The Gypsy Threat Narrative

Abstract

In this study, we analyze European attitudes about the Roma. These attitudes are important because they encourage or impede the full inclusion of the Roma in European society. We articulate what we refer to as the Gypsy Threat Narrative and use it to motivate an empirical analysis of how comfortable Europeans are with Roma neighbors, as expressed in a 2008 Eurobarometer survey. We use mixed ordinary least square regression models to account for the hierarchical data structure, and account for a number of factors previously found to correlate with attitudes about the Roma while reporting new findings grounded in the logic of the Gypsy Threat Narrative. We discuss the implications of our study for research on European ethnic relations and for activists working for greater Roma inclusion.

Keywords

Roma anti-Gypsyism narrative antiziganism European Union culture

Personal Reflexive Statement

Delia Popescu’s work addresses totalitarianism, anticommunist dissidence, and issues of justice, political rhetoric, and remembrance in the context of Eastern European postcommunism. Her book The Responsibility of Resistance: Political Action in Vaclav Havel’s Thought explores the possibility of self-affirmation and individual opposition in the face of extreme repression. Matthew Loveland’s recent work has explored how individuals overcome religious differences to form positive social relationships as well as the performance of disobedience in public places. As professors and researchers at Le Moyne College, a liberal arts institution in the Jesuit tradition, the authors approach this work from the perspective of social justice concerns with discrimination, disempowerment, and marginalization. Together, our work is generally concerned with issues of “othering” in different social and political contexts and the work individuals do to maintain or subvert existing injustices. The present essay reflects our dissatisfaction with the persistence of state-centric discourses that construct a monolithic and exclusivist nationalism which disproportionately affects the vulnerable and underrepresented Romani minority.

The Roma issue dominated the September 2010 European Union (EU) summit.¹ In what was described as an “unprecedented row” between Brussels and Paris, former French President Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso exchanged heated words over France’s deportation of Roma ethnics (BBC News 2010a). The situation in France saw no improvement over the “Roma question” as Sarkozy’s successor, Francois Hollande, faced civic unrest after French deportation police detained a Roma girl on a school bus, in front of her classmates (Rubin 2013). Elsewhere in Europe, in a surge of “reverse missing child” cases, Greek authorities removed a blonde Roma girl from a dark-skinned Roma family, and light-skinned Roma children were taken away in Ireland to verify their paternity. In Serbia, an extreme right group attempted to abduct a white Roma child from his family (Bilefsky 2013). These incidents are only a recent expression of what has become one of the major tests of EU integration, human rights activism, and immigration policy.

The Roma represent, in the words of James Goldston, Europe’s “quintessential minority” (2002:147; see also Tileaga 2006a). Without a “mother state” to represent them, historically marginalized and vilified, the Roma are the largest minority in Europe. “Their renown as musicians, dancers, and palm-readers” Goldston argues, “is surpassed only by the near-universal belief among the Gadze —or non-Roma—that Gypsies are also liars, thieves and cheats” (2002:146). In sociological terms, the Roma are Europe’s strangers. Simmel described the stranger as a social category of those who are simultaneously a part of society and marginalized (Simmel 1971; see also Foddy, Platow, and Yamagishi 2009; Schuetz 1944). The narrative of the Roma as eternal immigrants makes them strangers across Europe, if not, as Sigona argues, “inner enemies” (2005:747; see also Stewart 2012; Tong 1998). Traditional stereotypes of the Roma cast them as violators of basic values like honesty, hard work, and ownership (e.g., Culic et al. 2000; Hockenos 1993; Mac Laughlin 1998; Petrova 2003; Stewart 2011, 2012). Given this history, the degree to which Roma are accepted or “othered” (Woodcock 2007; see also Crowe 1996; Pons 1999) in contemporary European society reveals the degree to which traditional divisions continue to hold sway.

