovakia).
However, the culturalist discourse was in turn diverted by the media,
which took every possible opportunity to bring up the themes of insecurity and
social instability, particularly since there is no linguistic taboo when it comes

13.  Anne Timisrenko, Les fondements du statut juridique des Tsiganes en droit international et en droit
français: Rapport pour la Fondation Robert Schuman, Appendix, p. 18-33., Bordeaux, 1997.
14.  Alain FENET et alii, Le droit et les minorités: Analyses et textes (Bruxelles, Bruylant, 1995), 60.
 Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law VII

to Gypsies. Furthermore, Romani youth, exploding in number in countries

with aging populations, suffered the effects of the disintegration of the overall
society as well as of the Gypsy system. In post-Soviet Russia, Alaina Lemon
shows in evocative fashion the ambivalence of assimilation between the Roma
and “blackness.”15 Young Gypsies identify with American Blacks, admiring
their clothing styles, consumption habits (including illicit ones) and impudence.
They do not see that this cultural integration furthers the disintegration of
their own culture by sinking them down a bit deeper into ghettoization. Only
an élite minority of the Romani nostalgically unearths the past splendors of
aristocratic sociability and the freedom of the steppes.16
In fact, the two federative nations of Central Europe and the Balkans, which
should have constituted the political model for multiculturalism, did not resist
the transition process. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were dismantled under
the pressure of ethnic exclusivism according to apparently opposite formulas.17
In the former case, a peaceful, democratic process determined the choice of
separatism; in the latter, an authoritarian policy of ethnic cleansing was led by
the Croats and the Serbs, then by the Kosovars. Finally, the reclassification of
nationality was always unfavorable to them. Vaclav Havel declared that “the
treatment of the Roma is a litmus test for democracy.” However, on June 30,
1994, more than 75,000 Czech Gypsies were stripped of their nationality on
the pretext that they originated from Slovak regions in the former Habsburg
territories!
The milieu of the Romani intelligentsia was made up of three dominant
culturalist currents18: the movement defending the right to difference, directly
influenced by intellectuals from the English radical left of the 1970s, such as
Thomas Acton and Donald Kenrick; the Spanish Gypsy activists inspired by
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Basque and Catalan separatists and the development of Andalusian identity;
and the current trend among Central and Eastern European intelligentsia,
inspired by Austro-Marxism.19 The link to Horkheimer’s critical sociology
is ensured by the German radical left, which supported the Sinti und Roma
emancipation movement with a fervor marked by culpability.20

15.  Alaina Lemon, “‘What are they writing about us blacks?’ Roma and ‘Race’ in Russia.”
Anthropology of East Europe Review 13 (1995), Special Issue, “Culture and Society in the Former Soviet
Union”: “The issue of ‘blackness’ first emerged as significant to my research in 1990.”
16.  Alaina Lemon, Between two fires: Gypsy Performance and Romany Memory from Pushkin to
Postsocialism (Durham, Duke University Press, 2000).
17.  Xavier Rothéa, “Les Roms: De la République fédérale socialiste yougoslave aux États nés de
son éclatement” (Maîtrise thesis, Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier III, 2000).
18.  See Jean-Pierre Liégeois’s prophetic book, Mutation tsigane: La révolution bohémienne (Brux-
elles, Complexe, 1976). And for an updated account, see Thomas Acton (ed.), Scholarship and the
Gypsy Struggle: Commitment in Romani Studies. Dedicated to Donald Kenrick (Hatford, UK: University
of Hertfordshire Press, 2000).
19.  Ian Hancock, “The Struggle for the Control of Identity,” Transitions: Changes in Post-Communist
Societies, 4 (4), 1998, 36-56.
20.  Recently, the Minister of the Environment in the Schröder government prayed at Auschwitz to
commemorate the memory of the liquidation of the Zigeunerlager during the night of August 1-2, 1944.
 VIII Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine

