‘Civilising’ the Roma? The depoliticisation of (anti-)racism within the politics of integration

Abstract

This essay questions the enduring difficulties of addressing racism within the current politics of integration in Europe, with a specific focus on the Portuguese context. The analysis centres on integration initiatives to promote employability among the Portuguese Roma and the ways in which they are rationalised by employment gatekeepers and decision-makers. This rationalisation depoliticises racism by constantly shifting the focus to the presumed characteristics of the ‘other’, re-enacting white-privileged notions of nationhood, Portugueseness and Europeanness. Accordingly, projects based on ‘activation of social competences’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘interculturality’ are implemented as a civilising and disciplinary programme aimed at correcting the presumed deficiencies in ethnically marked populations. The analysis aims to contribute towards a much needed debate on the notion of integration and the re-articulation of the historical legacies of racism in contemporary European democracies.

Keywords:

• anti-racism
• depoliticisation
• institutional racism
• integration policies
• Portugal
• Roma

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Marta Araújo for her critical observations on earlier versions of this manuscript. I am grateful to Olivier Guiot for his assistance during fieldwork.

Notes

1. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 244,633. The collaborative research project: The semantics of tolerance and (anti-)racism in Europe: public bodies and civil society in comparative perspective (TOLERACE) was carried out between March 2010 and February 2013. More information available at: http://www.ces.uc.pt/projectos/tolerace

2. A series of other terms are also used within employment policies, such as inclusion, insertion or access. I use the term integration to refer to the wider Portuguese and EU political framework regarding these issues.

3. Most of the current official texts within Europe, such as treaties, recommendations and resolutions, have adopted the term Roma. However, in Portugal, the official designation is Portuguese of Gypsy ethnicity (Portugueses de etnia cigana), although the term Roma is often used in international documents. Portuguese Gypsies are the target beneficiaries of the initiatives considered in this essay.

4. Official European agencies and NGOs generally use the term ‘anti-Gypsyism’, defined as a recurrent, violent form of racism against the Roma, deeply rooted in European history, and evident in direct and indirect forms of discrimination in all spheres of life, such as education, employment, housing and healthcare.

5. These policy schemes were not exclusively designed for the Roma, but the specific projects analysed targeted Portuguese Roma families. For a critical view of project-based funding see Vermeersch (2013).

6. The Portuguese Constitution of 1822 and the Constitutional Charter of 1826 conferred Portuguese citizenship on the Roma born in Portuguese territory.

7. There is no official data on the number of Roma in Portugal; it is estimated to be between 40,000 and 60,000 (Resolution of the Council of Ministers 2013, 2213). Research published with the data available in the 1990s indicates their economic marginalisation, low housing standards and high incarceration rates (Bastos 2007).

8. Most interviews – which were semi-structured – were conducted by two researchers.

9. http://www.ec.europa.eu/employment_social/equal_consolidated/ (accessed 4 August 2011).

10. https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/equal/jsp/dpComplete.jsp?cip=PT&national=2004-003 (accessed 4 August 2011).

11. This project was planned as a short-term housing solution for ‘families with cultural, ethnic or social characteristics who, due to their living conditions, could not find traditional accommodation’.

12. On institutional practitioner discourses that pathologise the Roma in the Portuguese context, see Bastos, Correia, and Rodrigues (2007, 188–189)

13. This programme is run on a small farm dedicated to biological agriculture and livestock, which also has recreational areas (e.g. a football pitch).

14. The ‘cultural deficit’ model can be traced back to nineteenth century Social Darwinism and discourses on education and the working class. See Orlowski (2011).

15. This deficit model can also be found in recent literature addressing institutional racism – in a central or tangential way – and the situation of the Roma in Europe, see Phillips (2011); Goodwin (2009).

16. Vermeersch links this discourse to the ‘Europeanisation’ of the problem-framing regarding the situation of the Roma and related policies (2012, 1203–1208).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Silvia Rodríguez Maeso

SILVIA RODRÍGUEZ MAESO is a Senior Researcher in the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra