The production of irregular citizenship through mobile governmentalities: racism against roma at the security-mobility nexus

ABSTRACT

This article uses the case study of the European Roma to demonstrate the importance of mobile governmentalities in regulating mobility and citizenship. These are political technologies in which mobility itself is turned into a strategy to govern mobility, particularly through keeping people on the move. Whereas most studies about mobility and migration focus on the governing of mobilities and on interrelated biopolitical mechanisms, I extend these investigations to mobile governmentalities, which include what I call governing and securitizing through ‘nomadization’, as well as through what William Walters calls ‘viapolitics’. The latter is a form of governing that considers vehicles, routes and journeys as mobile sites of power and contestation in their own right. Through an examination of a historical case study about Dutch Roma and a contemporary one about Roma in France, I show that not only camps and halting sites, but also routes, vehicles and mobility itself are to be understood as technologies of securitizing and racializing minorities such as Roma, thereby turning them into irregular citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Irregular citizenship
• mobile governmentality
• viapolitics
• securitization
• racialization
• nomadization
• roma

Introduction

In scholarship on the situation of Roma minorities, much attention has been paid to the histories of their mobilities and to the ways in which these have been governed throughout the ages, by themselves but mostly by others, including various kinds of authorities, ranging from Churches, tax collectors, towns and nobilities to the police and a huge variety of other governmental officials at various institutional levels, including, more recently, international ones. In this historiography, much attention has been dedicated to the role that encampments have played in the perception and self-perception of their mobilities and, thus, in practices of outside identification, and to a lesser extent, processes of both identity formation and articulating minority agency. In these historiographies, the analysis of encampments hugely varies and ranges from camps with caravans (romanticized or not), separated or segregated neighborhoods and concentration camps to urban and rural contained or semi-contained spaces, such as ghettoes, slums, shantytowns, refugee camps, (un-)organized halting sites, and (un-)authorized camps for Roma, Gypsies, or Travellers.

Various studies that analyze the relations between authorities and Roma, Gypsies and Travellers emphasize the ambiguous role that ‘Gypsy camps’ have played therein. Following Foucault’s understanding of technologies of government,¹ Giovanni Picker, Margaret Greenfields and David Smith have suggested that

the ‘Gypsy camp’ can heuristically be viewed as a spatio-racial political technology, namely as a largely supported and self-legitimizing policy device which sanctions the perfect juxtaposition of a racially connoted marginalized population with a secluded urban location, eventually crystallizing racist perceptions and public attitudes towards RGT [Roma, Gypsies and Travellers] onto the urban space and landscape. (Picker, Greenfields, and Smith 2015, 742; see also Picker 2017, 101–03)

As the authors emphasize, particularly since the 1960s the ‘Gypsy camp’ as a spatio-racial political technology has begun to function as a tool to combine governmental ambitions to ‘sedentarize’ ‘nomadic’ groups with cultural policies dedicated to the ‘protection’ of ‘their way of life’, thus, their tradition of ‘nomadism’²:

The drive to sedentarize nomadic populations in isolated places stemmed from the governmental presumption, emergent across Europe during the 1960s, that itinerants needed a place to stop in order to become incrementally integrated into mainstream society without totally losing their ‘way of life’. (742)

And indeed, after the war, strategies of governing that combined sedentarization with forms of minority ‘protection’ were articulated in several, mostly West European countries. The United Kingdom and Italy are good examples, and in France and the Netherlands similar governmental attempts to deal with ‘unruly’ populations with a Roma background were introduced.

In addition to what happened at various national levels, the Council of Europe ‘complemented’ at the European level with a clearer but still ambiguous dimension of minority recognition through safeguarding their protection. For instance, since the late 1960s, the Council adopted several resolutions and recommendations dealing with the situation of people who, depending on the period and the discursive framing that then dominated, were referred to as ‘Gypsies and other travellers’ (Council of Europe 1969), ‘Nomads’ (1975–87), ‘populations of nomadic origin’ (1981–84), ‘Gypsies’ (1983–95), ‘Gypsies and Travellers’ (1987), ‘Gypsies (Roma and Sinti)’ (1995), ‘Roma/Gypsies’ (1995–2000), or ‘Roma’ (since 1995). A 1975 resolution explains that, ‘the expression “nomads” means persons who for historical reasons are accustomed to following an itinerant way of life, as well as persons of nomadic origin who experience difficulties in integrating into society for sociological, economic or similar reasons’ (Council of Europe 1975 in Danbakli 2001, 125, emphasis added). Both highlighted expressions are remarkable for how they project the reasons for following an ‘itinerant way of life’ onto the past and, thus, for how the (alleged) ‘nomadism’ of this minority is considered a declining tradition or in jeopardy. In the former case, it is suggested that this lifestyle is a remnant of the past that is still maintained as an everyday practice of living, while, in the latter expression, it is insinuated that these persons are not ‘nomadic’ but only of ‘nomadic origin’.

This framing concurs with the ways in which the Council of Europe’s policies of the late 1960s and of the 1970s problematize the situation of ‘Nomads’ or ‘Gypsies’: they do so from the perspective of the need for their social and cultural protection while, at the same time, it is suggested that their identity is threatened because of ‘industrial and urban development’, ‘the extension of town and country planning’, and ‘discrimination on the part of the settled population’ (125, emphasis added). Articulating the differentiating binary of ‘modern’ versus ‘traditional societies’ characteristic of modernization theories, it is stated that ‘the Gypsy population in Europe is severely affected by the rapid changes in modern society, which are depriving Gypsies and other travellers of many opportunities to carry on with their traditional trades and professions’ (Council of Europe 1969 in Danbakli 2001, 144, emphasis added). Thus, modernization itself is interpreted as endangering allegedly ‘traditional’ societies, professions, and ‘lifestyles’, such as those of ‘Gypsies and other travellers’.

