Transnational Romani and Indigenous Non-territorial Self-determination Claims

Abstract

Taking the indigenous and Romani transnational movements as examples, this paper concerns the self-determination claims of dispersed ethno-national communities that cannot and/or do not wish to possess a territorial nation state or other territorial political unit yet desire popular sovereignty, self-government, autonomy and participation. I argue that the Romani and indigenous predicament lies largely in the fact that the prevailing international practice of self-determination through territorial statehood or territorial autonomy is not suited for communities living on territories of various states and/or in mixed residential areas and, as such, it keeps a significant percentage of the world's population politically subordinated. This political subordination is indeed sanctioned by contemporary liberal theory and we thus need to look at some alternative political traditions that could be explored in our search for a more inclusive self-determination and fairer international system based on the vested collective rights of ethno-national communities. I suggest that some variation of the Renner–Bauer non-territorial cultural autonomy model, worked out through agonistic negotiations at discursive international fora, might be able to combine the need for both justice and the stability of the world order.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Ephraim Nimni for a number of inspiring discussions on the topic of this paper and for his comments on earlier drafts. Many thanks also to Morag Goodwin, Jarmila Lajcakova, the anonymous referee and the workshop participants for their comments and to Duncan Alexander for language corrections.

Notes

1. And many others: more than fifty ‘nations without states’, whose goal is not always the establishment of a territorial state, are associated with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (see http://www.unpo.org/).

2. Here I use the term ethno-national communities to refer to ethnic communities that possess or desire sovereignty and/or nationhood.

3. Talking about Indigenous or Romani claims of course entails gross generalisations, as both the Romani and Indigenous peoples comprise of very diverse groups. In addition, both Romani and Indigenous leaders face serious problems with legitimacy when claiming representation beyond the local level (see e.g. PER 2003, Klímová 2000 and Dyck 1985). It is beyond the scope of this paper to address these issues here. The reader should bear in mind that the claims presented here are those that have received most attention at the international level, regardless of the actual extent of support for these claims in the local communities.

4. Not even those who have long been settled and who are indeed in majority.

5. For more details on the relationship of Indigenous peoples to land see e.g. Wilmer 1993: 116–117.

6. And perhaps in other aspects, which are, however, not pertinent to this paper.

7. An encapsulated nation can be defined as a private, distinct group that has maintained its own traditions and laws and that exists as a cultural and legal entity distinct from the nation-state that it is geographically part of (Banach 2002: 356–357).

8. Some of these letters guaranteed an internal and sometimes even exclusive jurisdiction of the Romani Duke or Count over his people; however, their authenticity remains disputed (see Fraser 1992: 67–80).

9. On the individual level, this of course is often not true. Here I am referring to the discourse promoted by the respective movements.

10. This is not to deny that many Romani and Indigenous peoples (from mixed marriages or otherwise) feel a strong attachment to the majorities' cultures or identities. In my opinion, it is the right of every individual to choose one or more national belongings, and the fact that some opt for multiple national affiliations does not invalidate my claim to the distinctiveness of Indigenous and Romani cultures in the widest sense of the word. This individual need for multiple national belonging needs to be taken into account by any model of national autonomy. While this is not the case with the original Renner-Bauer NCA, I believe non-territorial autonomy arrangements could and should accommodate multiple national affiliations.

11. This claim, where sustained, could actually warrant inclusion of Romani groups in the category of Indigenous peoples, at least according to the definition in the ILO 169 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of 1989 which states that peoples can be regarded as indigenous “on account of their descent from the populations who inhibited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries” [emphasis added] (Convention (No. 169) concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, Adopted on 27 June 1989 by the General Conference of the International Labour Organisation at its seventy-sixth session, (Internet), available http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/62.htm).

12. The Human Rights Council adopted the Declaration on 29 June 2006 and recommended that it should be adopted by the General Assembly during its 2006 session. However, on 28 November 2006, the General Assembly's Third Committee passed a motion to defer the adoption decision until September 2007 (DPI 2006).