The Romani leaders and proponents of minority rights agreed to rein-

force the essentialist view, even if it was opposed to historical experience and
provoked the denunciation of all those who did not yield to that point of view.
This view was constructed on the Jewish model (a “Jewish narrative”) of
a lost original home, which linguists agreed to situate in Northern India. A
tribe set out, and the scattering that began in the late Middle Ages expanded to
the borders of the known world (Japan alone has no Gypsies, but the National
Museum of Ethnology in Osaka dedicated a department to them). After a brief
period of welcome, a long string of persecutions culminated in the genocide
perpetrated by the Nazis. But the road to recognition differs from the Zionist
process in that the Romani leaders abandoned the dream, long-nurtured though
it may have been, of building a “Romestan.” All of the groups currently share
in the transnational claim made by the head of the Romani Union, Nicolae
Gheorghe, when he declared after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Europe is now
our country,”21 and emphasized the fact that “the Gypsy minority in Europe
does not demand any territory of its own.” The International Romani Union
obtained NGO observer status at the United Nations in 1979 and was promoted
to Special Consultative Status in 1993. It works for “the common good” of
Gypsies and for their recognition at the European and international levels.
The movement seeks, therefore, to attain legal status matching the political
representation of each community in the member states. It has the support of
intellectuals, like Günter Grass and his Roma Foundation, who have committed
to a new internationalism in the name of “criticizing the Stalino-Bismarckian
and Jacobin view of the nation.”
One may therefore observe that international institutions created the
demand for an exceptional status for the Gypsies by choosing a trans-European
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ethnic definition, without proposing a legal solution based in any true political
tradition. The combined pressure of theories of multiculturalism and minor-
ity rights contributed to leading the Gypsy populations to an impasse, which
explains the unprecedented wave of persecutions and physical assaults in the
late twentieth century, which remain, despite the admonitions of the European
Court of Human Rights, completely unpunished.22
The political arrival of the Gypsies is therefore part of a hazy intellectual
montage between national self-determination and transnational citizenship.
Once more, the malign duo of democratic idealism and particularism would
inevitably lead to the practical eviction of Romani families who were too

21.  Nicolae Gheorghe was Secretary General of the Roma federation in Romania; see Sam Beck,
“Racism and the Formation of a Romani Ethnic Leader,” in G. E. Marcus (ed.), In Perilous States:
Conversations on Culture, Politics and Nations (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 165-191.
22.  The construction of the “wall of shame” in the city of Ústí nad Labem in Northern Bohemia
captured much international attention. The European Court of Human Rights condemned Czechoslo-
vakia for having systematically steered Gypsy children toward schools for the mentally handicapped.
But at the same time, the very official European Roma Rights Center has counted seventeen racially-
motivated murders since 1990, only one of which led to a conviction in principle in a court of justice.
 Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law IX

visible in the European area. The “right to difference” remains the right of
the mightiest to decide who is different.

The Ambiguities of the New Forms of Academic Recognition

The dangers that we have mentioned are therefore linked to the political
arrival of the Gypsies at a time of extraordinarily singular circumstances in
Europe. But they can also be explained by the ambiguities of the new forms
of academic recognition and the divergent assessments of the virtues of a well-
tempered cosmopolitanism.
Numerous research centers, particularly in Eastern Europe, are dependent
upon the financial manna that flows from European institutions and NGOs
in the name of the fight against “discrimination.” The too-simple notion that
the Gypsies are victims of the economic transition and the disappearance of
social entitlements is swept aside by experts who avert their gaze from the
dysfunction of the élites that bestow study grants upon them. Some doctoral
students display a surprising intellectual agility when it comes to grasping ideas
that are pleasing to the technocrats whom they assist with linguistic duplic-
ity as to the merits of the culturalist approach. Let us consider the case of a
study carried out through the very official European Roma Rights Centre in
Budapest, dealing with the forced sterilization of Gypsy women in Slovakia.
The categorization of this work in the field of gender studies leads the
author to denounce equally the twofold exploitation suffered by Gypsy women,
who were subjected to an archaic patriarchal order and to eugenic pressure in
the nationalistic environment of Eastern Europe.23
The validity of applying cultural studies to the field of the right to recogni-
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tion turns out to be clear-cut. Curiously, the creative effect of social scientists’
classifications, as described by Erving Goffman, does not help to discredit
the producers of these discriminatory discursive schemas; on the contrary,
it casts doubt on the very existence of the Gypsies as a historical entity.24
Culturalist analysis of conflicts places the social actors as separate entities:
here, the majority society and the “Gypsies,” or those called by that name. Yet
the discursive balance of power appears quite unequal: on one side, a society
is invoked in its entirety, while on the other is a cultural community with a
perpetually changing name, with vague functions, whose very existence can
ultimately be called into question on the pretext that the social sciences have
not proposed any clear definition for it.