Both in West European governmental approaches to Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers and in the policies of the Council of Europe, calls for the ‘protection’ or even ‘recognition’ of these minorities’ cultures and ‘lifestyles’ coincided with the observation that these lifestyles were at risk of vanishing due to the rise of ‘modern’ industrial societies. In this context, Picker, Greenfields and Smith accurately remark:

By the mid-20th century, the ‘problem’ resulted from the declining position of Gypsies and other itinerants in relation to majority society as demand for their labor and tolerance of their ‘difference’ declined. Policy responses seeking to enforce sedentarization through making a nomadic life increasingly untenable represented one element of an assimilationist strategy targeted at ‘outsiders’ and ‘deviants’ which had developed throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. (745, emphasis added)

No matter the accuracy of this observation, the primary focus on the assimilationist strategy and the underlying dynamics of ‘sedentarization’ through questioning and protecting ‘a nomadic lifestyle’ is not sufficient to get a good sense of the full scope of the governmental rationalities, technologies and strategies that are involved in how Roma, Gypsies and Travellers have been politicized and depoliticized in post-war Europe – certainly not when we analyze them longitudinally and in the context of what has happened more recently in European history. Nor is the focus on the ‘Gypsy camp’ as a spatio-racial technology appropriate to understand the variety of governmentalities and counter-governmentalities involved in the regulation of their lives, practices and ‘difference’. Picker, Greenfields and Smith state that, in post-war (Western) Europe, the ‘Gypsy camp’ was a policy response to the dilemma: ‘how to protect an alleged nomadic lifestyle, while encouraging sedentarization’ (747, emphasis added).³ Alternatively, I argue that one of the leading parallel governmental strategies has tried to answer to the dilemma of how ‘settlement’ could be prevented through encouraging nomadization. Here, I use ‘nomadization’ as a concept that defines a governmental strategy that enforces mobility through the active ‘irregularization’ of the involved individual’s or collective’s mobility. ‘Irregularization’ (Nyers 2019: 22–33, see also van Baar 2015) refers to the more general processes and mechanisms through which a status, practice or act of citizenship is made ‘irregular’. The concept acknowledges that notions such as ‘irregular migrants’ or ‘regular citizens’ do not refer to static states of affairs but to (relatively) reified, temporary and contestable outcomes of political processes that ‘regularize’ or ‘irregularize’ people. There are various strategies that contribute to the production of irregular citizenship and ‘nomadization’ is one of them and often articulated in combination with overlapping strategies of, for instance, stigmatization, orientalization, criminalization, racialization and securitization.

Accordingly, not only assimilation through ‘sedentarization’, but also expulsion through ‘nomadization’ should be understood as a key strategy of governing that has dramatically affected Roma, Gypsies and Travellers in Europe, as well as the reproduction of their ostensible ethnic-racial ‘difference’, throughout the twentieth century and up till now. Nomadization is a mechanism that overlaps with, but also differs from (spatial) displacement through expulsion. It refers to a mechanism that tries to keep people on the move or to produce the conditions that contribute to a kind of perpetually enforced mobility. Among these conditions are those of ‘evictability’ (van Baar 2017), that is the possibility of being removed from a sheltering place; conditions that have significantly contributed to a situation of contained mobility (van Baar 2018, 2019) regarding Roma. To grasp the full scope of the diversity of Roma-related governmentalities and counter-governmentalities, I would like to make yet another argument; one that is related to the need to look beyond the trope and technology of the ‘Gypsy camp’, as well as beyond the interrelated biopolitical technologies of government. This observation requires some explanation before it could lead to a sustainable argumentation.

Analyses of mobilities in migration studies, as William Walters (2015b) has observed, often ‘tend to see the movement of people and things in terms of how movement is produced, regulated, surveilled and contested.’ Yet, while the ‘mobilities turn’ in the humanities and social and political sciences has contributed to contesting sedentarist assumptions and methodologies in social and political thought, the role of vehicles, roads, routes, journeys and vessels in how they channel and challenge the movements of people and things has so far been largely undertheorized.⁴ This observation has led Walters (2015a, 2015b) to introduce the concept of ‘viapolitics’. In a similar way in which Foucault’s concept of biopolitics involves the dimension of ‘bios’ (health, productivity, subsistence, preservation of life) in how politics operates, viapolitics is concerned with the dimension of ‘via’ in how politics functions, emerges and redirects. ‘Via’ refers to ‘the in between, the en route, the places on the way’, ‘the specific means of transportation and communication’, as well as to the ways in which the vehicular, roads, routes, and journeys can provide ‘a locus for problematizations of the human and for the possibility of politics’ (Walters 2015a, 471, 472). Below, I will further discuss viapolitics.

This short explanation of viapolitics leads me back to the question of how we can shed better light on the complexity of Roma-related governmentalities and counter-governmentalities. Through examining nomadization and viapolitics as central dimensions of governing dispersed populations that intersect with the biopolitical dimensions that have been discussed in the literature, we can diversify these governing technologies and rationalities and make them receptive to mobile governmentalities and strategies of governing not only of, but also through mobility (van Baar 2011b, 2015, 2018, 2019; Tazzioli 2020). This implies that we have to understand not only the ‘Gypsy camp’ as a technology of governing, but also mobility itself, as well as the ‘via’s’ that channel and challenge the movement of ‘disorderly’ people. Thus, whereas the biopolitical dimensions related to the ‘Gypsy camp’ as a political technology still privilege the fixed structures of containment, an examination of nomadization and viapolitics undoes this fix through underlining the importance of mobility and its infrastructures in governing ‘unruly’ mobilities.

This approach also historicizes the mobility of Roma, Gypsies and Travellers as fully involved in minority and migrant governmentalities, rather than essentialize or romanticize their mobility and ‘difference’ as expressions of some ‘genuine’ freedom of movement. Moreover, this historicization of their mobilities contributes to unraveling overlapping genealogies of how they have been governed by others and have governed themselves in different European contexts and beyond. The focus on the heterogeneity of minority governmentalities also contributes to showing how the historicization of Roma stigmatization and that of the articulation of their agency are significantly interwoven in European history (van Baar 2011a) and how the vehicular, routes, journeys and roads have never been just ‘out there’, but always co-constituted the possibilities of minority politics (Silverman 2012; Le Bas 2018).

