757774

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DCM0010.1177/1750481318757774Discourse & CommunicationBreazu and Machin

Article

Discourse & Communication

A critical multimodal analysis 1­–18

© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1750481318757774
https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481318757774
coverage of camp evictions journals.sagepub.com/home/dcm

and deportations of the Roma

migrants from France

Petre Breazu
Örebro University, Sweden

David Machin
Örebro University, Sweden

Abstract
In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of a sample from
a larger corpus of Romanian news articles that covered the controversial camp evictions and
repatriation of Romanian Roma migrants from France that began in 2010 and continue to the
time of writing in 2017. These French government policies have been highly criticized both within
France and by international political and aid organizations. However, the analysis shows how these
brutal, anti-humanitarian events became recontextualized in the Romanian Press to represent the
French government’s actions as peaceful and consensual. In addition, the demonization of the
Roma in the press serves as a strategy to continuously disassociate them from their Romanian
counterparts. While there is a long history of discrimination against the Roma in Romania, these
particular recontextualizations can be understood in the context of the Romanian government’s
need to gloss over its failure to comply with the Schengen accession requirements and acquire
full European Union (EU) membership.

Keywords
Camp evictions, Critical Discourse Analysis, France, Roma, Schengen

Corresponding author:
Petre Breazu, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences (HumUS), Örebro University,
Fakultetsgatan 1, 701 82 Örebro, Sweden.
Email: petre.breazu@oru.se
2 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Introduction
In the summer of 2010, the French government began a systematic process of camp dis-
mantling and forced repatriation of Roma migrants to Romania and Bulgaria, practices
that continue to the time of writing (European Roma Rights Center (ERRC), 2017). The
figures showed numbers of forced evictions for each year as between 10,000 and 20,000
individuals (ERRC, 2016). According to reports from the ERRC and Amnesty
International, these evictions were brutal and had a savage effect on families and chil-
dren, who were forced into constant relocations. The French policy received huge criti-
cism, not only from international human rights organizations, but also from within the
local political landscape itself. In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical
Discourse Analysis (MCDA; Machin and Mayr, 2012) of how these events were repre-
sented in the Romanian press.
There is extensive research pointing to how the Roma have been represented in various
European media as a homogeneous and deviant group, set apart from the values and prac-
tices of society at large (Erjavec, 2001; Richardson, 2014) and are unable to adapt to
modern life (Cretu, 2014). Here, the Roma are consistently referred to in relation to illit-
eracy, crime, violence and corruption, which Richardson and O’Neill (2012) argue has
been entirely counterproductive for the social inclusion and integration of Roma into
European societies. In Critical Discourse Analysis, it has been shown that in Romania
itself, there is a discourse where the Roma themselves are blamed for their own marginal-
ized position (Tileaga, 2005) and that the Romanian Press has been involved in campaigns
to distance the Roma from the wider Romanian population, calling for the adoption of the
term Gypsy, to avoid ambiguity and association (Catalano, 2012; Mădroane, 2012).
In this article, we do not simply point to another pattern of othering but we show that
these negative ascriptions of the Roma in Romanian Press are recontextualized to serve
quite specific ends, for instance, to justify Romanian government’s failure to gain access
to the Schengen zone.1
More broadly, in Critical Discourse Analysis, there has been extensive work on racist
representations in the press (Fairclough, 1995; KhosraviNik, 2009; Richardson, 2007;
Van Dijk, 1991). These studies show that racial talk about specific groups, especially in
elite discourses, takes on a variety of forms and is used as a means to delegitimize groups,
to justify existing negative characteristics, recontextualize events (Beciu et al., 2017) or
even normalize, and deny racism (Guillem Martinez, 2017). A number of studies have
also indicated how current racial discourses have shifted to framing minorities in relation
to sociocultural incompatibilities or the manner in which they violate the norms and
values of the mainstream population, referred to by scholars as the ‘new or modern rac-
ism’ (Gale, 2004; Liu and Mills, 2006; Simmons and Lecouteur, 2008). In line with these
new ways of framing racial talk in the media, we carry out an MCDA of a corpus of texts
to reveal how events are recontextualized to foster specific interests, and how this new
racism is instrumental for authorities and media to sidestep accusations of racism.
In what follows, we first present the actual sequence of events beginning in 2010 and
examine the political reactions in France and within Europe. This is important in order to
clearly point to how these are discursively represented in the press such that they become
entirely recontextualized (Van Leeuwen, 2008). Second, we give a brief account of the
Breazu and Machin 3

place of the Roma in Romanian society, shifting in the post-communist era and then with
integration into the European Union (EU). This also helps in understanding the nature of
the discourses found in the texts, particularly why the Roma are represented so unfavora-
bly during this particular time, where the Romanian government was failing to gain full
access to the Schengen zone and full EU membership.