Attitudes about the Roma, across Europe, are the subject of this study. Knowledge about these attitudes is important because they reveal the degree to which the Roma are accepted in European society, and the human rights and equality issues they evoke are central to the claims of activists and politicians who speak of the European project (Fox and Vermeersch 2010; Goldston 2002; Simhandl 2006; Van Baar 2011). We provide an analysis of European attitudes about the Roma as expressed in the European Commission’s Eurobarometer (EB)² 69.1 survey conducted in 2008 (European Commission 2008), using mixed models to test individual-level correlates of tolerance for the Roma while accounting for the hierarchical nature of the data. Our analysis considers only individual level of predictors of Roma prejudice and tolerance, but we encourage analysis of structural and contextual-level factors, intending for our article to be a starting point rather than the final word. Nonetheless, we address a gap in the growing literature by providing a cultural explanation of variation in individuals’ attitudes about the Roma with reference to what we call the “Gypsy Threat” Narrative.

Cultural Narrative and the Roma Threat

Most studies of prejudice and discrimination against the Roma are limited to documenting incidents or attitudes in only one or a few of the EU member states. While we note the diversity of experience within particular nations, these studies do suggest that Roma discrimination is a prominent and common occurrence across Europe. Attempts to explain European attitudes about the Roma in a generalizable way are rare (see Tileaga 2006a, for an exception). To address this gap in the literature, our analysis tests the general claim that anti-Roma attitudes are an expression of what we will refer to as the Gypsy Threat Narrative. Like the Latino Threat Narrative that Chavez (2013) advances to explain prejudice in the United States, we argue that a Gypsy Threat Narrative lies behind anti-Roma prejudice in Europe. A general individual-level model of anti-Roma prejudice can be devised by considering the degree to which various individual characteristics are likely to be associated with greater acceptance of the cultural Gypsy Threat Narrative, and this model is applicable throughout the EU.

We choose the language of cultural narrative rather than other discourses, particularly that of racial ideology, because culture, our theoretical model assumes, precedes ideology. Following the logic of Swidler (1986), we contend that various and significantly different ideologies justifying attitudes about, or policy relative to, the Roma may each draw upon the “Gypsy Threat Narrative” that we outline below. In terms of scholarship about race and racism, Bonilla-Silva’s (2001) well-known arguments about racialized society and racist ideology fit well into a cultural narrative approach. In fact, Bonilla-Silva (2001:62) explicitly articulates a novel definition of ideology to avoid the common drawbacks of what he calls a “fuzzy concept.” The “broad mental and moral frameworks … that social groups use to make sense of the world,” Bonilla-Silva incorporates into his definition of ideology fit easily into a theory of cultural narrative (2001:62). C. Smith, for example, writes that “narrative is a form of communication that arranges human actions and events into organized wholes in a way that bestows meaning on the actions and events by specifying their interactive or cause-and-effect relations to the whole … Narratives, thus, always have a point, are always about the explanation and meaning of events and actions in human life” (2003:65). Narratives selectively emphasize some past events while ignoring others, and events are selected so as to communicate “the larger intended moral meaning” (C. Smith 2003:66).

Narratives, as latent conveyors of meaning, could be accepted as basic truths even by those who subscribe to competing ideologies. For example, while nationalist ideologies might cast the historically mobile Roma as outsiders to be contained or expelled, EU policies promoting Roma inclusion may adopt a paternalistic style of forced integration which similarly disrespects the values and “nomadic” history of the Romani people. While the social action justified by either ideology is different, the narrative of Roma history is the same. Particular social and political conditions, such as recent economic recession across Europe, may elicit varied expression of the Gypsy Threat Narrative, but we contend that it has been historically resilient and resurgent, and that it interacts with more general European concerns over the meaning of nation, property, and religion.

We distinguish between an informal but stable narrative about the Roma, political ideologies, and strategically articulated activist frames. We will return to this distinction between the cultural and the political at the end of the article. Apart from well-rehearsed political ideologies or activist frames, how do cultural narratives come to be expressed as personal attitudes? As Chavez shows in the case of Latinos in America, narratives about minority groups are pervasive social constructions that define “truths” about outsiders and the threats they pose (2013:3), and attitudes “emerge from a history of ideas, laws, narratives, myths, and knowledge production in the social sciences, the natural sciences, the media and the arts” (2013:24). European public debates, policies, and attitudes are influenced by unquestioned and disparaging assumptions about Roma motives and behaviors—again these assumptions underlie perspectives across the political spectrum.