I will first show the relevance of viapolitics at its intersection with biopolitics. I limit my analysis to the role that the caravan or ‘living wagon’ (woonwagen in Dutch) has played in the twentieth-century history of Dutch policies towards caravan dwellers – called woonwagenbewoners in Dutch policy discourses – a group that includes people with and without a Roma or Sinti background and that, following the post-1989 trend to Europeanize Roma representation (van Baar 2011a), can be considered as belonging to ‘Roma’. Viapolitics involves more than just vehicles but, in the Dutch context, the example of the living wagon is exemplary for how via-political dimensions of Roma-related governmentalities have contributed to disputing their citizenship over the last century. Thereafter, by means of a case study on France, I will discuss how mobility itself has been used as a political technology to govern Roma minorities in contemporary Europe. While these Dutch and French case studies are by no means isolated, more research into the dimensions of mobile governmentality is to be welcomed to understand regional parallels and differences within and beyond Europe.

Viapolitics meets biopolitics: from the ‘living Wagon’ to the ‘VROM Wagon’

Before the town, there was the road to the town and ‘there are towns because there is police,’ as Foucault (2007, 337) summarized one of the key ideas of some seventeenth and eighteenth-century police scientists. In his discussion of the emergence of police as a practice of governmentality, Foucault pays quite a lot, though no systematic attention to institutions prior to police, such as the mounted constabulary which, in early modern Europe, was responsible for controlling ‘people on the road’ (336, cf. Walters 2015b). In this context, the road network feeding the market had to be governed and, therefore, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century ‘police was thought essentially in terms of what could be called the urbanization of the territory [that is] … arranging things so that the territory is organized like a town, on the model of a town, and as perfectly as a town’ (336, emphasis added).

I begin this section with this observation because, in historicizing the governance of mobility, these via-political dimensions of technologies and strategies of governance have usually been overlooked regarding how they were articulated in the past and how they have continued to play a vital role today. I discuss the history of governing vehicles in the Dutch policies regarding woonwagenbewoners over the last century and focus on moments that are key to understand adequately their contemporary history. These cover the introduction of the 1918 and 1968 laws – the ‘caravan acts’ (woonwagenwetten) – and the changes to these laws in the 1970s and 1980s, until the abolition of the 1968 Act in 1999.

The ‘Living Wagon’ as a Via-political Technology of Governing in the Law of 1918

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the arrival of the ‘living wagon’ in the Dutch landscape was increasingly problematized in terms of a threat to public order. The living wagons, for the first time mentioned in Dutch censuses of 1879, were very basic and not equipped with separate places to sleep, although wagons offering sleeping places were developed in the decades to come, also because of the then increasing housing shortage.

In 1911, this problematization of living wagons in terms of (in-)security led to the first national counting of wagons and their inhabitants: the authorities counted 2,800 inhabitants in 584 wagons, 402 of which with one room only (van Ooijen 1993, 71, 83–87). The research carried out for this census also revealed that most inhabitants were never accused of any penal act and that they were generally no ‘aliens’; they usually had Dutch citizenship. The census also focused on whether these families had sufficient ‘means of subsistence’. Furthermore, the census categorized the households on the basis of the number of adults and children, the number of rooms and the specific usage of the wagons (for work, permanent or non-permanent living, travelling, and/or transport or storage of goods). This census would become an important biopolitical tool in the development towards the official post-First World War national policy.

In the two decades preceding 1914, Dutch municipalities dealt mostly haphazardly with living wagons and their inhabitants. Local governments frequently tried to evict wagons; practices that led to keeping their inhabitants on the move and to shifting the responsibility to deal with them to ever new municipalities. These practices led to calls for a national approach (van Ooijen 1993, 71–116). Attempts of many MPs to forbid all living wagons turned out to be unrealistic when the war began and the financial means to build new houses lacked. Finally, the first Caravan Act of 1918 obliged all municipalities to offer sites on which woonwagenbewoners could live. The law included many regulations; here, I focus on those concerning living wagons, because the impact of their management has been largely if not entirely neglected in the literature.

Article 1.1 of the Act prescribes that ‘the living wagon must rest on at least two axles and four wheels; the top of its floor may not be higher than 1 meter above the ground’ (quoted in van Ooijen 1993, 104, emphasis added).⁵ Article 1.4 continues requiring that ‘the length, width and height of the living space must be at least 4.5, 2.1 and 2.1 meter (internal dimensions),’ while article 1.5 states ‘that the living space must be divided into at least one day and one night space; day and night spaces must be separated from each other by a partition, in which a folding or sliding door [is available] … ’ (105). Among the most remarkable articles of the Act is the following:

The number of persons who may maximally live in the wagon … or have a night stay there may not, as a rule, be greater than the total volume of the rooms equipped for habitation in cubic meters, divided by 4, whereas, at the outcome of this division, fractional parts have to be rounded up. (105)

One may wonder how frequent governmental officials actually made this calculation with its correct rounding off, while checking whether the law was appropriately applied!

Van Ooijen (1993) has argued that the aim of the law was to discourage people to live or continue living in a wagon and, by so doing, reducing the number of wagons in the country. In a commentary on the Act’s introduction, the Minister of Justice stated that one of the government’s aims was ‘to treat all living wagons … no longer on equal footing.’ He continued that ‘those who inhabit a suitably equipped vehicle … and themselves obtain sufficient means of subsistence by lawful means must not be made difficult in their business. However, strong action must be taken against the others’ (quoted in van Ooijen 1993: 89, emphasis added).

We can observe an important discrepancy between the way in which the aim of the law is stated here – primarily in terms of a distinction between the ‘bad’, ‘criminal’ woonwagenbewoners and the ‘good’, ‘law-abiding’ and ‘self-sustainable’ ones – and how this aim was translated into the law’s text. In the 1918 Act, the biopolitical knowledge of the 1911 census – which clarified that the majority of wagons had only one room and were poorly equipped – was meticulously combined with the via-political tool to put the wagon to a severe, if not totally unrealistic test. Officials involved in the law’s composition could know that the requirements the law prescribed meant that the majority of living wagons would not come through the test and, thus, that this law would actively contribute to the illegalization of the woonwagenbewoners through targeting their wagons via-politically.