23.  Isabelle Mihalache, “Faces of Discrimination: the Case of Forced Sterilization of Roma Women
in Slovakia,” (M. A. Thesis, Budapest Central European University, 2002-2003).
24.  Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1963), 140.
 X Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine

In other words, the over-valuation of the cultural norm leads to the opposite
of the expected effect. Thus many authors presuppose that the name “Gypsy”
carries a discriminatory charge and functions as a stigma. The refusal to
historicize this semantic content with a general context, coupled with a nomi-
nalistic moralism, leads to ill-intentioned debates, particularly when it comes
to questions dealing with the policy of extermination conducted during the
Second World War.
Thus the authors choose from the following three approaches the one
that best serves their political analysis of the “global society,” adding social
overinterpretation to political overinterpretation:
• A culturalist essentialism considers the Gypsies to be a scattered people
united by common cultural traits. These are origin, language, traditions,
and customs, all essentially unchanged over the centuries. This collection of
archaisms forms their ethnic identity. The permanence of these characteristics,
when so many peoples have been erased from European memory, remains to
be explained, which perplexes researchers who hold an advance copy of the
chronicle of the inevitable “cultural disappearance.”
• The second interpretation is an organicist essentialism that, as we have
already seen, takes the Gypsies as a race united by blood, with no biological
interruption from their estimated tenth-century departure from Northern
India to today. This vision guides, for example, Donald Kenrick and Grattan
Puxon’s 1974 proposal to reconstruct the fate of the Gypsies from their origins
to the “Final Solution.”25
• Finally, the constructivist vision is based upon the opposite assertion,
that the Gypsies do not exist as a true people but are a stereotype – a fluc-
tuating one, at that – used by the social sciences and institutional practices
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to characterize certain forms of itinerancy that are especially looked down
upon. One of the most groundbreaking historiographical trends on the sub-
ject of the history of migration is developing this tendency. Thus, the book
edited by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, who intend to present works “in
Slavery Studies, Ethnic History, Macro-Economic Migration Studies and
Gypsy Studies.”26 Leo Lucassen takes a resolutely constructivist position
that does not recognize any identity inherent to the Gypsies. According to
him, the discursive category built by States takes in individuals character-
ized by their itinerant lifestyle. These ideas are shared by Wim Willems,
himself a student of Jan Lucassen and an active member of the Centre for

25.  Appearing first in English in 1972, their book The destiny of Europe’s Gypsies was republished
in France as part of the “Tel” collection (Éditions Gallimard) under the title Destins gitans, des origines
à la solution finale in 1995.
26.  Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (eds.), Migration, Migration History, History, Old Paradigms
and New perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999); see in particular Leo Lucassen, “Eternal vagrants? State
formation, migration, and travelling groups in Western Europe, 1350-1914,” 225-251.
 Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law XI