While never explicitly stated, the Gypsy Threat Narrative can be inferred by identifying patterned historical events, political action, and individual attitudes. After reviewing Roma discrimination in Europe, we provide an account of the cultural narrative that we argue supports anti-Roma attitudes and actions. We then use this account to generate hypotheses about the relationship between the personal characteristics and the expression of discomfort with Roma neighbors that manifest acceptance of the narrative.

The Historical Development of Romani Otherness

While we recognize the diversity of local experience, Roma marginalization is common across Europe. The overview that follows is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to emphasize historical events and trends that evidence the manifestation of the narrative we argue is persistent and significant historically, and in contemporary Europe. Roma marginalization is reflected in civil society, state policy, and social commentary (for detailed reviews of media and policy content, see Rughiniś 2007; Tileaga 2006a, 2006b).

The Roma migration from Northern India into Europe began in the eleventh century and continued in waves over the next three centuries (Crowe 1996; Hancock 1987). While records do not clearly indicate the reasons for this early migration, it is likely that the Roma arrived in Europe as slaves or mercenaries in a Persian army (Barany 1994). By the 1500s, the Romani had spread all around Europe, as far as England and Spain. A Parisian document records the reaction of the European population to this new and visible minority: “The men are very dark and their hair crisp; the women the ugliest and swarthiest ever seen” (Parisian document cited by Hancock in Yoors 2004). This reaction formed the basis of a politics of differentiation, which would be institutionalized in various forms of oppression, including slavery (Achim 1998; Crowe 1996; Fraser 1992; Hancock 1987; Kenrick and Puxon 1972), and continues to be socially and politically reflected in discourses of the Roma as foreign to Europe. The early history of the Roma serves as the basis of a popular image of traveling Roma disparagingly described by antiziganist author Vekerdi (1988:13) as “wandering and criminal tribes” who “infiltrated” Europe and pursued itinerant activities of questionable productivity (Vekerdi’s own fame is arguably evidence of how the Gypsy Threat Narrative operates). The stereotype of the “Gypsy” as parasitic, opportunistic, and transient became a symbolic tool invoked to forcibly integrate the Roma and eradicate their perceived dangers to common morality. They became, and remain, a marginalized minority across Europe, relegated to a narrow and distinct socioeconomic niche.

Historically, the dominant religious groups in Europe have either excluded the Roma and treated them as irreligious or tried to forcibly convert and assimilate them (Fraser 1992:184). Most Roma identify with the dominant religious groups of their home countries (Fraser 1992:312), while retaining some elements of traditional Roma beliefs, but non-Roma frequently emphasize their syncretism in disparaging tones. For example, providing building blocks of the Gypsy Threat Narrative, Hungarian scholar Joszef Vekerdi criticizes Roma religiosity as “nothing but a primitive form of animism, with the additional element of a vague idea of God (to whom, however, they never pray) and Devil” (1988:16). Vekerdi’s work is less social analysis than an articulation of the Narrative we argue influences European attitudes about the Roma as it uncritically imagines Roma religiosity as a utilitarian ploy to reap social benefits from the surrounding, true Christian, community. Generally, Roma are portrayed as “lacking true piety,” just as, originally, they were dubbed “Heathens,” “Saracens,” and “Tartars” (Fraser 1992:313). Recent studies of increased Roma conversions suggest that status differences are maintained despite common religious practices, even when conversion is an attempt to escape stigma and gain social acceptance (Chelcea and Lăţea 2000; Fosztó 2009).

Sociopolitical changes in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s did not end the plight of the Romani, the largest minority in the region (Fraser 1992:321). The exclusion of the Roma from mainstream socioeconomic life continued and reinforced a vicious cycle of economic marginalization as the Roma were labeled as unproductive, given to frivolous occupations (such as singing and dancing) and generally dependent on the local population for their livelihood. Writing about this history, Vekerdi polemically comments that the Roma and their Indian ancestors “never lived by work, but by remuneration for their services done to the surrounding peoples, or by begging and theft” (1988:15).

While geographically dispersed, and lacking a central Romani state, the Roma see themselves as belonging to a distinct group that shares “similar historical, cultural and linguistic ties which set them apart as a nation of people” (T. Smith 1997:244). Importantly, however, as Barany points out, it is often wrongly assumed that the Roma are “an ethnologically and socio-culturally homogenous group notwithstanding the amazing diversity among them with clear distinctions in occupations, language/dialect, lifestyle, geographical background, etc.” (1994:324). In sum, while Roma share a collective understanding of belonging to a larger group, non-Roma overemphasize a singular image of the Roma. Selective emphasis on Roma homogeneity sustains the Gypsy Threat Narrative and contributes to their general marginalization throughout Europe (and hence to their perpetual diasporic nature).

