Roma are always the last to count, but we won first prize. We would not settle for second or third place.
—Maria, Roma dancer, interview with the author, 2009
I’ve worked hard. When you look at me, you can see that I’ve succeeded through my voice, not my looks.
—Viorica, Roma singer, Romanian reality TV show Clejanii, December 2012
Moderator: Why is there tension between Roma and Romanians?
Roma activist: First of all, you should not use these terms; you should speak of Roma and non-Roma, as all Roma [in Romania] are Romanian citizens.
—Talk show on Romanian national TV channel Realitatea, December 2007
According to Maria, dance was the only avenue of success available to her as a Romni.1 High rents and unemployment had driven Maria and her family to Pod,2 a settlement where people squatted in improvised lodgings and collected recyclables from a nearby refuse site. Living in difficult conditions, without infrastructure or medical facilities and far away from schools, Roma in Pod could be mistaken for refugees in a camp, even though they were citizens of Romania. Local media looked down on Roma from Pod and often described them as poor, dirty and lazy. A far cry from such stereotypes, thirty-five-year-old Maria – always impeccably dressed in modern clothing – lived with her family in a wooden house, one of several wooden and brick houses that some residents had managed to build in Pod with the money they made from scavenging on the refuse site. She had been a member of a Roma dance group that was formed and active during the first post-socialist decade; she showed me her dance costumes, which included long, colourful skirts, scarves decorated with coins, and high-heeled shoes. Sitting in her spotlessly clean living room, Maria, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, proudly reminisced about her dance group’s success in competitions: ‘When they heard that we were coming, they were surprised, and the last ones to come ended up winning first prize. Roma are always the last to count, but we won first prize. We would not settle for second or third place.’ She told me that even though sometimes they were looked at with suspicion because they were Roma, their performances always earned them praise.
At the opposite end of the social spectrum, Viorica, a famous Roma singer from the band Taraful din Clejani, explains that her successful musical career is the result of hard work, not looks. With her musician partner and two children, Viorica featured on Clejanii, a reality show on Romanian television portraying their daily life. The quotation in the epigraph is from the third episode, in which she and her daughter Margherita pay a visit to a designer. When the designer offers Margherita a modelling job (a way for the designer to gain publicity through the reality show) and asks her to lose a little weight for the purpose, Viorica – blonde, slightly overweight and in her late thirties – tells her daughter: ‘Yes, make sure you do not end up like me. Once you’ve gained weight, it’s hard to lose it.’ Then she turns to the camera: ‘Thank God I did not make my living that way. I succeeded through hard work, through my voice.’ Viorica expresses her relief at being successful because of her musical abilities when most female artists in Romania are evaluated for their image and appeal as sex objects. She is one of very few female Roma musicians to have enjoyed success in a field where Roma men reign. And yet, despite their success and prosperity, famous Roma musicians such as Viorica are not considered part of the nation in Romania; indeed the reality show trod a fine line between admiration and mockery of Viorica and her family.
The final quotation in the epigraph is from a discussion between a non-Roma moderator and a Roma activist during a 2007 talk show on Romanian national television. The moderator refused to refer to Roma as Romanian citizens, even though most Roma in Romania have Romanian citizenship. Two Roma activists – a man and a woman – were the only Roma on this talk show, which focused on the question ‘why is there tension between Roma and Romanians?’ and featured five other guests. The moderator, a non-Roma woman, did not seem to understand why the activists were insisting that Roma were Romanian citizens, and she proceeded to call them ‘Ţigani’ even after the activists had told her that the term was not acceptable and she should use ‘Roma’ instead.
These three examples illustrate what this book defines as the citizenship gap for Roma: the distance between legal citizenship, which most Roma hold, and actual citizenship,3 which the majority of them cannot access fully. Actual citizenship is the ability to take advantage of the citizenship rights that have been gained through legal citizenship but which, if ‘understood as private “liberties” or “choices”, are meaningless, especially for the poorest and most disenfranchised, without enabling conditions through which they can be realized’ (Yuval-Davis 1997b, 18). Actual citizenship encompasses both cultural citizenship, ‘the right to belong while being different’ (Rosaldo 1994, 402) – with material and symbolic consequences – and basic citizenship rights such as the right to medical facilities, running water and so on.4 In this book I argue that all Roma experience a citizenship gap to different degrees, depending on class, gender, occupation, age, geographical location and so on, despite the visibility of Roma post-1989 as performers or as victims of poverty and discrimination, in Romania and beyond. Even though they were recognized as an ethnic minority in 1991, Roma in Romania continue to be seen as foreigners, while most Roma see themselves as both Roma and Romanian. Viorica and the Roma activists discussed above experienced the citizenship gap in terms of cultural citizenship and belonging; in addition to the deficit in cultural citizenship, Maria and numerous other Roma, in Pod and elsewhere in Romania, who live in poverty and face eviction and discrimination on a daily basis, also lack basic citizenship rights, despite new measures officially designed to improve their situation. I argue that all Roma face a cultural citizenship gap in post-socialist Romania, and many Roma also experience a complete citizenship gap with regard to both cultural belonging and basic citizenship rights.
Indeed, this book shows that Roma are denied cultural citizenship not only in Romania, but also in most other European countries; and, at the same time, many of them suffer discrimination and abuses of their basic rights. I argue that policies and social programmes for Roma need to be linked to interventions in the official and symbolic definitions of citizenship, which are not captured by a focus on legal citizenship or poverty alone. This book intervenes in current debates on Roma and citizenship in Europe (see Sigona and Trehan 2009; van Baar 2011; Sigona 2015; Hepworth 2015) by introducing (the lack of) cultural citizenship as a key concept for understanding the lack of access to citizenship for Roma.
Numerous reports by international NGOs have brought to global attention the discrimination and abuses Roma suffer across East Central Europe. From Albania to the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine, many Roma lack access to public services, experience violence and are denied basic human rights.5 Even though minority rights for Roma were high on the agenda of Eastern European countries’ EU accession negotiations, which have seen thirteen additional states join the EU over the last ten years, the situation of many Roma in these countries has not changed significantly. Furthermore, police violence against Roma in Western Europe, including the fingerprinting of Roma in Italy in 2008 and the expulsions of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma from France from 2010 onwards,6 have brought to light the struggles of Roma across Europe. Both the forced eviction of numerous Roma to places like Pod, inside Romania, and the expulsions and police violence targeting Roma in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, can be regarded as state-sponsored attacks on Roma, who are not treated as equal citizens by their governments. Hepworth (2015) discusses Romanian Roma living in camps in Italy who were deported to Romania, despite their legal status,