Yet, like most of the time, laws and policies work out differently in practice. There emerged a huge variety of municipal practices towards ‘their’ woonwagenbewoners. Many municipalities that took the law seriously created sites for them, but often deliberately on the margins of municipal territory and next to trash dumps or otherwise unattractive locations . This was the  reason why many caravan dwellers continued to move on from one municipality to the other, looking for better conditions. On the other hand, those municipalities that had already introduced their own regulations regarding woonwagenbewoners continued to rely on them and neglected the 1918 Act.

Importantly, already in 1918, the government created a so-called ‘transitional provision’ to take into account the fact that most wagons would not meet the introduced requirements. The government realized that strict law enforcement would cause massive homelessness and unemployment among woonwagenbewoners, an undesirable outcome that would cause other problems. Particularly when taking into consideration later developments (see below), the following remark of the government regarding the Act’s enforcement is striking:

A slow extinction (langzame uitsterving) seems better so that the bad living wagons … may still be inhabited during the life of the present main occupant or his wife … If the … transitional provision is broader in so far, on the other hand, it is now prohibited that permits will be granted to persons who have insufficient means of support. Bad living wagons will be tolerated for a while, not bad residents. (Quoted in van Ooijen 1993, 111, emphasis added)

Thus, the law actively illegalized the wagons’ inhabitants, but tolerated those with sufficient means of subsistence, mostly through tolerating the ‘bad’ conditions of many of their wagons, including the missing separation between living and sleeping parts. Consequently, the law produced both the conditions of evictability (van Baar 2017) and the irregularization of their citizenship that would be maintained throughout the twentieth century and into the third millennium.

In the Interbellum, it became clear that the 1918 Act did not achieve its ‘unofficial’ aim: the official institutionalization of living in a wagon had, instead of reducing the number of woonwagenbe-woners, increased it  radically, as well as the number of wagons – not the least because the general housing shortage only persisted; one of the reasons why also others than the ‘original’ woonwagenbewoners began living in wagons. These other Dutch citizens developed what we would now call ‘mobile homes’ and transported them to marginal urban and rural sites aiming at creating more or less permanent housing for themselves. For these large ‘mobile homes’ they used removable wheels (only required during transport), so that nothing hindered these vehicles to be considered as ‘living wagons’ according to their definition in the 1918 Act. In this way, these new ‘caravan dwellers’ circumvented the Housing Law and, instead, relied on the 1918 Act to turn their improvised living places into (semi-)permanent housing.

A new episode in the via-political bordering of woonwagenbewoners would only emerge in the 1960s. However, what happened during and immediately after the Second World War is crucial to understand its emergence. I will not focus on the human tragedies and the direct effects of what happened afterwards, including the persecution of woonwagenbewoners by both the Nazis and Dutch police, attempts of many to go into hiding, and the deportation of Sinti and Roma among the woonwagenbewoners to Auschwitz–Birkenau. I rather concentrate on what could be considered as the unintended consequences of governmental plans and measures in the longer run, and on how these were partially caused by what happened during the war.

One of these ‘unintended’ outcomes was that what had been put under taboo in Dutch policies regarding woonwagenbewoners before the Second World War, became the dominant way of governing their mobility in the first post-war decades. Soon after the war, large ‘regional camps’ were established or better, re-established, in larger regional municipalities, while the sites for living wagons in smaller municipalities were to disappear (actually, to reappear again a few decades later, when it was acknowledged that this policy had ‘failed’). During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and in order to strictly control the population of woonwagenbewoners, the Nazis forbad any kind of movement of their caravans and concentrated them in a few so-called ‘collection camps’ (verzamelkampen), thereby ordering the closure of many municipal halting sites and limiting their number to a few where all the woonwagenbewoners should be concentrated (for a detailed discussion of the wartime measures, see van Baar 2021).

After the war, in 1952, a committee proposed a new law that, in a more moderate form, resembled these Nazi measures: the committee recommended a ban on the moving of living wagons, and the reorganization and larger concentration of their sites in ‘regional camps’. Out of these two recommendations, only the latter would make it into the 1968 Act. Yet, indirectly the former was implicated in it as well, as I will explain below.

The governmentalization of the ‘living wagon’ through the laws of 1968 and 1981

In the 1968 Act, the living wagon is redefined as ‘a wagon that is used constantly or almost constantly as a home or intended for that purpose’. Remarkable is the addition that a living wagon does not stop to be one ‘due to the fact that the wheels are removed from underneath or the living or sleeping area is expanded by means of an earth-stable extension (aardvast aanbouwsel)’ (quoted in van Ooijen 1993, 199, emphasis added). Similarly weird requirements as we saw in the 1918 Act were included in the 1968 one, such as the regulation that ‘a wagon may not be inhabited by a greater number of people than the number of square meters of floor space of the wagon divided by 2 ½’ (199); a measure that strictly limited the maximum number of inhabitants of a wagon through its definition and size and, thus, tried to limit them through using viapolitics.

Before reflecting on the specificity of the via-political technologies implicated in the 1968 Act, I want to underline its intersecting moralizing and racializing dimensions. In particular after the Second World War, the emphasis on social care, ‘moral upbringing’ and the education of children of woonwagenbewoners had become increasingly dominant. While, before the war, this domain had been mostly the terrain of church organizations, after the war a newly established faith-based organization – the R.K. Vereniging van Woonwagen Liefdewerken (Roman Catholic Society of Caravan Charities) – offered its charity services to the government in exchange for subsidies (Cottaar 1998, 125–26). The post-war reformulation of the policy towards woonwagenbewoners in terms of social welfare, rather than primarily public order – as in the 1918 Act – was also articulated through the 1957 shift of responsibility for this policy from the Ministry of Justice to that of Social Welfare (Cottaar 1998, 126). The philosophy behind the shift from various small municipal camps to a limited number of large regional ones also related to this emphasis on re-educating woonwagenbewoners. The Act required the establishment of 50 regional camps, each with halting sites for 50 to 80 wagons and all equipped with their own schools – ‘special’ ones – general practitioners, social workers, and other facilities, such as connection to the sewage system, electricity, and toilets for each wagon, and fire protection, central lighting, and access to main infrastructure in and for each camp – which was no longer called a ‘camp’ but a ‘center’ to avoid direct connotations with the camps installed by the Nazis.