Over the seven centuries of Romani presence in Eastern Europe, social marginalization has been met with varied state responses. Responses range from exclusion, active disenfranchisement, expulsion, to forceful integration (Barany 1998). Nonetheless, Barany notes, although policies, approaches, and regimes occasionally changed, attitudes of the general public remained consistently and negatively prejudiced (1994:324). The persistence of negative social attitudes often rendered state policies irrelevant, regardless of regime type. When state policy did prove effective, it manifested popular anti-Roma sentiment.

The two World Wars put into motion the tragic extermination of Roma in the Romani Holocaust, or Porrajmos in Romani (Barany 2002; Ioanid 2000). Nazi policy revolved around the threat of “The Gypsy plague” polluting Aryan blood. Germany and its satellite states placed Roma in concentration camps and sanctioned the “Final Solution.” The policies enacted during the Nazi regime came on the heels of a long history of discrimination and enforced assimilation, including prohibitions on Roma marriage, and taking Roma children away from their parents to be raised in non-Roma families (Crowe 2003). The Nazi regime capitalized on well-established anti-Roma policies in the region to putatively protect German culture and society from the threat of inferior outsiders. Hitler used existing German policies, laws, and administrative units (such as the Gypsy Information Agency, committed to collecting information about the Roma) to target the Roma. A series of laws for expulsion, denaturalization, and sterilization culminated in an extension of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 to apply not only to Jews but also to the Roma, while they were deported to special camps known as Zigeunerlager. The number of Roma deaths in the Porrajmos was substantial, with estimates ranging from 80,000 to over a million (Crowe 2003:86).

The end of World War II was followed by policies, which made homogeneity and assimilation the measures of national solidarity, particularly in the socialist states of Eastern Europe (for an account of communist policies regarding the Roma population, see Crowe and Kolsti 1991; Poulton 1993). Cultural differences had no place in the homogenous ideal of the communist state and the Roma became prevalent victims of state discrimination. State apologists touted the supposed historical inability of the Roma to be productive members of society (Barany 2002; Stewart 1990). Writing about this time period, Vekerdi constructed a history of the Roma arguing that they left India as a group of “robbers, murderers, hangmen and entertainers” who spoke a language containing no words for productive professions and were mentally incapable to recognize the superiority of the cultures they encountered while they chose to pray on the countries they colonized (1988:13). This account was disseminated by the state and became the dominant definition of the Roma at the same time as the Romani were resettled and their language was banned in most of the Eastern bloc.

Throughout Europe, the rigid structure of the postwar national school systems had unfortunate and immediate effects on the Roma population. Coming from poor families and unused to a rigid education structure, Romani children were mocked, insulted, and frequently thrown out of school (C. Smith 2003). In countries like Romania, as many as 70 percent of Roma children were sent to schools meant for students with disabilities (C. Smith 2003).³ The lack of education paved the ground for a low economic standing which further reinforced the social discourse of the antisocial, “lazy Gypsy” (for Czechoslovakia, see Sokolova 2008).

The 1989 revolution did not improve public attitudes toward the Roma in Eastern Europe (European Roma Rights Center 2001; Project on Ethnic Relations 1992, 1997). Guy argues that while reforms codified minority rights and state obligations, these were never fully realized. Writing that “instead, they [Roma] were left exposed—to the ruthless logic of a fledgling market economy in which they were made redundant, to the moral vacuum of a legal interregnum in which they were left defenceless against an upsurge of murderous racism and to democratically-elected governments which were uninterested in a constituency without electoral power” (Guy 2001:xv). A Project on Ethnic Relations Report spanning only two years showed that,

since the beginning of the 1990s, Roma have suffered more than 45 attacks, resulting in the deaths of twenty Roma and the destruction of over four hundred Roma dwellings. The violence has been especially well documented in the … Czech and Slovak lands and in Romania and Hungary, but it has also taken place in Poland, Bulgaria, and former Yugoslavia. (1992:7)