Background
In 2010, the French government began a systematic process of camp evictions and repa-
triations of Roma migrants to Romania and Bulgaria, measures that sparked intense criti-
cism both within France and from international organizations. The French government
offered a financial compensation of 300 euros per adult and 100 euros per child for those
Roma migrants who willingly accepted to be repatriated from France to Romania or
Bulgaria. Those who rejected the deal were to be forcefully repatriated to their countries
of origin the following months.
The evictions were executed in a brutal and often spontaneous manner, involving
bulldozers tearing apart makeshift shelters and dogs used to forcibly move the inhabit-
ants (Amnesty International, 2012a). More reports (Amnesty International, 2012b;
ERRC, 2017) gave personal accounts of mothers, children and elderly people being
repeatedly evicted pointing, to the consequences for schooling, healthcare and loss of
personal documentation. Apart from the deeper levels of social marginalization and pov-
erty these reports showed, these policies also led to increasing hostility toward the Roma
migrants from the wider French communities where they lived and worked.
The reports also emphasized that these actions went against both international human
rights laws and the protocols2 and directives3 of the EU regarding the treatment of ethnic
minorities. It was pointed out that similar actions against any other ethnic group in a
European or non-European context would be classified as ethnic cleansing (Fichtner,
2010; Korando, 2012). While French politicians, under criticism, constantly pointed to
the responsibility and inability of the Romanian government to deal with the ‘Roma
problem’, their policies toward the Roma reflect on the massive failure of French author-
ities themselves to provide any kind of support for the social inclusion of the Roma into
French society (Fekete, 2014; Korando, 2012).
There were criticisms of the evictions and repatriations from within France itself.
Ministers were critical of a policy that was clearly targeting a single ethnic group. Foreign
Minister Bernard Kouchner expressed shock at ‘the government’s focus on people of
foreign origin’ (BBC News, 2010). Defense Minister Herve Morin questioned social
policies based on systematic police repression. A member of Sarkozy’s own party, Jean-
Pierre Grand, compared these events with the treatment of the French Roma and Jews
during World War II (WWII) (BBC News, 2010). Other ministers, such as Marisol
Touraine, and François Lamy, in charge of social affairs and urban centers, met with
Hollande to express their opposition (France24, 2013). There were also reports that
Sarkozy was faced by decent from within his own cabinet describing the happenings as
part of a ‘policy of hate [and] of fear’ (Greenberg, 2010).
The then European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship,
Viviane Reding expressed her disapproval (Traynor, 2010). She announced publicly that
4 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

the European Commission (EC) would take legal action against France, urging all mem-
ber states to instigate clear strategies for Roma inclusion that would address four essential
‘pillars’: ‘access to education, jobs, healthcare and housing’.4 At the same time, press
reports (Castle and Bennhold, 2010) described clashes at an EC meeting between the then
President José Manuel Barroso, the Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, and Sarkozy
where there were accusations of France acting in an outright racist fashion.
Some argued that the evictions and repatriations in fact could be seen as part of
Sarkozy’s broader stance of using a tough on crime and anti-immigration to repair his
own falling popularity and win over voters (Castle and Bennhold, 2010; Themelis, 2016).
Voice of Roma spokesperson Samir Mile also commented that targeting the Roma was a
ploy to divert the French public’s attention from other pressing issues, such as the dis-
content with the austerity measures (BBC News, 2010).