Through this ‘civilizing offensive’, camp inhabitants had to ‘teach themselves’ the benefits of living sedentarily and, ultimately, refrain from continuing living in a wagon. The description of one of the aims of one of the first regional camps is exemplary in this respect:

By means of a clean halting site, an own shed with heating facilities …, a private toilet and garbage bin (hygiene promotion within one’s own reach) [and] a private electricity meter … needs are learned (aangekweekt) unnoticed, making travelling increasingly difficult for psychological and material reasons. The management of the regional camp … expects to achieve in such a way that the woonwagenbewoner, in complete freedom, comes to the realization that not only travelling has lost its attractiveness, but also living in a wagon. (Janssen 1962 quoted in van Ooijen 1993, 227, emphasis added)

The most striking, but often neglected aspect of the 1968 Act was the racial demarcation of the population group for whom the law was explicitly meant.⁶ Remarkably, the Act allows that a permit for living in a wagon is also granted when ‘the applicant can prove that he [sic] … has previously lived in a woonwagen’ (quoted in van Ooijen 1993, 199). Even more radical: a permit has also to be granted to persons who – even when they themselves never lived in a wagon – can prove that their parents ever received a permit or that they actually lived in a wagon. Thus, the decisive feature for the distinction between a ‘living wagon’ and a house in the sense of the Housing Law is not only the kind of wagon/house, but also the kind of inhabitant. The Act determines that only when inhabitants belong to the group of ‘traditional’ woonwagenbewoners, or can prove that their parents belonged to it, they live in a living wagon, as defined by the Act (cf. van Ooijen 1993, 199)! This decisive feature is all the more remarkable if we take into account that, in the 1968 Act, those who were living in a wagon and continued travelling for professional reasons – this category mainly included fairground operators, circus artists, and road builders – were not considered as the woonwagenbewoners for which the Act and regional centers were meant.⁷

Thus, two categories of woonwagenbewoners were now carefully distinguished: those who were travelling for professional reasons, and those who belonged to the ‘category of so-called travellers’ (de categorie der zogenaamde reizigers), also called the ‘original woonwagenbewoners’ (woonwagenbewoners van origine), for whom the regional centers were strictly meant. The category of new woonwagenbewoners that already emerged before the war and that had its origin in the housing shortage was no longer taken into account. The inhabitants of these ‘mobile homes’ were considered as citizens in the understanding of burghers (burgers) who were perceived having a solid ‘sedentary’ background. As Annemarie Cottaar (1998) rightly observes, in the end ‘the controversial ban on travelling was smuggled into the law in disguised form.’ Whereas the purported ‘traditional’ or ‘original’ woonwagenbewoners ‘kept their right to move about, … they were no longer allowed to station their homes anywhere outside a regional camp [and] … official permission was [now] required to change camps’ (127, emphasis added).

In this way, the Act introduced a set of regulations that turned the regional centers into sites of a civilizing offensive, which defined their inhabitants on the racializing basis of descent, which limited their mobility on the basis of an implicitly formulated travel ban (contained mobility), and which legitimated the establishment of substandard public services, including, most notably, education in special schools, in the regional centers. The lawyer Lau Mazirel (1987[1968]) was among the first who pointed to the racism – she called it the reliance on descent (afstammingsbeginsel) – implicated in the 1968 Act and the troublesome, and in fact fully indecisive and therefore entirely arbitrary way in which the different categories of woonwagenbewoners were distinguished. What Cottaar (1998) has called the ‘making of a minority’ – referring to the case of Dutch ‘traditional’ woonwagenbewoners – occurred to a significant extent through racialization, and led to systematically subordinating the minority members, including those with Sinti or Roma backgrounds.

The Act’s racializing condition also prevented that the new definition of the woonwagen – with or without wheels and with or without further extensions – would seriously affect ‘burghers’ who lived in a mobile home. The moral upbringing and discouraging of travelling took place not only through the biopolitical treatment of the involved woonwagenbewoners, but also and considerably through the via-political treatment of the woonwagen. Indeed, it was the wagon that had to be rooted, if not directly through legally requiring its connection with sewage, water, gas or electricity systems, then indirectly through what the 1968 Act called ‘earth-stable extensions’. What if we simply turn the ‘living wagon’ into a ‘mobile home’ (stacaravan) that is (almost) impossible to move? This effort perfectly characterizes the final episode of the Dutch policy that I want to discuss.

In the 1970s, the supply of wagons was increasingly transferred to the government. The stricter regulations regarding the ways in which wagons had to be equipped led to a situation in which the government itself was going to fabricate wagons that were, from then on, subsidized ones; a form of financial support for woonwagenbewoners that was going to be organized in a new law, initiated in 1981. This law introduced yet another definition of the woonwagen: now it must be at least 9.2 × 3.5 × 3 m in size to qualify for a financial contribution from the Ministry of VROM (Public Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment). As van Ooijen remarks, transporting such a huge wagon behind a car was not in accordance with the official road traffic regulations and, thus, illegal(ized). He adds: ‘not only misses a wagon [of such a size] its wheels, but its construction also does not allow having wheels fitted underneath’ (van Ooijen 1993, 288, emphasis added).