As an example, a 2006 Open Society Foundation study found that 75 percent of Romanians did not want to live near Roma (Amnesty International 2006). In a 2009 Barometer survey sponsored by the Romanian government, 43 percent of the respondents indicated they would not hire Roma because they are lazy and they steal. The survey also shows that 55 percent of the respondents think that Roma should not be allowed to travel abroad because they damaged Romania’s reputation (Amnesty International 2010). According to another report, the 2004 Minorities at Risk Project, the decade 1989 to 1999 saw yearly incidents of Romanian groups burning down Roma houses (Minorities at Risk Project 2004; for details on some incidents, see also the Amnesty International Report—Romania 2010). In 1990 alone there were 15 documented incidents of violence targeting Roma, including the burning of a Roma village by 1,000 Romanian villagers. On the other hand, a 2005 United Nations (UN) survey shows that 70 percent of Romanian Roma live below poverty line and have no running water, and 80 percent cannot afford prescription drugs, while Roma infant mortality rate is four times higher than the national average (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Romania: Situation of Roma: January 2003–June 2005). A United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) study found that “an unequal and discriminatory sociology is practiced by healthcare institutions and medical staff,” and this situation is replicated in education, housing, and employment (1998 UNICEF study, cited in Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 2000).

The early 2000s witnessed startling episodes of anti-Roma violence and discrimination perpetrated by both private individuals and national governments in Europe (Stewart 2012; Toma and Fosztó 2011). Western European nations became concerned with potentially increased Romani migration and deployed a rhetoric of national security that led to drastic targeted policies, like the 2010 expulsion of Roma from France (Kalb and Halmai 2011; Lucassen 2005; McGarry 2012; Stewart 2012). As an example of rising nationalism with an anti-Roma focus, in 2007 the Italian government declared a “Romani emergency” (emergenza nomadi) and proceeded to fingerprint ethnic Roma (many of Romanian origin) who lived in government-created camps (Associated Press 2008; see also De Zulueta 2009; Stewart 2012). In 2007 to 2008, the Italian government measures against the Roma population escalated in a series of so-called Pacts for Security adopted in over 13 Italian cities, which prepared the ground for the eviction of tens of thousands of Roma (10,000 in Rome alone; see Colacicchi 2008). The pacts were followed by measures based on what Piero Colacicchi calls a “securitarian propaganda and on the ‘terrorize and win’ concept, in which Roma and Romanians (grossly confused as one) were assigned the part of the felon” (Colacicchi 2008:36), while Roma camps were burnt down by groups of vigilante looking to punish alleged Roma crimes in Italian communities. During his 2008 campaign, and following increasingly vehement right wing demands, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi publicly blamed much of the street crime in Italy on the over 150,000 Roma living in Italy (De Zulueta 2009; Owen 2008), and labeled the Roma “an army of evil” (Fraser 2008).

In 2008–2009, at least 100 Roma were forced to leave Belfast after episodes of vandalism and intimidation (BBC News 2009). The summer of 2010 effectively registered as the summer of forced repatriation for ethnic Romani in Europe. In July, France followed in the footsteps of Italian political scapegoating when Sarkozy made anti-Roma rhetoric a central part of his campaign and proceeded to launch a target deportation campaign (BBC News 2010b). Jacques Myard, MP and member of Sarkozy’s ruling party, declared that the key issue with the “European Roma problem” is their “excessive mobility” and “related medieval lifestyle,” which challenges French national security (Van Baar 2011:206). In September 2010, Germany sent thousands of Roma refugees (including children) to Kosovo (BBC News 2010c).

These events happened in the midst of the Decade of Roma Inclusion (2005–2015), a declaration signed by several European governments. The initiative was meant to bring “an unprecedented political commitment by European governments to improve the socio-economic status and social inclusion of Roma” (Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005–2015) with the support of several international institutions such as the World Bank, the Council of Europe, the UN Development Program, and the Open Society Institute. The initiative was meant to capitalize on two converging trends, Eastern European democratization and EU enlargement, and to prepare the stage for the EU accession of countries with large Romani minorities. The action plan of the Decade was clearly geared toward a comprehensive approach to the Roma as a European minority, but despite hopes that the decade would see a rise in awareness and marked improvement in the situation of the Roma, they remain some of the “most hated, misunderstood and mistreated of people” (Goldston 2002:146) in Europe. The narrative of inclusion, it seems, is competing with a narrative of “dangerous gypsies.”