The Roma in Romania

Scholarly literature (Achim, 2004; Bunescu, 2014; Ladányi and Szelényi, 2006) has
shown that throughout history Romanian Roma have always been viewed as a ‘social
problem’ that needs a solution. But after the collapse of the communist system, the situ-
ation of the Roma worsened as the transition period from a planned to a market economy
took its toll on the Romani communities in these countries (Ladányi and Szelényi, 2006;
Ringold et al., 2005; Szalai, 2003). In an era of change, economic upheaval, inflation and
recession, where older economic formations and relationships broke down, the Roma
became excluded from the labor market, proper housing and education, which in turn,
intensified their segregation and poverty, turning them into an underclass (Ladányi and
Szelényi, 2006). In this period, poverty levels of the Romanian Roma (68.8%) soared
compared with the rest of the population (29.5%) (Ringold et al., 2005). The collapse of
communism in Eastern Europe was also followed by the rise of ideological nationalist
discourses (Themelis, 2016), which resulted in a more acute persecution of the Roma,
both on societal and institutional levels which intensified their social exclusion and
poverty.
Romania’s accession to the EU in 2007 brought new challenges for the Roma. This
period corresponds to the time when economic crises throughout the EU escalated. Large
numbers of Roma migrants moved to Central and Western Europe in search of better
jobs. It is during this time frame, when a new profile of the Eastern European migrant
emerged (Fielder and Catalano, 2017; Van Dijk and Wodak, 2000; Van Leeuwen and
Wodak, 1999). These migrants were no longer regarded as the heroes who escaped the
bondage of communism, but as groups who were socially disruptive and economically
threatening. As Themelis (2016) explains, in the context of accelerated global neoliberal-
ism and economic crisis at the EU level, there arose a notion of a division between pro-
ductive and non-productive workers. In this particular context, the Roma became easy
targets for politicians who sought to consolidate their own positions or distract the pub-
lic’s attention from actual problems, such as financial cutbacks, lack of jobs or limited
access to social welfare (Fekete, 2014; Nacu, 2012).
Since its accession to the EU, Romania has repeatedly sought but failed to gain mem-
bership in the Schengen Area (The Economist, 2013). The Roma appear to have played
Breazu and Machin 5

both a real and constructed role here too. The EU assessment specified that Romania was
not yet ready due to lack of judicial reform and high levels of corruption at official levels
across the government itself (The Economist, 2013). These reports did not make refer-
ence to the Roma, especially, since the European Commission for Home Affairs clearly
stipulates that integration of ethnic minorities is not one of the criteria to assess the eligi-
bility of member states to join the Schengen zone. Yet, within Romanian politics and
media, there was an assumption – to some extent well-grounded, but at another level just
another case of scapegoating to conceal the government’s own shortcomings (Nacu,
2012) – that the real reason for the failure was the fear of wide-scale Roma migration
across the Schengen zone (Fielder and Catalano, 2017). The representations of the evic-
tions and repatriations in the Romanian Press must be understood, therefore, not only in
the context of the wider social exclusion and racism against the Roma, but also as spe-
cifically related to the issue of Romania’s failure to gain full access to the Schengen
zone.

Method and data

In this article, we use MCDA (Machin and Mayr, 2012), a form of Multimodal
Discourse Analysis closely aligned to the principles and aims of Critical Discourse
Studies (Flowerdew and Richardson, 2017). This involves a close critical examination
of how discourses and ideologies are carried by both language and other forms of com-
munication such as images, films, food packaging, war monuments, and so on, and
how these function to serve specific political interests and maintain kinds of social
relations (Ledin and Machin, 2018). The analysis draws on the social actor and social
action analysis of Van Leeuwen (2008) as applied multimodality by Machin and Mayr
(2012). It uses these tools to look at what Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) call the
recontextualization of social practices. Discourses comprise ‘components’ like partici-
pants, actions, evaluations, circumstances, times and sequences of events. These com-
bine to form ‘scripts’ or the doings of discourse. The analyst can look at how actual
events become recontextualized in the service of ideologies by asking what kinds of
components have been deleted, added, substituted, and so on. This allows us to show
what kind of discourses or scripts are used in the Romanian press to represent the evic-
tions and repatriations.
We present a detailed analysis of three newspaper articles from a corpus of the 71
stories, which reported on the evictions and repatriations of the Roma between 2010 and
2013, all of which were analyzed. The selection of this period is significant; first, it cor-
responds to the time when the economic crises accelerated throughout Europe, and,
therefore, large segments of Eastern European migrants, including some Roma, migrated
to the West in search of a better life (Delanty et al., 2008; Themelis, 2016). Second, this
was a time of probation for Romania’s eligibility, as a new EU member, to join the
Schengen zone, and within European media and politics there was a sense of the imagi-
nary threat posed by Romanian migrants, including the Roma, to freely settle anywhere
in Western Europe. The corpus includes the two most widely read newspapers both in
print and online in Romania and which represent polarized political viewpoints: Adevarul
(The Truth) and Jurnalul National (The National Journal). Both newspapers are
6 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Table 1. Participants and their actions: ‘I cried with joy’.