With the implementation of the 1981 Act on financial support for woonwagens, so-called ‘VROM wagons’ were introduced, called after the Ministry of Public Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment. These were mobile homes, owned by the municipalities, mostly rented by woonwagenbewoners, written off in 15 years and with a lifespan of approximately 25 years. In the 1980s, most of the older ‘living wagons’ were systematically replaced by VROM wagons, which fulfilled all official requirements, simply because the Dutch state produced them. The 1981 Act still offered some space for the former ‘living wagon’: it showed up with an ‘entirely’ new definition of what the Act now calls a ‘travelling wagon’ (trekkerswagen). This was a wagon meant to be moved on by a car, in full accordance with road traffic regulations. Yet, this ‘travelling wagon’ could not count on financial support from the government. After the neoliberalization of social policies and the 1999 abolition of the 1968 Act, the delivery of mobile homes for woonwagenbewoners was privatized and, increasingly, they could also buy their mobile homes.

In summary, we could say that the living wagon has been substantially if not entirely ‘governmentalized’, that is, made amenable to political technologies of government. I would do harm to this history if I suggest that this via-political trajectory did not include resistant moments of counter-conduct as well,⁸ even though these have impacted only marginally to the current state of affairs in which municipalities still refer – officially and unofficially – to (the desirability of) extinction policy.⁹

Mobility as a political technology: mobilizing ‘nomadism’ to legitimize nomadization

In the context of present-day Europe, the analyses of the mobilities of Roma have focused on their migrations within and beyond Europe. The scholarly lens has been almost exclusively trained on examinations of the governance of Roma mobilities, rather than on how forced or contained mobility itself has been used as a strategy and technology of governing minorities or migrants such as Roma. This latter mechanism is what I have called governing Roma through their ‘nomadization’ (van Baar 2011b, 2014) and this could also be understood along the lines of what, more recently and in the context of illegalized migration, Martina Tazzioli (2020) has called ‘governing mobility through mobility’. This practice includes all sorts of mechanisms that are used to keep people on the move and, as Tazzioli (4) emphasizes, mobilized ‘for decelerating, diverting and troubling their [socio-political] movements.’ In this section, I discuss attempts at governing Roma through mobility in France from the angle of how domestic efforts to ‘nomadize’ them in the post-war period have perfectly matched with post-2004 attempts to govern Roma through mobility and to dispute their citizenship also at the European level. Here, ‘2004ʹ refers both to the year of the EU ‘Eastern’ enlargement, and to the one in which, two days before this entry, the EU adopted its ‘free movement directive’.

Since then, the citizens of these countries have become EU citizens and, thus, they also enjoy rights that are related to EU citizenship, including their right to free movement within and between EU member states. This right is one of the EU’s key principles and driving forces behind the EU project, according to which the mobility of its citizens, and of capital, goods and services, should be fostered. Yet, at the institutionalized nexus of freedom and security articulated in this right, desired forms of the circulation of persons, capital, goods and services – such as those that are associated with business, tourism, student exchanges, and high-skilled migration – are ambiguously distinguished from undesirable forms of circulation that would endanger the proper functioning of the EU’s internal market and its interdependent freedom of movement (Huysmans 2006). Transnational crime, terrorism, and trafficking have been classified among these dangerous forms of circulation, but also ‘irregular’ migration including that of Europe’s poor (New Keywords Collective 2016; van Baar 2018). This distinction between ‘desired’ and ‘unwelcome’ forms of ‘intra-EU’ mobility has been articulated ambiguously, because, through these policy transformations, the EU has brought its approach to migration and social inequality (i.e. poverty and ‘underdevelopment’) together with the combatting of transnational crime, shadow economies, trafficking and terrorism (Huysmans 2006; van Baar 2017). Migration policies have been directly linked with the EU’s reshaped security policies and, thus, with a strong trend to ‘irregularize’ migration – ‘undesirable’ forms of mobility – as a (potentially) destabilizing phenomenon; a tendency that has only become more prominent with the deepening of the so-called ‘migration/refugee crisis’ (New Keywords Collective 2016).

The probably best-known recent problematization of Roma as ‘unwanted’ EU citizens is related to France. In the summer of 2010, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced the deportation of Bulgarian and Romanian Roma from the country, a practice that the European Commission’s Vice-President and Euro-commissioner Viviane Reding (Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship) strongly condemned. In its turn, her condemnation also caused much turmoil, because of her indirect comparison to deportations during the Second World War (van Baar 2011b). This case received much attention in 2010, but remarkable less once the expulsions had been normalized. Moreover, scholarly analyses of the case have focused on the governance of their mobility and the role that both the evictions of ‘Gypsy camps’ – ‘wild Roma camps’ as Sarkozy called them – and the establishment of so-called ‘insertion towns’ (village d’insertion) have played in the French policies towards Roma and the authorities’ attempts to distinguish between the ‘incorporable’ Roma migrants from Central and Eastern Europe on the one hand, and the ‘evictable’ ones, on the other.

Much less attention has been paid to the analysis of their nomadization, their governing through mobility, that has led to keeping them on the move, internally in France and other countries in Europe, but also internationally, in cycles of cross-border migration and in those of repeated expulsion. Here, we deal with cases of contained mobility (van Baar 2015, 2017, 2018) where containment should not be understood in the limited context of spatial segregation – as in the case of the ‘Gypsy camps’ or what Picker calls ‘Gypsy urban areas’ (2017, 2–5) – or in that of temporary detention – as in the cases of the imprisonment of Roma and others that Didier Fassin (2017, 155–56, 200–02) has analyzed – but in the wider sense of ‘spatial restrictions imposed on … migrants that … generate temporal suspension [and that] do not necessarily involve immobility or strandedness; they can also consist in convoluted or repeated movements that migrants are forced to undertake, diverting from their established routes’ (Tazzioli 2020, 8).

As I have argued above and elsewhere (van Baar 2017, 2019), the Roma case illustrates how the boundaries between the categories of ‘citizens’, ‘migrants’, ‘regularity’, and ‘irregularity’ have been considerably blurred, not only in domestic cases but also in the European context. In what follows, I show how the combination of their governing of and their governing through mobility has substantially contributed to producing Roma as irregular national and European citizens. I will first explain how this process of citizenship irregularization has taken place at the domestic French level and then how it has increasingly intersected with similar processes at the European level.