After 1989, emphasis was placed on Central and East European (CEE) efforts to live up to the EU standard.⁴ Aware of the possibility of mass immigration, Western EU members framed accession requirements in terms of minority rights, holding them up as a necessary condition of EU approval (if not actual accession; Goldston 2002:158). As Katrin Simhandl comments, “the situation of the Roma was one of the most prominent considerations made by the Commission of the European Union in the annual reports” (2002:97) required by EU accession negotiations. The effort backfired for the Roma as the institutionally centered approach resulted in institutional sparring over who is responsible for solving the “Roma problem.” By emphasizing the institutional dimension in a Europe still led by the principle of national sovereignty, the EU treated CEE Roma as an essentially different ethnic category, of the East. Simhandl argues that a rhetorical-political distinction was drawn between “Western Gypsies and travelers” and “Eastern Roma.” This allowed for policy to distinguish between “national minorities” and the “Roma” so that “the formulation ‘national minorities’ is more often used in contradistinction to “Roma” (“national minorities and the Roma”)” (Simhandl 2006:108). As a result, although they are citizens of EU countries, the Roma are rarely portrayed or perceived as such. For example, according to an Italian government study presented at the European Conference on Roma Population, only 24 percent of Italians are aware that over half of the Romani in Italy have Italian citizenship, 84 percent believe that Romani are nomads, and 83 percent believed that Roma chose to live in camps ⁵ (Italian Institute for Studies on Public Opinion study, 2008, cited Colacicchi 2008:42).

More recently, the poor economic situation in Europe spurred nationalistic sentiments and the persecution of the Roma was readily reflected in political campaigns rife with anti-Roma speech and state policies of exclusion and ghettoization. “As current debates about the situation of the Roma show,” Huub Van Baar argues, “it is often their problematization as profiteers who do not work, as criminals involved in illegal activities, and as nomads unwilling to integrate that has led to the legitimization of their eviction, expulsion, substandard housing, education and healthcare” (2011:205). The shift to a discourse of the “Roma problem” in Europe, resulted is the “increased criminalization of the Roma as profiteers, criminals, and nomads” (2011:205) through forms of minority governance meant to deal with a perceived European immigration problem. Our analysis follows Van Baar who argues that the Roma problem must be understood in terms of its problematization in political discourse coupled with the social and political practices that buttress this phenomenon. The problematization of an issue (in this case, the Roma) reveals a series of framing choices that tell us how and why the Roma are cast as a particular problem to be solved through a series of particular policies. “The French and Italian situations,” Van Baar argues, “clearly illustrate how the Roma’s problematization—be it in terms of nomadism, illegality, or public or social security—is mobilized to create a legal state of exception and legitimate unorthodox policy interventions” (2011:206). The problematization of the issue becomes the prescriptive basis for policies and attitudes. In this context, an analysis of Roma history and recent policy responses to events involving the Roma, together with an awareness of public attitudes and discourses reveal the dimensions of the Gypsy Threat Narrative we now put forward.

The Gypsy Threat Narrative

The regularity of Roma discrimination across European history suggests the salience of what we call the Gypsy Threat Narrative. We argue that this narrative continues to be relevant in contemporary Europe and we use it to generate hypothesis about which Europeans are more likely to express anti-Roma sentiments. Our basic claim is that different social locations lend themselves to a defense of the Narrative which is evident in expressions of comfort with Roma neighbors—a standard sociological measure of prejudice.

The Narrative

The Gypsies entered Europe as nomads. Carriers of an alien, resilient, and superstitious religious and cultural heritage, they subversively insulated themselves from the rest of society. Historically averse to productive labor, they refuse to participate in the legitimate economy and instead survive by robbing and deceiving the good, civilized people. Devoid of respect for the nation, the Gypsy culture of criminality and self-isolation undermines the foundation of the modern state. As such, Gypsies are not to be trusted, and Gypsy communities must be monitored, controlled, and even dismantled.

Hypotheses and Method

Our analysis assumes that anti-Roma attitudes are an expression of the latent Gypsy Threat Narrative—a narrative that resonates with some more than others. Individual attitudes, generally, are a function of material, social, and political position. We briefly explain hypotheses about how individual social identities are correlated with anti-Roma sentiment.

The Gypsy Threat Narrative casts the Roma as superstitious religious outsiders. In contemporary Europe, Christianity is the dominant religious tradition, and while many Roma have converted to Christianity, our discussion earlier indicates that their commitment to Christianity is frequently doubted. Thus,

Hypothesis 1: Those affiliated with Europe’s dominant Christian religious groups will be less comfortable with the Roma than those affiliated with another or no tradition.

Hypotheses 2 and 3 emerge from the Gypsy Threat Narrative’s portrayal of the Romani as lazy, thieving opportunists with little desire to work in the “legitimate” economy. So, Hypothesis 2 considers the attitudes of the employed who we believe are more likely to accept the Narrative as a defense of their position in the labor market, and reads:

Hypothesis 2: Those who are currently employed will be less comfortable with the Roma than those who are not currently employed.

Hypothesis 3 involves our assumption that ownership of consumer goods is an active expression of a consumer–citizen narrative that counters the Gypsy Threat Narrative image of the “thieving gypsy” by morally favoring consumption and legitimate ownership. Hypothesis 3 reads:

Hypothesis 3: Those who own more consumer goods will be less comfortable with the Roma than those who own fewer goods.

The Gypsy Threat Narrative portrays the Roma as a transient people that never fully embraces its current nation. Therefore, we would expect that those most prone to nationalism will report lower levels of comfort with the Roma. In contemporary European politics, adherents of the political right are typically more nationalist than those on the political left (Halikiopoulou, Mock, and Vasilopoulou 2013). As such, we propose the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 4: Those who identify with the political right will be less comfortable with Roma neighbors, on average, than those who claim a political position on the left.

Method and Data

To test our hypotheses, we make use of EB 69.1 which was collected in February and March 2008, and included a battery of questions about discrimination. The EB random sample surveys are designed to be representative of the population aged 15 and older of the EU member states. A total of 26,746 interviews were conducted across 29 sampling units (there are separate samples drawn for East and West Germany and for Northern Ireland and Great Britain). Listwise deletion reduces our working sample to 25,018 individual level respondents, a reduction of 6.5 percent. No systematic biases were discovered in the missing data.

As EB data are collected from random samples drawn from EU member states, they are hierarchically structured with individuals nested within countries. To account for this data structure, we make use of mixed effects linear regression to model our continuous dependent variable with a random intercept allowed to vary by country. When presenting the descriptive statistics, we weight the individual-level data using WEIGHT EU 27, which accounts for the recent additions of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU and adjusts each national sample according to its proportion of the total EU population, aged 15 and older. Because no weight is available for the country level, and weighting at only the individual level can produce biased estimates, we test our hypotheses with unweighted data.

Our dependent variable is a self-reported measure of comfort with having Roma as neighbors. Respondents were presented with a question reading: “For each of the following situations, please tell me using this scale from 1 to 10 how you would personally feel about it. On this scale, ‘1’ means that you would be ‘very uncomfortable’ and ‘10’ means that you would be ‘totally comfortable’ with this situation—Having a Roma as a neighbor.” Those who were indifferent or refused to answer are coded to the midpoint of the scale, 5.5. The variable has a mean of 5.99 and a standard deviation of 3.10.

We test our religion hypothesis, Hypothesis 1, with a self-report measure of religious affiliation. In the EB 69.1 sample, 77 percent of respondents identify as Christian, 20 percent as atheist or agnostic, and 3 percent as members of other, non-Christian religious traditions. We created dummy variables for each category and included the “Christian” indicator in the models. Non-Christians are the reference group in our analysis.

To test Hypothesis 2, about employment status, we dichotomize the EB’s employment variables into nonworking (0 = looking after the home, student, unemployed, retired) versus working (1 = all others). EB 69.1 included a battery of questions about ownership of goods which we use to operationalize Hypothesis 3. Respondents were asked whether they owned a television, a DVD player, a music CD player, a computer, an Internet connection at home, a car, an apartment, or house that was paid for, and an apartment or house that was currently being paid for. We summed the owned goods to create an index of ownership ranging from 0 to 8 with a mean of 4.99 and a standard deviation of 1.86.