Participants
French lady, neighbor
The Roma, camp of Roma,
200 Roma
Police intervention troops
The inhabitants/tenants
Melanie, a young lady,
mother-to-be, neighbor
Authorities
Actions
Cried with joy, testified
Exasperated, steal, curse, threaten, cause scandals at 2
in the morning, drove the French out of their minds, melt
the insulation of copper wires, envelop everything in a toxic
cloud, make a lot of noise (from the chainsaws)
Evacuated, conducted the operation
Complained, say, set up an association, started a blog,
showed, are relieved, they are afraid that the Roma will
come back, suggest the building of a 2 m high cement wall
Was robbed, fell, spent two months in the hospital
Assured the tenants, will build elevations of land to stop the
access of caravan, authorized the evacuation

privately owned by influential, wealthy Romanians who are/were very active in the
Romanian political scene. The selection of these three texts is also important as they are
representative of some of the main patterns of recontextualization.

Analysis 1: ‘I cried with joy’: The reaction of a French

woman after a Roma camp was demolished (Jurnalul
National, 9 August 2012)
This text reports on local reactions to a camp eviction. What is of particular interest in
this text is the language used to represent the reactions of the different participants and
to represent the nature of the evictions themselves. There are two discursive transforma-
tions that play an essential role in the recontextualization of the events: the evaluations
as important additions to the script and the deletion of the violence and upheaval of the
evictions and repatriations. We present the participants and their actions in Table 1.
In the first place, the text is framed in terms of the reactions of a French woman,
who ‘cried with joy’ and who explained what had happened in terms of ‘testified’ – a
quoting verb, which indicates reliability (Caldas-Coulthard, 1997). The inclusion of
reactions has been shown to play an important evaluative role in texts (Van Leeuwen,
2008), especially when the reader is given access to the internal thoughts and emotions
of a participant.
In contrast, we are not given the reactions and internal feelings of the Roma who are
being evicted. We can only imagine the reactions of Roma women whose accounts were
reported by Amnesty International (2012a, 2012b), losing all possessions and having to
hastily gather children in the face of private companies using bulldozers and dogs to
move people off sites, often with little prior notice. The tears of joy would appear rather
callous should the two sets of reactions be given equal salience in the text.
The Roma are the actors of material and behavioral actions and do not possess any
mental or verbal agency; they are often represented as ‘stealing’, ‘threatening’, ‘making
Breazu and Machin 7

smoke’ or ‘cursing’. And these assigned actions, whether material or behavioral, show
how the Roma violate the norms and values of civilization and modernity. This is to be
contrasted to the verbal processes assigned to the inhabitants and tenants, which collec-
tively appear to be measured and civilized: ‘complained’, ‘set up an association’, ‘started
a blog’, ‘are relieved’ and ‘are afraid’. We could imagine that terms such as ‘anger’,
‘intolerant’ and ‘unsympathetic’ could also have been relevant in this case. The locals are
also represented as victims, such as ‘Melanie’ who was highly individualized and human-
ized (Van Leeuwen, 2008) through the inclusion of terms such as ‘a young lady’, ‘mother-
to-be’, and ‘neighbor’. No such details are given for the Roma, who are impersonalized
and objectified (the Roma, 200, a camp). This collectivization and aggregation of the
Roma distances them from the reader (Van Leeuwen, 2008). It also serves to suppress the
diversity of age and gender. We could have been informed here if this included ‘mothers
to be’, or ‘young ladies’, as we were for the French.
In Table 1, we see that in contrast to the detailed reports (Amnesty International,
2012a; ERRC, 2016), which narrate about destruction, panic and threat using bulldozers
and dogs, there is no reference to acts of violence. Rather, we find the terms ‘evacuation
and eviction’. By definition, eviction describes the action of removing people who settle
illegally on a private property, and implies that the action is conducted legally with a
court decision. The notion of ‘evacuation’ implies that people are evacuated for their own
sake, because they are in danger. Finally, the authorities themselves act only in measured
and positive terms, ‘authorizing’ and ‘reassuring’.
In Figure 2, we see the photograph which the article carried. Here, we can also con-
sider the representation of participants and actions (Machin and Mayr, 2012). In the
photograph, we do not see the woman who cried for joy, nor the locals. The photograph
which is an archive image is one which we found reused many times and in fact shows
Roma moving across the border from Hungary into Austria and Germany. Nevertheless,
photographs carry the affordance of claiming to neutrally represent reality and bear wit-
ness on events (Ledin and Machin, 2018), which means that it is easy for a reader to
assume it is related to the story.
In the photograph we see a group of four adults who we assume are Roma, being
moved along a road by a single police officer (Figure 1). The depicted people, none of
whom are children, nor elderly or sick, are to some extent generic Roma media represen-
tations: untidy appearances, colorful clothing and poor. The single police officer is
anonymized as we do not see his face. We are told in the text that there were ‘200’ Roma.
Yet, here they are substituted for four persons. Depicting these 200 being evicted and
moved along, including children, with the force of police and private contractors required
to do so, would have looked very different.
As regards actions, there is a complete deletion of force and of the magnitude and
wider resources involved in moving on larger numbers of people including families
with children. We see the lone policeman who simply points the way. The Roma man
to the right appears to be cooperating and appears neither afraid, annoyed, nor
aggressive.
Overall, this article clearly aligns the reader alongside the French locals and against
the Roma, deleting the violence of the evictions and repatriations. As we look at the fol-
lowing texts, we see a pattern of representing the Roma simply as a problem group.
8 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Figure 1. Jurnalul National, 9 August 2012.

Solutions to the situation, for example, as regards integration, as prioritized by the EU,
tend not to be considered. In the end it is the magnitude of the Roma problem and their
clash with the values of all wider European societies which is foregrounded.

Analysis 2: ‘Mayors in major French cities find it impossible

to accommodate the Roma’ (Adevarul, 27 September 2013)
In this text, the recontextualization is mainly achieved by substituting the complexity of
the reactions to the events across French politics for a coherent and consensual view. We
also find a visual substitution of the complexity and diversity of Roma communities in
France for one which is highly stereotyped.
This text is presented as being sourced from Le Monde (26 September 2013). We are
told that politicians from across the French political spectrum support the repatriation
policies and we are provided with a list of names, affiliations and locations. Although
much of the text is in fact a faithful translation, it has one important deletion from the
start of the Le Monde article and one important addition which is two paragraphs at the
end taken from a very different news outlet, Le Point (26 March 2013). This deletion and
addition play a very important role in how the comments of six politicians in France are
recontextualized to show that the whole of French politics is united behind the evictions
and repatriations.
The basic format of the text is a list of statements by the politicians. It is the represen-
tational strategies used here that are the key to how the text works (Table 2).
Much emphasis is placed on the individualization of the mayors through naming
and inclusion of honorifics (Van Leeuwen, 2008). These linguistic choices are
Breazu and Machin 9

Table 2. Representational strategy for the French politicians.

Maurice Vincent, socialist mayor Saint-Etienne
Socialist Mayors in Toulouse and Grenoble
Francis Choutat, Socialist Mayor of Evry
Serge Godard, socialist mayor of Clermont-Ferrand
Andre Rossinot, mayor of Nancy, Union of Democrats and Independents
Union Movement Populaire President Jean-Francois Cope

Figure 2. Adevarul, 27 September 2013.

instrumental in communicating that their views are both personal and representative of
an official stance. The listing of the municipalities suggests a diverse and comprehen-
sive geographic distribution, even though to many readers in Romania these places
may not mean a great deal. The collectivization of ‘Socialist Mayors in Toulouse and
Grenoble’, also helps to create a sense that this is an extensive number.
However, the nature of this list reads as very different in the original Le Monde article,
where at the start we are told that these comments were from a conference of newly
elected municipal socialist mayors lead by their boss Valls.
The opening line in Adevarul deletes reference to the conference:

Extract 1 (Adevarul, 27 September 2013)

French mayors whether right or left, supported the statements of the Interior Minister, Manuel
Valls, who said on Tuesday that the Roma should be repatriated back to Roma and Bulgaria.