Migration History at the University of Amsterdam, which condemns “the

power of labeling.”27
The problem is that these three points of view can support a positive politi-
cal view of the Gypsies, but they can just as easily contribute to a pejorative
assessment of their identity. For example, the essentialist view emphasizes the
values of cultural authenticity and a strong cultural identity, and supports the
claim of minority rights, but it could just as easily encourage the questionable
(but, in Eastern Europe, fashionable) argument for sociobiology, according
to which the depraved behavior of a purportedly criminogenic population is
explained by atavism. Thus, concluding its investigation into the 1993 Hadar-
eni pogrom, the Romanian parliament’s committee on human rights, religion
and national minorities blamed the violence on the Roma families, who were,
according to the rapporteur, incapable of decent social behavior!
In the late nineteenth century, the complex process of creating a portable
“paper identity” doubtless transformed the category of “nomads” by ethni-
cizing it, and each construction of a nation brought its own obsessive touch,
making the comparison more complicated. But, if we take the example of the
Gypsy census conducted in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1893, one notes that
organicist theories were corroborated neither by nomadism, nor by lack of
religion, nor even by a large number of inhabitants per household.
And yet the stereotypical image endured of a prolific race leading an
archaic and itinerant lifestyle – an image utterly disconnected from the real-
ity of the Gypsy population.28 Over the course of events, this image split into
two fantastical branches. Thus in post-war Hungary, the Communist Party
resolution of 1961 recalled that the “Gypsy question” was no more than a social
problem that could be solved by the construction of “low-income” housing.
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But at the same time, the police and criminal sociologists did not hesitate to
speak, with strong racial connotations, of “Gypsy delinquency.” Also in this
same time period, Hungary adopted identification equipment intended to
establish hereditary “criminogenic traits.” At the time, physical anthropology,
which was in sharp decline in Western societies, helped to establish a particular
profile of the Gypsies. However, the critical sociology that developed during
the Kadarist period again found the Gypsies to be an illustration of the failure
of socialism to eradicate poverty. A group of sociologists was formed in 1971
under the direction of István Kemény. Shaped by discrimination and subjected
to a lower standard of living than the rest of the population, the Gypsies were

27.  Wim Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution (London:
Franck Cass, 1997); see the introduction, 1-21.
28.  Eliza Johnson, “Counting and categorizing: The Gypsy census in the Kingdom of Hungary,
1893.” The Journal of Gypsy Lore Society 8 (1998), 5-6, cited by Balazs Berkovics in his preliminary
research proposal for the DEA, “Représentation des Tsiganes dans le discours des sciences humaines
en Hongrie et en France de l’après-guerre,” EHESS, 1999. See Véronique Klauber’s study, “Les Roms
de Hétes. Sociographie d’un quartier d’Ozd, ancienne ville sidérurgique hongroise” (DEA thesis,
EHESS, 2001)
 XII Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine

becoming an example of the “culture of poverty.” Ethnic traits were in fact

nothing more than a social response through survival strategy.29 And the
reference to Richard Hoggart’s book was clearly in evidence.
The Gypsies of the Wild East remain an enigma for anthropologists,
who hurried into transitional Europe with the idea that it was a haven of rural
ethnography, frozen in time by communism. The defeat of the intelligentsia
of the transition, accused (depending on the time and place) of corruption or
of cosmopolitan compromises of principle, leaves the field wide open today.30

The Forms of Identity A ssignment and the Crisis of the Systems of Affiliation

It is more worrisome to observe a parallel between the instrumentalization

of the notion of “differentiated citizenship” and the marginalization of the
historical approach. Here it is necessary to mention the tautological cultur-
alist approach to which numerous practitioners in the social sciences have
confined the world of the Gypsies. 31 Certain authors therefore assert that a
statement of assignment necessarily produces a statement of exclusion. The
analysis of discourses of ethnogenesis as historically determined processes
has displaced problems of the self-definition process with the mechanisms
of ethnification. A certain use of historical analysis to deconstruct obsolete
concepts may replace one myth with another: a fetishism of the discursive
replaces the imperialism of facts.
This organicist nominalism explains that the Gypsies were long consid-
ered “displaced primitives” by academic anthropologists, who deemed them
unworthy of serious attention, and that they discouraged the wisdom of the
best authors. One of the first texts published by F. Barth dealt with the Gyp-
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sies, but via the study of the Tattaren of Norway, a group not considered to be
true Gypsies. Barth’s article was circulated outside the traditional channels of
Gypsy studies, and it remained unknown until Rehfish republished it.32 Luc
de Heusch’s book pronounced the existence of a “society under siege.”33 As for

