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Abstract
This article reflects on the tensions and anomalies of European citizenship from the perspective of European Union (EU)-citizen Roma, people who have an ambiguous positioning within the EU space because they are both European citizens, but also located as ‘in but not of the EU space.’ On the basis of events, discourses and negotiations surrounding the displacement of EU-citizen Roma in Berlin in 2009, this article explores how the borders of European citizenship are policed. The paper examines how the flattening of the inner EU political space is achieved through a set of semantic tactics, as well as extra-legal means, and how the desire of EU-citizen Roma to become asylum seekers becomes an act of citizenship constituting them as claimants of rights beyond their legal status and thus a threat to the social and political space of the EU. The article draws attention to the mutual constitution of sites and acts of citizenship.
Notes
1. This article is based on the research conducted within a FP7 project ENACT, Enacting European Citizenship (FP7-SSH-2007-1-217504). I thank Sebastian Mehling for the excellent fieldwork and the interviews conducted for the project. Parts of this article draw on the reports written within this project and on Çağlar and Mehling (Citation2012) and Çağlar (Citation2015). Our project initially concentrated mainly on TCNs and their ambiguous positioning within the EU political and social space together with their acts of citizenship. It did not include the challenges to European citizenship from within. However, during our fieldwork the contestations between the EU-citizen Roma in Berlin started to unfold and thus we included these legal, social, and political confrontations into the project. We were able to collect fieldwork material on these events starting from the very first days of Roma displacement within the city. The empirical research for this article is based on the excellent fieldwork and data collected by Sebastian Mehling, which included participant observation in several places the EU-citizen Roma were placed and displaced within the city; on the discussions and negotiations in these places with a variety of institutional and non-institutional, state and non-state actors; interviews and informal conversations with many actors (ranging from the activists to representations of political parties, organizations, NGOs, and the translators). Additionally, debates in print and digital media are used as part of the data.
2. For the analysis of the citizenship acts of TCNs see Çağlar and Mehling (Citation2012) and two reports within the framework of the ENACT project (ENACT Citation2009a, Citation2009b).
3. The mobility of increasing numbers of EU-citizen Roma to France in 2010 summer also initiated heated debates and controversies very similar to the issues raised in 2009 summer in Berlin. However, in the former case, the debates were more at EU level and received more international (media) attention.
4. Again there were rumors about the nature of the signed document and whether or not it would ban the re-entry to Germany in the coming five years.
5. The Roundtable meeting in Sankt-Marien Kirche on 28 May 2009 is a good example of the spectrum of the actors involved in searching for solutions to the ‘crisis.’
6. This is by no means to argue that these sites were not political before. Some of them were, but during the process of the constitution of the acts, these sites acquired different connotations, were transformed and became political in different ways.
7. For example, see the Minister of interior’s explanations on this (May 2009).
8. It came out that a year ago, the Romanian embassy and the communal authorities had a meeting about the ways to put pressure on the Roma who could not be legally expelled from Germany. One of the models worked out there was putting pressure on the Roma by taking their children away and blackmailing them to go back to Romania in this way (see Interview at the NewYorck , 24 June 2009).