And the original Le Monde article states not that the mayors support his policy of
repatriation only that the mayors, ‘echo the words of the boss of Place Beauvau’. Le
10 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Monde, rather, suggests that the mayors may be aligning with his power over them rather
than with his policy per se. The deletion of these introductory parts of the Le Monde
article allows this to be presented not as a set of comments produced at conference but as
evidence of the entire political landscape in France being in agreement with the
repatriations.
In fact, only one of the five comments cited by the mayors, actually refers to repatria-
tion. While clearly being against Roma camps, two of the mayors frame the events in
terms of practical challenges. For example:

Extract 2 (Adevarul, 27 September 2013)

the anarchic setting up of Roma camps leads to terrible tensions that we must not deny and
which we cannot solve locally.

Extract 3 (Adevarul, 27 September 2013)

in a period of shortage of jobs and housing we cannot manage to integrate them.

We saw earlier in the article that the Sarkozy policies themselves helped to ferment
greater public hostilities and focus on the Roma camps. For an elected mayor, it would
be less easy to publicly align entirely against such a climate, and in some of the above
municipalities there had been instances of open conflict between local residents and the
Roma. What these mayors appear to be saying, however, is that such a situation would
need to be solved by broader structural changes and investment.
The last of the people cited in the text, is found in the section taken from the news
outlet Le Point. The person cited is not a mayor but the President of the right-wing Union
Movement Populaire, Jean-Francois Cope. These comments are used to sum up the text.
They are in no way directly related to the conference and bring a crucial component to
the process of recontextualization. Cope is cited as saying:

Extract 4 (Adevarul, 27 September 2013)

The problem with the explosion of delinquency and violence in the country, the Roma problem,
all these together have exasperated a certain number of our compatriots. We must understand
that neither Romania nor Bulgaria are ready to enter Schengen.

Here this comment has been used to bring the story, the agreement of the mayors with
their patron, back to the Roma being the reason for Romania’s continued exclusion from
Schengen. We find the use of language like ‘the explosion of delinquency and violence in
the country’ and ‘the Roma problem’. The personalized comments of the previous list of
mayors, representing official positions and a geographical spread across France, are now
framed by this addition. The actual context of the conference is replaced by the wider one
of surging violence and the Roma as problem, rather than an issue of planning and resources.
This Adevarul article carries the photograph seen in Figure 2. Again this image
does not depict the actual events represented in the text and is an image that we have
Breazu and Machin 11

seen used for other news reports on the Roma. In this sense, this image provides an
addition to the story by introducing some Roma stereotypes not represented in the text
itself.
As regards the participants, we find a man who we might read as a father along with
eight children, given the stereotypical discourses of Roma hypersexuality (Bhabha et al.,
2017). As regards actions, we see a lack of structured activity which points to a well-
established discourse about the Roma as non-productive citizens (Themelis, 2016). And
we see a lack of active parenting, where children appear unhappy and idle. Such a repre-
sentation helps to provide an addition for the discourse of ‘new racism’ in the sense the
Roma are out of synch with wider social norms. A closer look at the image shows that
colors have been saturated which gives the scene a feel of gaudiness and ugliness (Kress
and Van Leeuwen, 2002).
So, again, visually we do not see the evictions and repatriations. Rather we find a visual
reminder of the Roma as jarring with wider social values, as regards parenting and being a
productive citizen, about appropriate forms of domestic space and boundaries between
public and private. And at the end of the article it becomes clear that the whole of France is
against the Roma, and this creates a huge problem for Romania’s access to Schengen. It is
hard to see what practical solution might be implied by such a text, but its purpose appears
to be best explained by observers who point to the way that the Roma are used politically
to distract from other kinds of structural matters within Romania, such as corruption, which
do have a concrete influence on Romania’s EU status (Nacu, 2012).

Analysis 3: ‘In steps with Valls. Waltzing with the Roma in

France’ (Adevarul, 4 October 2013)
This text is quite a lengthy editorial piece written by a Romanian journalist living in
France. The article offers a personal account of the prejudice experienced by Romanian
migrants in France due to the presence of the Roma, since French people tend not to dif-
ferentiate between the two groups. We again find recontextualizations through evalua-
tions as we are taken into the personal experiences of a Romanian person living in France
and as Romanians are differentiated from Roma. We also find that the Romanians are
substituted as victims in place of the Roma.
To begin with the headline, the words Valls and waltz are homonyms in Romanian
language, and are pronounced as /‘vals/.5 The title is, therefore, a pun that creates a humor-
ous effect (adynaton) of the Roma dancing the waltz. The journalist relies on the fact that
it is common knowledge that the waltz is a ballroom dance, specific for white, upper-class
society and, is consequently associated with culture, civilization and mannerism. By lexi-
cally merging the two nouns, the Roma and the waltz, a discrepancy is constructed as an
oxymoron, which emphasizes that the Roma do not fit in any civilized society.
It is against this background that the journalist explains her own grievance of being
unjustly taken as a Roma. What stands out in this article is the fact that she uses a form
of direct personal address, which takes on an informal conversational style:

Extract 5 (Adevarul, 4 October 2013)

12 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Figure 3. Adevarul, 4 October 2013.

Yes, I am Romanian born, raised and educated in Romania and I do not understand why you
change faces when I confess this. Or why are you taking a step back or … why, after a few days,
you do not answer my greetings … or why, after being overtaken by amazement while reading
my CV, you don’t give any sign!

Such use of personal address and pronouns, is what Fairclough (1992) has associated
with ‘synthetic personalization’, and can be related to claiming sincerity and equal foot-
ing. In this case however, as she speaks to the imagined French person with whom she
interacts the reader is encouraged to align with her feelings at the time, giving them
access to her internal state (Van Leeuwen, 2008). She invites the Romanian reader to
align with this everyday prejudice on a more personal and intimate level, especially since
as she says, her national identity became ‘a scary shadow that accompanies me every
time I go for an interview’.
Throughout the text she describes both the Roma and Romanians. We show these
representational strategies and attributed social actions in Table 3.
Table 3 illustrates the polarized representation of the Romanians and Roma. The
Roma are framed as lacking both the moral and cultural capital required by civilized
societies. Their assigned actions relate to the usual associations with crime, begging
and conflict. In addition, the Roma appear to be the source of wider social conflicts
as in ‘divide the Romanians’, or ‘divide the French political class’. In contrast, the
Romanians, who are also portrayed as a collective group, are defined by both moral
capital (have dignity, have commonsense, behave decently) and cultural capital (are
educated, are knowledgeable about French language, culture and art). These are
typical discourses of the ‘new racism’, which are instrumental in delegitimizing the
Breazu and Machin 13

Table 3. Representational strategy for the Roma and Romanians.

Participants Actions
The Roma
Les Roms Don’t cease to perplex the public by their inability to
integrate into the society and (inability) to behave, if not in
a civilized manner at least in the very limits of decency
They Steal
Exotic group Beg at every street corner,
‘Extras’ Involved in scams
Beggars Live in camps
Thieves Divide the Romanians
Offenders Divide the French political class
Romanians
We Are stigmatized
Christians Accused of criminal acts
Educated Need to hide their country of origin
Doctors Afraid of being misjudged
Students Have dignity
Religious ministers Have commonsense
Are educated
Struggle to learn accents, the subjunctive mood and the
exceptions of French language
Behave decently
Know that Manet and Monet are not the same character

Roma, on the ground that they fail to conform to the rules, values and expectations
of the mainstream society.
In fact, the text is unclear as far as who is to blame and where the solution lies,
whether it is the responsibility of France, or Romania, to integrate the Roma. The author
acknowledges that there are ‘French associations fighting poverty and social exclusion’,
suggesting that other forms of solutions may exist. But, the overall script here is that the
Roma are an extreme case of group who cannot be integrated into any society. And at the
end we find indirect reference to Schengen.

