Developing into equal citizens? Historical re-creation of Roma as an underdeveloped minority.

• Author: Sardelic, Julija

Introduction

While the Member States of the European Union have been ranked as having a high human development index (UNDP 2019), the E.U.'s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) reported that the E.U.'s largest minority, Roma "face life like people in the world's poorer countries' (FRA 2018). The predicament of Roma as the most socio-economic disadvantaged and ethnically discriminated minority in Europe has thrown a dark shadow on the rich liberal democratic states. The poverty that most Romani minorities experience is not limited only to Eastern Europe but extends across the European Union (Vermeersch 2012, Ram 2013). Many studies have argued that extreme poverty, described as "[p]oor sanitation, hunger and youth unemployment" (FRA 2018), is linked to the discrimination Roma face as a minority group. The question, however, remains how was this connection formed historically. In this paper, I argue that local histories show that the representation of Roma as a poor social group was connected to the perception of Roma as an 'underdeveloped minority' who cannot have rights equal to other citizens in their countries precisely because of their own perceived underdevelopment.

To examine this argument, I scrutinize the historical development of minority rights for Roma in today's Slovenia and Croatia. While both countries are now Member States of the E.U., they have historically been a part of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) after the Second World War (WWII) and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War (WWI). Officially, according to the Council of Europe's data, Roma constitute a small minority in both countries: 0.42 per cent in Slovenia and up to 1 per cent in Croatia (E.U. n.d.). While there has been a certain recognition of Roma as an ethnic minority in Slovenia and Croatia even when they were a part of Yugoslavia, the discourse on Roma historically framed them more as the most disadvantaged socio-economic group, the poorest part of the population (Sardelic 2016).

To elaborate on this, I offer a socio-legal analysis of how both the first and second Yugoslavia established the ethnic hierarchy of minority rights, which later continued in Slovenia and Croatia as a hierarchy in citizenship rights when both countries became Member States of the European Union. This hierarchy has been based on developmental logic, which took for granted that some minorities need to overcome their own underdevelopment before becoming equal citizens. The fact that countries' representatives sought the source of poverty in what they have perceived as an underdeveloped Romani culture rather than their own discriminatory policies indicated methodological whiteness (Bhambra 2017a) in the policy and legislation making in these countries.

According to Gurminder Bhambra, methodological whiteness...

'is a way of reflecting on the world that fails to acknowledge the role played by race in the very structuring of that world, and of how knowledge is constructed and legitimated within it. It fails to recognise the dominance of 'whiteness' as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective--that deriving from white experience--as a universal perspective. At the same time, it treats other perspectives as forms of identity politics explicable within its own universal (but parochial and lesser than its own supposedly universal) understandings' (Bhambra 2017a).

Bhambra applied methodological whiteness to the analysis of the scholarly perspective (as well as popular beliefs) that the disenfranchised white working class has formed the main support body of Donald Trump as 2016 U.S. presidential candidate and the U.K.'s movement to leave the E.U. (Bhambra 2017b). As Bhambra showed, this view has driven the debate away from the hidden racism as the underlying principle of these two events in 2016.

Similarly, through adopting a socio-legal analysis, I aim to reveal how policy makers and legislators who formulated different citizenship regimes in Slovenia and Croatia (Shaw and Stiks 2010) applied methodological whiteness to the position of Roma as citizens. While in recent times there has been an increase in racist outcries again Roma in Europe (Fekete 2014, Sardelic and McGarry 2017), the antigypsyism and Romaphobia have far longer histories and have been embedded within the societies' structures (Sardelic 2014, McGarry 2017). While most countries do not have directly racist laws, the systemic racism based on the perception of cultural/ethnic difference created a hierarchy that persists in the case of Roma (Sardelic, 2014). The critical whiteness perspective has been previously applied while scrutinising the position of non-Romani researchers who take Roma as the subject of their research (Vajda 2015). However, the question I ask here is what the position of Roma in Slovenia and Croatia signifies about the access to certain fundamental rights that all citizens should have in their countries. In other words, I am not taking Roma as the object of my research but rather the policies and legislation that frame their position as citizens (Sardelic 2021). My research aims to understand the legitimization that state representatives use to explain why Roma in their countries are marginalized despite having a status of a traditional minority and certain protected multicultural rights. I aim to show the role that methodological whiteness plays in the development of minority policies. I especially focus on the devolpement of such minority policies when it comes to Roma as citizens of Slovenia/Croatia and in particular, when Roma themselves demand equal access to social rights, such as the right to education and clean drinking water as the other the majority citizens have it.

Historical (non-)development of minority rights for Roma

While a great number of countries today recognize Roma's need for minority protection due to their disadvantaged position, Roma have been, throughout the 20th century, mostly invisible as a cultural minority (Sardelic 2021). It is only a development in the last half of the century (particularly from 1971) when Roma started to be considered more widely as an ethnic minority rather than a poor itinerant social group (Simhandl 2009).

After WWI, when multinational empires disintegrated, the newly established states legitimized the new borders with the aspiration to protect minority rights. The League of Nations supported this process through the so-called Minority Treaties at the end of WWI, also with a belief that defending minority rights would prevent destabilizing territorial conflicts and act as a 'bargaining chip' in international relations (Jackson Preece 1997, Spanu 2019). Maja Spanu showed that the underlying idea of Minority Treaties was that all citizens, regardless of belonging to a minority within a majority community group, would have the same citizenship rights. Nominally, the Minority Treaties strived to achieve equality among citizens: 'The treaties also stated that all those having the same nationality should be equally treated by the state authorities and granted the same guarantees of protection as well as political and civic rights' (Spanu 2019: 250).

The League of Nations primarily applied the Minority Treaties to Central and Eastern Europe. It is reasonable to ask why Western Europe was not under the same scrutiny.

'The answer to this question reflects the same combination of balance-of-power calculations and Western prejudice against East-Central European regimes which underlay the Treaty of Berlin minority stipulations: minority safeguards were deemed unnecessary for politically mature Western European states who could be relied upon to fulfil 'the standard of civilization' (Jackson Preece 1997: 82).

As Hannah Arendt argued in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/1968), the minorities which did not have a state to back them up after WWI ended up as partially stateless. While Jews have actively advocated for their rights to be recognized (Fink 2006), Roma have not been a part of these conversations. The 1921 Treaty of Saint-Germain offered a new framework for minorities-majority relations in the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes (shorly known as SHS, later named the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and have recognized Austrians, Bulgarians, Muslims and Hungarians as minorities (Spanu 2019: 251). However, several other minorities remained unrecognized despite being mentioned as ethnic groups in the 1921 Yugoslav population census. In this census, 34,919 Roma listed Romani language as their mother tongue, which was used as a proxy for ethnicity in the census (Crowe 2007: 213).

Roma have remained to a large extent invisible as citizens also after WWII despite the fact that they have also been victims of the holocaust, which Arendt mentions in her other work (Arendt 1963). While the League of Nations' approach towards minority rights has been abandoned and replaced (as has the League of Nations itself) with the United Nations' universal human rights approach after WWII, some reminiscent of the past Minority Treaties have been continuing in the post-WWII arrangements (Spanu 2019).

Minority Treaties established certain ethnic hierarchies that continued...