The racialization and irregularization of French domestic Roma – who, since a 1969 law, are officially called gens du voyage or ‘travelling people’ – have a notorious tradition. Two laws of 1990 and 2000, the ‘Besson laws’, are of particular importance, because they have established the framework that considerably determines the French approach to their ‘domestic’ Roma. These laws aim at the ‘protection’ of them and their ‘itinerant lifestyles’, but they do so ambiguously through, on the one hand, demanding from municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants to provide halting sites and services for Roma (regarding education, health care, and access to utilities) and, on the other, not allowing them to stay at any place outside these sites.¹⁰ The so-called ‘security law’ of 2003, introduced by Sarkozy when he was still France’s Minister of the Interior, considerably reinforced this latter, repressive aspect of the Besson laws, because it explicitly considers it a criminal act for Roma to stop on French territory outside designated halting sites. Their presence outside these sites is considered a threat to public peace and security or deemed to threaten public health. With the ratification of Sarkozy’s law, eviction is allowed, even from private land owned by Roma, on the grounds of threatening public health, security or peace (ERRC 2005, 95–98).

The main problems have emerged due to the fact that many municipalities – in 2010 half of them countrywide (Cour des comptes 2012) – have never done anything to construct the halting facilities for gens du voyage that they are required to provide according to the Besson laws. The fact that numerous municipalities violate the law or, at least until 2007, repeatedly took profit from officially sanctioned delays of the deadlines by which the sites had to be completed, has resulted in a situation in which many French Roma could not and still cannot live or stop on an authorized site, because there are not enough sites where they can stay and due to the refusal to construct them. Paradoxically, however, French authorities including municipalities that do not fulfill the requirements of the Besson laws, have simultaneously turned to Sarkozy’s security law to evict Roma, destroy, seize or confiscate their property, fine them, take away their driving licenses, or imprison them, usually claiming that they threatened public order, health and security (ERRC 2005, 2013). Consequently, the ways in which consecutive French governments, from Chirac’s to Macron’s, have approached their Roma minority have actively contributed to the production of the conditions of evictability and, thus, disputed their citizenship through combining the governance of their mobility with their governance through mobility.

This argument can be extended to how non-French EU citizens with a Roma background have been irregularized in France, and not only because they have migrated in the situation of the persistent production of the conditions of evictability just discussed. It is important to remark that, when Sarkozy made his ‘successful’ securitizing moves in 2010, practices of eviction and deportation, including the more fundamental production of the conditions of evictability, had already been steadfastly established as basic ingredients of police work. At least since the entry of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU in 2007, EU citizens from these countries, and Roma particularly, have been faced with dubious police practices. During his 15 months of fieldwork among French anticrime squads, Fassin (2013, 64–68, 157–63) observed that Roma from abroad, like North Africans, were overrepresented among those who were stopped and searched and verbally and sometimes also physically harassed by the police, even while, in the majority of cases, no offenses against Roma were reported. In accordance with Fassin’s findings, the Romanian Ministry of the Interior reported that many of the Romanian Roma who were deported from France had no criminal record (Bărbulescu 2012, 289).

On top of this, in a 2008 report of the European Commission that assessed the EU member states’ transposition of the free movement directive, the Commission concluded that France is in violation of EU law over the procedural safeguards of the directive (Carrera and Atger 2010). The Commission mentioned that ‘in cases of absolute urgency, no procedural safeguards apply in France. The EU citizen receives no written notification of the expulsion decision, is not informed of the grounds on which the decision was taken and has no right of appeal before the decision is enforced’ (European Commission 2008). The situation would not improve thereafter. In August 2010, it was discovered that, despite Sarkozy’s repeated insistence that his self-declared war on crime and illegal migration was not stigmatizing Roma or explicitly targeting them on the basis of their ethnic background, the French Ministry of the Interior had issued a ‘secret’ memo for its police personnel with clear instructions to prioritize Roma as the target group of the repressive measures (Carrera and Atger 2010). Also, in October 2010, Le Monde revealed that, for many years, the French gendarmerie had created ethnic profiles of Roma and compiled databases illegally (van Baar 2014, 37–40). Particularly in this light, the reversed depiction of the state of affairs by Jacques Myard, a member of former French President Sarkozy’s party UMP, was remarkable. In August 2010, he stated that the so-called ‘European Roma problem’ was caused by how Roma interpreted the right to travel freely. Their ‘excessive mobility’ and ‘medieval lifestyle’ would cause security problems and, he suggested, should lead to reconsider seriously the free movement directive (see van Baar 2011b, 206–07). Thus, rather than France violating the EU directive and, therefore, causing problems to the Roma involved, reversely, the practices of Roma would be problematic and require the directive’s revision. This qualification fits what I have called ‘reasonable antigypsyism’ (van Baar 2014), that is a form and practice of anti-Roma racism in which the roles of the perpetrators and victims are reversed and unorthodox measures against Roma are presented as ‘reasonable’ and ‘legitimate’ on the basis of this racial reversal.

Once more, but now in the transnational dimension of ‘intra-EU’ mobility, we have thus been able to notice a highly ambiguous relationship between the law, the production of illegality as well as the conditions of evictability, and the governing through mobility implied in the feared, announced or actual evictions and deportations of now non-French EU citizens, primarily Romanian Roma. The securitization of Roma and the integral moments of spectacular law and/or border enforcement one-sidedly politicize and visibilize both domestic and migrant Roma as ‘illegals’ and ‘criminals’ and, by so doing, racially produces them as irregular EU citizens (van Baar n.d., see also van Baar, Ivasiuc, and Kreide 2019). The media and security spectacles that have coincided with bold manifestations of law enforcement work ‘its magic trick of displacing “illegality” from its point of production … in the law … to the proverbial “scene of the crime”’ (De Genova 2011, 103, emphasis added), that is, in these case studies, to the illegalized halting sites and to what Sarkozy qualified as ‘wild Roma camps’. As in the French ‘domestic’ case, we can conclude that the purported ‘illegality’ of non-French Roma with EU citizenship has been displaced from its point of production in the law – both through the inadequate transposition of EU law in domestic French law, and through the disputable ways in which the EU directive differentiates between ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ practices of mobility – to the ‘wild Roma camps’ represented as incorrigible, natural crime scenes that legitimate permanent evictions and keeping the racialized camp inhabitants on the move.