29.  István Kemény (ed.), Berszamolo a magyarorszagi ciganyok helyzetével foglalkozo 1971-ben veg-
zett kutatasrol, a 1971 report on research into the living conditions of Gypsies in Hungary (Budapest:
MTA Szociologiai Kutato Intezete, 1976).
30.  Laslo Kurti, “Homecoming: Affairs of anthropologists in and of Eastern Europe.” Anthropol-
ogy Today 12(1996), 11-15.
31.  See Marlene B. Sway’s provocative article, “Simmel’s Concept of the Stranger and Gypsies.”
Social Science Journal, 1981, 18 (1), 41-50.
32.  Frederik Barth, “The social organization of a pariah group in Norway.” Norveg, 5, 126-143.
F. Rehfish (ed.), Gypsies, Thinkers and Other Travellers (London: Academic Press, 1975).
33.  Luc de Heusch, À la découverte des Tsiganes: Une expédition de reconnaissance (Brussels, Insti-
tut de Sociologie de l’Université Libre, 1966). Jan Yoors was his informant, but Philippe Lemaire de
Marne noted inconsistencies.
 Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law XIII

the commentary offered by the prestigious Evans-Pritchard in the introduction

to a book about the Gypsies, it is peculiarly insubstantial.34
Finally, all of the recent works refer to F. Barth’s famous book, Ethnic
groups and boundaries, in which the author designates a marginal space to the
Gypsies, whom he once again places in the category of Western pariahs as an
extreme form of minority status: “European pariah groups of recent centuries
(executioners, dealers in horseflesh and -leather, collectors of nightsoil, gypsies,
etc.) exemplify most features; as breakers of basic taboos they were rejected
by the larger society.”35
He adds: “Despite these formidable barriers, such groups do not seem to
have developed the internal complexity that would lead us to regard them as
full-fledged ethnic groups; only the culturally foreign gypsies clearly constitute
such a group.”36
The reason for that is as follows: “The condemned behaviour which gives
pariah position to the gypsies is compound, but rests prominently on their
wandering life, originally in contrast to the serf bondage of Europe, later in
their flagrant violation of puritan ethics of responsibility, toil and morality.”37
Yet on the one hand, it is odd to date disapproval of the Gypsies to the
Middle Ages, which were in fact a prosperous time in which they were wel-
comed by Little Egypt’s dukes and counts and their troops – during which
the Romani were resolutely itinerant, and did nothing but peregrinate all
throughout Europe, soliciting temporary accomodation in medieval cities by
presenting safe-conduct passes. And on the other hand, it is unclear how simple
marginalization would suffice to maintain both ethnic distance and cultural
reproduction. In fact, disinterest toward the European Romani world can also
be explained by the observation, made by all observers, that anthropological
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theories are ill-suited to polymorphous appearances.
Yet aside from the exhilaration of traveling writers, sensitive to the “phe-
nomenology of space,”38 the study of nomadic societies was primarily the
domain of anthropology, founded upon the traditional distinction between
“hot societies” and “cold societies.” Indeed, the perception of nomadism is
based on a paradox. The nomadic world is often associated with concepts of
stagnation or delay, even as cultures “on the move” are declared superior to
those that “go nowhere.”39

34.  E. E. Evans-Pritchard, preface to E. B. Trigg, Gypsy Demons and Divinities (London: Sheldon,
1975), ix-xii.
35.  Frederik Barth, introduction to Frederik Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The
Social Organization of Culture Difference (Bergen-Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969). These citations
refer to the English edition (Long Grove, Ill., Waveland Press, 1988), 31.
36. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 31.
37. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 38.
38.  Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace, Paris, 1957, 171-172, on the topic of the ancestral
forest. I thank Paolo Napoli for this reference.
39.  Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Histoire stationnaire et histoire cumulative,” in Race et histoire (Paris:
Gonthier-Médiations, 1961), 41-50.
 XIV Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine

Thus, even while insisting upon the supposed nomadism of the Gypsies,
some anthropologists refuse to see any historical authority in the management
of relational and familial cosmopolitanism. In 1985, Aparna Rao published
an article providing an overview of peripatetic communities. She described
nomadism as an adaptation strategy in response to disasters: “It is possible
that some communities have chosen to become peripatetic, but in the major-
ity of cases, they were brought into being by the pressures of sedentary (or, in
some cases, pastoral) societies, which today contribute to their more or less
rapid disappearance.”40
However, in the same journal issue, Patrick Williams proposed an entirely
different interpretation of the mental “nomadism” of the Kalderash Roma in
the Paris area. It is, he reports, possible to grasp their social organization only
through their various relationships with communities scattered throughout the
world. In each of these communities, a particular configuration of the overall
organization is established. This configuration is effectively determined by the
relationships created with the surrounding non-Gypsy society, but the overall
goal remained the perpetuation of the autonomy of the Gypsy system.41 These
same families, long established in the United States, are “American Gypsies.”42
What remains to be understood is how the Romani families’ capacity
for social reproduction is structured. Thus Leonardo Piasere, one of the top
experts on the Romani world, has wondered whether it was good to think
about the Gypsies anthropologically.43 The Babelian character of ethnographic
production begins with the uses of the term “Gypsy.” It is a heteronym with a
particularly fluid semantic area. There are no countries without Gypsies, and
every region associates different characteristics with the term.
Since the 1970s, Judith Okely, who taught anthropology at Oxford, deemed
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it especially improper to use the concept of acculturation, since it makes the
supposition that the Gypsies at one time existed independently of the domi-
nant society and culture.44 Experimental ethnography extended its territory
through the familiarity acquired through the regular presence of a group.45
The validation of “participant observation” led to a modification of the stakes
and a particular attention to language. As Patrick Williams put it, one is either
“completely in” or “must irremediably remain on the outside.”

40.  Aparna Rao, “Des nomades méconnus: Pour une typologie des communautés péripatétiques,”
L’Homme 25 (1985), 97-120, 110.
41.  Patrick Williams, “Paris–New York: L’organisation de deux communautés tsiganes,” L’Homme 25
(1985), 121-140; Béatrice Jaulin, Les Roms de Montreuil 1945-1975 (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2000).
42.  “They are different from Gypsies anywhere else in the world because they have successfully
adapted to the American environment.” Carol Silverman, “Negotiating ‘Gypsiness’: Strategy in Con-
text,” The Journal of American Folklore 101(1988), 261-275, 274.
43.  Leonardo Piasere, Un mondo di mondo: Antropologia delle culture rom (Naples: L’Ancora, 1999);
I rom d’Europa, Una storia moderna (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004).
44.  Judith Okely, The Travellers-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
45.  Zoltan Barany, The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality and Ethnopolitics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
 Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law XV

The dynamic and interactional view proposed by Barth and Goffman

rests upon the concept that ethnicity is a category of ascription, the continuity
of which depends on maintaining boundaries and, therefore, on constantly
re-codifying the cultural differences between neighboring groups. However,
Patrick Williams and Leonardo Piasere emphasize the existence of a “Gypsy
system” that rejects an ethnic taxonomy that varies over time, but engages
with a “modulated” personal identity by creating conditions for autonomy
and for perpetuation of the system. All sorts of formulas help one to remain
what one is. In this way, Patrick Williams demonstrated that a vica is not a
patrilineal lineage, which, in passing, implicitly calls into question the very
concept of lineage.
The consistency in the Gypsy system is ensured by the structural flex-
ibility between economic practices and the construction of their world.46
Michael Stewart has accentuated the “unsticking” of living conditions and
community ideology in a study that, however, sought for the first time to
describe the romipen of the “proletarianized” Gypsies.47 He demonstrates that
the Gypsies reorganized their field of experience as a horizon of expectation
that does not, however, project into the future. Thus the Hungarian Roma
of Harangos were able, between 1965 and 1985, to secure a place for romipen
under communist rule. Stewart’s research and his activity as coordinator of
the Centre for Democracy and Society have led him to question the notion of
“ethnic distance.”48 The attention given to mechanisms of reproduction shows
the creative nature of the group and the variety of measures implemented to
ensure that members’ affiliation with the group is preserved.
Thus, each one brings to the table a diffracted vision of “Mare Roma,”
of “my Roms,” forming a kaleidoscope, the key to which lies in the measures
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of the power of Romani civilization. Romipen does not propose a frightened
response to external conditions of exclusion, but rather an anticipation of
disdainful behaviors according to a low-water mark of sophisticated intellec-
tual responses. The reorganizations necessary to ensure the permanence of
the system take into account the surrounding society, without ever becoming
involved in it. Mobility, sedentarity, and every situation in between are all
variables that can be adjusted based on the requirements of sociability. The
primary demand is to maintain family contacts in order to ensure the peren-
nity of Romani existence, so as to avoid economic competition, but to be able
to reunite at any time if necessary. As for the lack of amiability on the part of
the gadjes, that is a constant; no use complaining about it.

