and deepening of the Romani social movement in and beyond Europe (Vermeersch 2006; van Baar 2011a). One of the profoundly new conditions under which the post-1989 movement has taken place has been the Europeanization of the representation of the Roma. What I have called “the Europeanization of Roma representation” designates, first, the post-1989 problematization of the Roma in terms of their “Europeanness”; second, the classification of heterogeneous groups scattered over Europe under the umbrella term “Roma”; and, third, the devising of Europe-wide programs dedicated to their rights, inclusion, development, empowerment, and participation (van Baar 2011a: 153–89). Historically, those who are called, or call themselves, “Roma” have often been considered a “non-European” minority, with origins outside of Europe, “dangerous” for “progress” and “civilization” in Europe. Yet, since the fall of Central and Eastern European state socialism, the Roma have been reclassified as a “European minority” to be respected and included as “true Europeans.”
This development toward Europeanizing the Roma’s status and representation represents a unique case, as no other minority has become the target of such wide-ranging processes of Europeanization, nor of the large-scale development programs that have been launched by state-related institutions, international governing organizations (IGOs) such as the European Union (EU) and the World Bank, and a wide range of civil society organizations (CSOs). The Europeanization of Roma representation has enabled (at least) some of the Roma—primarily Romani activists engaged in governmental boards, advocacy groups, activist networks, and grassroots movements—to become critical players in the public and political debates about their status and in the large policy fabric that has been built around them. By developing their own heterogeneous social movements across and beyond Europe, Romani actors have entered the post-1989 political scene as active agents, rather than passive “victims” of how others have continued to represent them (Vermeersch 2006; van Baar 2011a; 2013). Increasingly, they are not just the objects and subjects of discourses, programs, and instruments of inclusion, development, and participation. The Europeanization of Roma representation could be understood as a shift from considering the Roma as the externalized outsiders against which Europe defines itself to representing them as the internalized outsiders to be integrated as participating “true Europeans.”
At the same time, this shift does not represent a decisive, but only a highly ambivalent, turn toward considering the Roma as “true Europeans” (van Baar 2011a; 2015). Current practices, such as the ongoing expulsion of Romani migrants from France and Europe-wide manifestations of antigypsyism, show that the Roma frequently still end up in the symbolic or administrative cloud of “non-Europeans.” Despite the institutionalized promises of inclusion and European citizenship, both at home and in the European countries into which the Roma have migrated since 1989, they continue to be dealt with differently than other national and EU citizens. Thus, they “need to put in additional efforts to be regarded as equal and full citizens of the states where they live and the ‘Europe’ to which they belong” (van Baar 2011a: 18).
The ambivalences inherent to the Europeanization of Roma representation, and particularly the trend of the last decade toward a deterioration, rather than improvement, of the situation of many Roma, have encouraged several scholars and activists to reflect on the role that Roma-related activism has played in generating these ambiguous results. This chapter focuses on the post-1989 development of the heterogeneous Romani social movement and takes stock of the rise and impact of “nongovernmentalism,” that is the emergence of the “nongovernmental” as a category of rule and research in Roma-related policy-making and scholarship. The focus on nongovernmentalism does not imply that I seamlessly identify it with Roma-related activism or the Romani social movement, as if these are just three terms for one and the same phenomenon. Yet, many activists associate or align themselves with a more or less organized form of the “nongovernmental.” Therefore, the “nongovernmental” could be considered as a kind of interface of activist and scholarly attitudes toward desired or required societal change. Thus, rather than discussing varieties of activism that have been developed since 1989, or examining the discourses and practices that have emerged in informal and formal manifestations of the Romani movement, this chapter focuses on the nexus of activism and research through the lens of the emergence of the category of the “nongovernmental.”
I will distinguish three phases in the post-1989 period in which the policy relevance and scholarly appraisal of the role of CSOs have been discussed along different lines. First, I will discuss the reasons of the rapid rise, in the immediate aftermath of 1989, of civil society organizations, which include nongovernmental, faith-based, and grassroots organizations (NGOs, FBOs, GROs). This European pattern followed a more global one, according to which researchers and national and international policy makers considered CSOs as potentially effective partners and channels in attempts at challenging the “authoritarian” remainders of postauthoritarian regimes and transforming them into liberal democratic, economically sustainable, and “minority-friendly” states that would be able to address more effectively issues of poverty, development, and inequality.
This first phase, in which a relatively positive image of CSOs and their capabilities to “make a difference” dominated, would quickly be followed by a second phase in which, at the policy front, CSOs have increasingly been “governmentalized.” The governmentalization of civil society designates a trend in which the professionalization of CSOs is occurring hand in hand with their attachment to the more formal and institutionalized governmental structures at state and suprastate levels, thereby often (though not necessarily) diminishing their activist independence (van Baar 2011a). Accordingly, the scholarly assessments of CSOs have also become more mixed with, at the one end of the spectrum, those who consider the institutionalization of activism as an inevitable result of the activists’ professionalization and their aim at exercising power within official governmental structures and, at the spectrum’s other end, those who understand this governmentalization as a troublesome reduction of CSOs to mere service deliverers or, even worse, puppets of an omnipotent and destructive neoliberalism. At the policy level, this second phase was coinciding with the trend in which the largest donor of Roma-related development programs, the EU, mostly shifted its support toward the direct funding of its candidate member states’ governments, even though many other donors continued to fund Roma-related CSOs directly. This trend took place at the same time as negotiations about the EU access of these states continued and, finally, led to the eastward enlargement of the Union in 2004 and 2007. Some donors stopped their funding of Roma-related CSOs in the new EU members directly after these entered the EU, which required some of these CSOs to shift their activities more eastward to those countries that are (still) not EU member states.
We can distinguish a third phase that has started relatively recently with the “ethnic turn” in EU policies. This turn designates the move in EU support for the Roma toward the explicit devising of policies for Roma, a shift from generic to specific Roma-related policies that is particularly embodied by the 2011 launch of the so-called EU Roma Framework (European Commission 2011a). Apparently against the idea behind this framework, in many EU countries CSOs have been sidelined or deliberately excluded from the processes toward the development, implementation, and evaluation of the so-called National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS) that these states were encouraged to devise in this framework’s context. Consequently, we are currently facing, it seems, a phase in which Roma-related CSOs have increasingly less to say about how Roma policies are (to be) envisioned, designed, implemented, and assessed.
This chapter discusses the ways in which we could explain this post-1989 development, including the rise of nongovernmentalism and its development toward the current, third phase. Simultaneously, I will reflect on the ways in which researchers have assessed the rise and impact of nongovernmentalism, particularly vis-à-vis the abilities of CSOs to impact political and policy debates, agendas, and transformations. I will argue that, in Roma-related scholarship, the assessment of the emergence of the “non-governmental” as a category of rule and research has frequently and primarily been led by a largely counterproductive idea that we need to be either “for” or “against” CSOs. In line with the approach to the Romani movement that I have discussed elsewhere (van Baar 2011a; 2012b; 2013),