13. As in colonized peoples, populations of independent states, and once sovereign or entitled to be sovereign populations.

14. The original text reads:

• Indigenous peoples have the right to participate fully, if they so choose, at all levels of decision-making in matters which may affect their rights, lives and destinies through representatives chosen by themselves in accordance with their own procedures, as well as to maintain and develop their own indigenous decision-making institutions. (UN Doc. E/CN.4/2006/79)

The adopted text reads:

• Indigenous peoples have the right to participate in decision-making in matters which would affect their rights, through representatives chosen by themselves in accordance with their own procedures, as well as to maintain and develop their own indigenous decision-making institutions.

15. For information about the Romani movement in general see e.g. Klímová 2003: Chapter 2.

16. Yet there were exceptions. For example, already in 1967 the Gypsy Council of England sent a memorandum to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government which, besides local demands, also called for recognition by national governments and the UN of “Gypsies' right to self-determination” (Acton 1974: 162–170).

17. Although each supported a different concept for recognition.

18. The others were an initiative of the Finnish President Tarja Halonen to establish a pan-European consultative assembly for Roma (first announced in 2001), the 1557 Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly Recommendation on the ‘Legal Situation of the Roma in Europe’ that endorses ‘a European Roma Forum’ (2002), the RNC's European Charter of Romani Rights (debated in international fora since 1990), and the experience of Romani minority self-government and the ‘cultural autonomy’ providing Roma in Hungary with collective rights (PER 2003: 1 and 4).

19. The closest it came to it was at the WCAR. The documents prepared at two of the networking NGO meetings sponsored by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) – in Warsaw in 2000 and Quito in 2001 – contained references to Romani nationhood and self-determination. The Warsaw meeting Statement recommended that Roma be recognised as a non-territorial nation by the UN and that Romani representatives obtain a seat in the UN and participate as elected officials in the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and in the constitutive organs of these organizations (ERRC 2000). The Quito Declaration, inspired heavily by Indigenous activism, called for, among other things, acknowledging the right of self-determination of Roma, setting up a UN Permanent Forum on Roma, UN proclamation of 8 April as the International Day of the Roma and adoption of a UN Convention on the Roma (Klímová 2003: §8.2.3, see also the Appendix in this source for excerpts from these documents). Despite being “roundly mocked” by the civil society at the NGO Forum in Durban, the reference to the right of ‘the Romani nation’ to be recognised as a non-territorial nation by all relevant actors, including the UN, and treated on “equal footing with other nations of the world”, as well as the confirmation that the right of self-determination also belongs to Roma, survived the negotiations and was incorporated in the NGO Declaration presented to the governmental forum with the expectation at the end of the conference that the NGO provisions relating to Roma were to be adopted by government delegates without alteration. Yet eventually the Romani request for non-territorial nation status is not to be found in the final government declaration (Goodwin 2006: 62 and 250, Klímová 2003: §8.4.2).

20. It states that the MFA “does not see the request for the general recognition of the Roma nation as set by the 5th IRU World Congress as a problem of principal nature,” backing its view by referring to the Policy Concept of the Government of the Czech Republic towards persons belonging to the Romani community which respects “the view that the Roma minority in the Czech Republic forms a part of the Roma nation living in Europe” (Memorandum 2001, for full text see Document 2 in Klímová 2003: Appendix).

21. This view is supported, for example, by political scientist Martin Kovats, who argues that the claim is nothing but “the promotion of an authoritarian nationalist tradition in which a political community is constructed through the manipulation of vulnerable people, to secure the interests of an unaccountable elite” (Kovats 2003: 4). I have challenged it in Klímova-Alexander 2005b.

22. Although its text was not publicly read during the congress and the President only issued it after the congress (see Acton and Klimova 2001).