46.  Michael Stewart, “Underclass, race and ‘the Roma’ in post-communist Eastern Europe,” in
Chris Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (London: Routledge, 2001).
47.  Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies, foreword by Maurice Bloch (Oxford: Westview
Press, 1997).
48.  Michael Stewart, “Persistent Gypsies: a Critique of Barth’s Bounded Ethnic Group Model,”
in Leo PIASERE (ed.), Comunita girovaghe, comunita zingare (Naples: Liguosi, 1995), 315-341.
 XVI Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine

Anglo-Saxon legal culture discovered Gypsy studies under the pressure

of two events that have changed the way of seeing things.
The first is the system of transhistoric judicial pursuits and evidence, result-
ing from trials for crimes against humanity and the belated compensation of
victims. The second is linked to the question of refugees and asylum rights, and
to the symbolic promotion of displaced persons to the rank of model victims.
However, the suspensive reorganization of European civilization reopened
the Pandora’s box of a utopia of “ethnic democracy,” while it destroyed the
old habit of indifferent tolerance, which had been the mark of the European
principle of free movement, with excessive modernization. Thus the tension
between the creation of minority rights and the uncertainty over the territo-
rialization of affiliations created an explosive situation.
The breakdown of the national democratic imagination and the implosion
of the transnational totalitarian imagination, then, left a great deal of room
for the proliferation of identities. However, no human beings can be simpli-
fied according to what is said of them, and there is no need to fear cultural
studies; certainly no more than there is to fear the social sciences in general.
But the contemporary temptation to replace the religion of the “new man”
with a political religion of identity goes beyond the academic stakes and leads
to a utopian moral imposition. For the historian is particularly well placed to
know that, contrary to the repeated vows of the philosophers, hospitality and
compassion shall never govern societies!
Henriette A sséo
Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
190 avenue de france
75013 Paris
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henriette.asseo@ehess.fr
 Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law XVII

Abstract

Henriette A sséo
Gypsy Studies and European Minority Rights Law
The emergence of Gypsy studies into politics and into the academic sphere took place at a
special period in European history. Cultural sociology thus came into contact with the Roma
world within the framework of Anglo-Saxon minority law and the policy of multiculturalism.
Their goal is a “unified Roma political community” with its own competent representatives.
However, the activities of minority law adepts and Roma leaders, forced to simultaneously
enforce the principle of transnational recognition and the demand for local representation, are
based on cultural essentialism, defined in the academic field of Gypsy Studies. At the same time,
such an approach directly contrasts historical empiricism and works against anyone unwill-
ing to take such a view. Cultural premises are further propagated through numerous research
centres, relying on the financial aid from European institutions and NGOs, as well as through
programmes aimed at helping and developing Roma communities. These can then justify the
presence of self-proclaimed experts on the Roma people in decision-making bodies. It is thus
apparent that there is a connection between the instrumentalization of the idea of citizenship
and the marginalisation of the historic approach to researching the Roma and Gypsy people.
K eywords: Gypsy, Roma population, minority law, cultural studies, policy of multiculturalism n
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