Conclusion

In the majority of analyses of how vulnerable mobile populations – from several kinds of migrants to minorities with allegedly ‘nomadic’ backgrounds such as Roma, Gypsies and Travellers – have been dealt with at the mobility-security nexus, the focus is on how governing mechanisms such as displacement, deportation and containment have led to the government of their mobilities, mostly through containing them in (refugee, ‘Gypsy’) camps or (detention, transit, etc.) centers or through displacing them from one place to the other. However, I have shown that mobility, and the governing through mobility particularly, should be added to the usually analyzed segregating mechanisms, to those of displacement and containment particularly. Moreover, my focus on the mobility of EU citizens has shown that, through governing through their mobility, their citizenship has been disputed to such an extent that the boundaries between the categories of ‘citizens’, ‘migrants’, and ‘refugees’ are radically blurred. Challenging the idea that governing through mobility merely affects migrants (Tazzioli 2020), I have argued that even EU citizens who are not (necessary) involved in migration can become the target of mobile governmentalities and, as a result, racialized at the security-mobility nexus.

Additionally, a scholarly focus on relatively fixed sites such as towns or cities alone would exclude more mobile governmentalities and counter-governmentalities from our examinations, whereas they are of critical importance to understand both contemporary practices of (differential) exclusion and historical continuities and discontinuities in how mobilities of racialized and minoritized groups have been governed. I have demonstrated that the more fixed kinds of governmentalities that can be connected with analyses of biopolitics considerably interact with mobile governmentalities that are linked with viapolitics and nomadization, understood as ways to governing minorities such as Roma, Gypsies and Travellers through mobility, as a way to keep them ‘securely’ on the move or to try controlling their means or tactics of mobility.

If, in the tradition of Stuart Hall (2017, see also Lentin 2020), we formulate race as a technology of the management of human difference that aims at the production, maintenance or even reinforcement of power relations that articulate such human difference hierarchically, we can understand viapolitics, just as biopolitics, as a specific governmental technology that can significantly contribute to the articulation of racial and social difference. Therefore, in line with those who have underlined the importance of viapolitics as a prominent governing technology at the nexus of security and mobility (Tazzioli 2020; Walters 2015a, 2015b; Walters, Heller, and Pezzani forthcoming), my examination contributes to the debate about how we could understand mobile governmentalities in historical and contemporary practices of racism and those of the production of insecurities.

A final caveat is in order here: the ways in which I have investigated viapolitics primarily relate to how authorities have tried to govern Roma mobilities, and less to how Roma themselves have been involved in their own government. Yet, historically the former kinds of viapolitics have always coincided with manifestations of counter-conducts in which Roma have demonstrated that they do not want to be governed ‘this way’. Throughout history and up till now, Roma have frequently routed and rerouted their trajectories and journeys to circumvent or challenge particularly harsh governmental interventions or measures in order to create opportunities for the alternative ways they want to live their lives and, without romanticizing them, they have also done so more or less successfully in many cases (see, e.g., Le Bas 2018; Legros and Lièvre 2019).

Acknowledgments

I thank the organizers of and participants in the conference Trajectories of Romani Migrations and Mobilities in Europe and Beyond (1945 – Present) [held 16-18 September 2019 at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic] - particularly Ari Joskowicz and Yasar Abu Ghosh - the anonymous reviewers and Mobilities’ coeditor Peter Adey for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

I report no potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this article is based was supported by funding of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through grant SFB/TRR138.

Notes

1. Foucault discussed the relevance of political technologies in several of his works, most notably in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1995) and in his work on governmentality (Foucault 2007). I have extensively discussed (van Baar 2011a) how we could analyze the situation and history of Roma in Europe from the perspective of governmentality and, more specifically, from that of intersecting rationalities, technologies and strategies of government and how these have historically been mobilized to problematize Roma.

2. I put the terms ‘sedentarize’, ‘protection’, ‘their way of life’, and ‘nomadism’ in inverted commas because, as I show throughout this paper, these terms have become very delicate, politicized terms.

3. Although, in their paper, they reserve this description for how Italian authorities dealt with Roma in Italy, the paper’s more general argument clarifies that they consider this qualification relevant in a more general sense of what happened in post-war Western Europe.

4. Walters (2015a, 2015b) discusses various notable exceptions.

5. All English quotations of van Ooijen are my translations.

6. While van Ooijen (1993, 199-200) denies that the reference to descent represents racism, Cottaar (1998) does mention the relevance of this reliance on descent for the ‘making of a minority’, but fails to qualify it in terms of racism, something that apparently relates to the reluctance of the ‘Dutch School’ (Willems, Lucassen, Cottaar) to formulate stigmatization in terms of intersecting racializing processes, and minority self-articulation in those of ethnicization (for an discussion of this debate, see van Baar 2011a: Ch. 3, 4).

7. These people were not considered ‘problematic’, because municipalities usually found ways to grant them temporary permission to stay on a site related to their professions.

8. Such a moment occurred in the 1970s, when Koko Petalo (1942–96), an influential and controversial Roma leader in the Netherlands, occupied public spaces with caravans to claim amnesty for Yugoslav Roma. In the course of the 1970s, he occupied, for instance, a space next to the Royal Palace in Soestdijk, the front court of the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, and Dam Square in Amsterdam to create public attention for and indignation about how Yugoslav Roma were repeatedly forced to leave the country until, finally, in 1977–78, the Dutch government would grant amnesty and Dutch citizenship to most of these Roma (cf. Willems and Lucassen 1990; Rijken 2012).

9. In 2017, due to continuous protests of the Dutch Association for Woonwagenbewoners, Sinti and Roma, a court case against Dutch municipalities that still practiced extinction policy was won in favor of the involved Roma.

10. In this sense, their situation resembled the one in the Netherlands, after the post-war establishment of regional camps (see above).