The EU's Roma 'Paradox'

Abstract

The Roma people are the largest, most marginalized, discriminated against and misunderstood minority within the EU. Compared to non-Romani populations, they often live in marginal conditions, have low levels of education, high levels of unemployment and lack basic access to health-care. Over the past decades many EU policy measures have been implemented to address these problems which are aimed at improving the socioeconomic status of Roma. To date these have had only limited effect and the situation of many Roma remains precarious. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the reasons of this relative ineffectiveness of implemented EU policy. Human geography is deployed to look at policies of both national- and multinational governmental institutions as well as the main drivers of Roma migration. It investigates Roma migration and an overview is given of the main factors contributing to policy ineffectiveness. Cultural anthropology looks at Roma identity and analyzes their supposed cultural unity in order to understand what implications this has for the integration of Roma in the EU. We conclude that EU implemented policy is largely failing for a number of reasons. First of all, the integration of both human geographical and cultural anthropological insights show us that policy often targets Roma as a homogeneous unit, although the European Roma are mixed and diverse group. Furthermore, there seem to be discrepancies between EU initiatives and the actions taken by various individual member states and little attention is given to both institutional and non- institutional discrimination. Finally we argue there is too little communication and -understanding both between various levels of government, as well as between the people- and institutions that implement policy and the Roma communities and -individuals they are working for.