23. Indeed, already in 1998 Pietrosanti presented to the Commission a number of ideas that were later embedded in the Declaration (Klímová-Alexander 2005a: 124).

24. Goodwin points out that Pietrosanti's most recent statement is purely European in its reach, pushing for an acknowledgement of the Roma as ‘The first Europeans to be only Europeans,’ and interprets this as an attempt, on behalf of the IRU, to respond to the above-mentioned Halonen initiative for a pan-European consultative assembly for Roma (2006: 55, footnote 137). However, Pietrosanti was already making similar statements in the press immediately after the 5^th congress and before the start of the Halonen initiative. Nevertheless, to a certain extent Goodwin is right because, while prior to the Halonen initiative such statements appeared mostly in personal statements by Pietrosanti, since its announcement they have dominated official IRU releases and made the connection to the initiative (see e.g. IRU 2002).

25. The EU and Council of Europe have also dealt with Romani issues prior to the 1990s, but only on a very limited scale (Kovats 2001: 94–95).

26. For more on the attitude of European institutions to self-determination and autonomy see e.g. Wolff and Weller 2005.

27. Note that the Council of Europe already has an advisory group on Romani issues – the Expert group. However, this body has never been looked upon very favorably by Romani activists lobbying for the ERTF, and that is why a proposal to transform this group into an advisory body with the status of an ad hoc committee according to the model of the UN Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues has been dismissed (IOM 2004).

28. Although how much autonomy can really be achieved with funds provided by another entity with vested interests? Not surprisingly, signing of the Partnership Agreement which commits Council of Europe funding is conditional upon the ERTF complying with the Council of Europe's basic principles and general policy guidelines (ERTF and Council of Europe 2004). One aspect in which Romani activists had to give in to the Council of Europe's requirements is that the Forum is intended not only for Roma (in this case meaning various Romani communities) but also for Travellers (as reflected in its name), whom many Romani activists have been wishing to exclude (for details about the Romani vs Traveller debates see e.g. IOM 2004, Klímová 2003: §8.4.2).

29. In this sense, its autonomy is similarly insignificant as that achieved by Romani (and other) NGOs within the framework of Russian national cultural autonomies (for details of this argument see Klímová-Alexander 2005b: 131).

30. With the crucial difference that, unlike the IRU, the ERTF has secure funding (or at least a part of it) for at least the initial period of its functioning and the Council of Europe is eager to include it in its work, although the wording of the agreement is cautious to make any commitment by using the phrase the Council of Europe “may have recourse to the expertise of the Forum with a view to integrating considerations pertaining to the situation of Roma and Travellers in Europe in its decision-making process” (ERTF and Council of Europe 2004: §1.4) [my emphasis].

31. Lack of financial and human resources has been one of the main problems that prevented other international Romani NGOs like the IRU from proper functioning, including having a properly elected worldwide representation (see Klímová-Alexander 2005a: 17-18 for the description of the IRU's increasing attempts at professionalization and towards more elaborate democratic procedures). Note that the IRU, unlike the ERTF, actually aimed (although not that successfully) at worldwide, not just European, representation. During the initial discussions, plans were made for representation in the ERTF from other parts of the world (Klímová 2002) but have not been included in the Statutes (Roma and Travellers Drafting Group 2004).

32. See footnote 2.

33. See the Forum's website http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/index.html.

34. Although Keating and others argue that a common identity can only be sufficiently strong to desire nation status if “the group has a territorial base with which to sustain its ‘national’ difference” (Goodwin 2006: 160), the Romani case might yet prove this wrong.

35. It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve further into the possibilities of applying the NCA model to Romani and Indigenous communities. I have addressed this issue to a certain extent elsewhere (see Klímová-Alexander 2005b). For attempts of other authors to do so, see e.g. Semb 2005 and Lajcakova 2007.

36. For criticism levied against it, as well as arguments refuting some of the criticism and suggesting alterations where needed, see Nimni 2005a.