Extract 6 (Adevarul, 4 October 2013)

Not being the only country facing the massive migration of the Roma, France wants to find an
urgent solution at European level in order to favor first, the integration of the Roma into
Romania and Bulgaria. Then we’ll see …

As with the previous article, the concluding section draws the reader back to Schengen.
Simply, the Roma are presented as a universal problem, and fundamentally this is jeop-
ardizing the future of Romania’s place in Europe.
There are two photographs carried by this article (Figures 3 and 4). The first is a
slightly different scene from the events on the Hungarian–Austrian border used in the
14 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Figure 4. Adevarul, 4 October 2013.

first text analyzed above. So, again, we see the same four Roma and the same police-
man, although in the background we do see, out of focus two other policemen. The
evictions and the repatriations, again are peaceful, lacking in force or brutality or
magnitude.
The second photograph is a close-up, quite intimate portrait of Manuel Valls. The
image is decontextualized since the background is out of focus which is a signal that this
particular visual is being used to symbolize ideas, values and concepts, rather than to
document a specific moment (Machin and Mayr, 2012). Here we see Valls with a slightly
smiling face, although his eyes expression is neutral as he looks thoughtfully off frame.
His hair is little unkempt and along with the intimacy of the close-up shot provide a less
formal representation of him. He is slightly humanized and approachable. This visual
depiction of Valls conveys the calm, measured and somewhat warm face of French poli-
tics and erases any signs of violence or prejudice against the Roma.
While the ‘script’ of this article is not entirely clear as regards solutions and responsi-
bility for the Roma situation, there is no doubt that the Roma appear to be the source of
problems for all parties. As observed by Mădroane (2012) in this text, the Press plays an
active role in creating divisions between the Roma and other Romanians.

Conclusion
In our corpus of Romanian Press reporting on the evictions and repatriations of Roma
from France, we certainly identify what is called the ‘new racism’ (Liu and Mills, 2006;
Simmons and Lecouteur, 2008). We are told repeatedly that for many parties – for ordi-
nary and reasonable French citizens, for French politicians of different ideologies, for
educated Romanian people – the Roma’s social and cultural practices are utterly incom-
patible with those of wider society. But we have also seen that this new racism is used
here for a number of specific political ends. In an earlier section of this article, we saw
that critics felt that Sarkozy used the Roma issue as part of a political campaign to win
voters and distract attention from austerity measures. And in our analysis, we showed
Breazu and Machin 15

that the Romanian press clearly recontextualizes the entire events to present the Roma as
the sole cause of the failure to access Schengen. The ‘menace of the Roma’, who no
society appears able to deal with, are said to create this barrier for Romania.
Richardson and O’Neill (2012) argued that media representations of the Roma
have been entirely counterproductive for the social inclusion and integration of
Roma into European societies. And while the EU pushes for governments to provide
resources and programs for Roma integration – access to accommodation, educa-
tion, job market and healthcare – the coverage of Roma repatriations from France
in Romanian press is unlikely to garner public and voter support for funding of such
programs.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. The Schengen agreement is a treaty signed by selected EU member states, according to which
internal border controls are abolished. The treaty guarantees free movement of people within
the Schengen zone; applicant countries undergo an evaluation to ensure they meet all condi-
tions for joining the Schengen area.
2. Protocol No. 4 of the European Convention of Human Rights prohibits the collective expul-
sion of ‘aliens’; it also reinforces the right to freedom of movement for all EU citizens.
3. The directives and recommendations of the 2002 Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly
(no. 1557) underline that the Roma are entitled to full membership in the countries where they
are born and, consequently, in the EU member states.
4. The full statement of Viviane Reding, the Vice-President of the European Commission
responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship can be found in: http://europa.
eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-10-428_en.ht
5. Transcription according to IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).

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Author biographies
Petre Breazu is a PhD candidate in Media and Communication at Örebro University, Sweden. His
research project addresses the multimodal representation of the Roma in European media. Petre’s
research interests include the discursive construction of various social and political identities, vis-
ual communication, news photography and visual ideologies.
David Machin is Professor of Media and Communication at Örebro University, Sweden. He has
published extensively in the area of (Multimodal) Critical Discourse Analysis. His most recent
books are Doing Visual Analysis: From Theory to Practice (2017) and Visual Journalism (2015).
He is the co-editor of the international journals Social Semiotics and Journal of Language and
Politics. He also co-edits international Book Series Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse
Studies.