To test Hypothesis 4, we use a self-reported measure of political ideology based on the following question, “In political matters, people talk of ‘the left’ and ‘the right.’ How would you place your views on this scale?” On a 10-point scale, 1 is labeled as “left” and 10 as “right,” so higher scores indicate greater openness to positions of the political right. This measure has a mean score of 5.27 and a standard deviation of 1.91.

We include controls for size of place (dummy variables are included for rural and small town, using large town as the reference category), gender (1 = male, 0 = female), age measured continuously, education measured as the age at which a respondent ended schooling, an indicator of marital status (1 = married or living as such, 0 = otherwise). We also add controls meant to measure a respondent’s social familiarity and similarity to the Roma. Respondents were asked if they identified as a member of an ethnic minority where they live, and the 3 percent who responded in the affirmative are noted with a dummy variable (1 = ethnic minority, 0 = otherwise). It is worth noting that some of these respondents may identify as Roma, but the data do not allow us to explore this possibility. Respondents were also asked whether they have “friends or acquaintances who are Roma.” We account for this with a dummy variable coded 1 for the 15 percent who reported knowing Roma. We expect that ethnic minorities and those who know Roma are socially closer to the Roma, and therefore will report, on average, higher levels of comfort. Descriptive statistics for all variables in our estimation sample are made available in Table 1. Results of our mixed ordinary least square can be found in Table 2, and it is to these findings that we now turn.

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics.

Variables	Mean	SD
Comfortable with Roma as neighbors	5.99	3.10
Rural area or village	0.35	0.48
Small or midsized town	0.42	0.49
Male	0.48	0.50
Age	46.28	18.61
Age ended education	18.23	4.49
Married, remarried, cohabitating	0.61	0.49
Member of ethnic outgroup	0.03	0.18
Roma acquaintance	0.15	0.35
Christian	0.77	0.42
Atheist or Agnostic	0.20	0.40
Other religion	0.03	0.17
Count of goods owned	5.00	1.86
Working	0.50	0.50
Ideology (left vs. right)	5.27	1.91
Observations	25,018

Table 2.

Mixed OLS Regression of Comfort with Roma on Independent Variables.

Variables	B (SD)
Rural area or village	−0.25** (0.048)
Small or midsized town	−0.21** (0.048)
Male	−0.06 (0.037)
Age	−0.01** (0.001)
Age ended education	0.03** (0.004)
Married, remarried, cohabitating	−0.06 (0.040)
Member of ethnic outgroup	0.49** (0.096)
Roma acquaintance	1.47** (0.055)
Christian	−0.26** (0.050)
Count of goods owned	−0.03** (0.012)
Working	−0.16** (0.041)
Ideology	−0.12** (0.009)
Constant	6.94** (0.221)
Variance (constant)	0.87
Variance (residual)	8.26
ICC	0.10
Wald χ² (p > χ²)	1,290.08 (0.000)
Observations	25,018
Number of groups	29

Note: Standard errors in parentheses. OLS = ordinary least square.

**p < .01, *p < .05.

Results

Model 1 reports the results of a mixed linear regression including fixed effects at the individual level and allowing the intercept to vary by country. The constant shows that the average score on the comfort with Roma scale for all countries is 6.94 (on a 10-point scale). The model’s total variance is 9.13, and 0.87 of this is at the country level. The variance partition coefficient (ICC) of 0.10 indicates that only about 10 percent of the variance in the comfort score can be attributed to differences between countries and suggests that a European-wide model of individual levels of comfort is appropriate. We now explore the fixed portion of the model in order to understand the individual-level correlates of Roma tolerance, being careful not to imply causation.

Among the control variables, age, education, and urban residence are each significantly related to comfort with Roma neighbors. The older, holding all else constant, reports lower levels of comfort with the Roma, perhaps suggesting that the narrative we outline holds more sway with older Europeans than with the younger. Those who report finishing their education later in life, which we take to mean more education completed, report slightly higher levels of comfort with a Roma neighbor. Also significant, our model shows that those living in the largest cities are more comfortable with Roma neighbors than are those in smaller areas. Perhaps, then, education and metropolitan life support an understanding of the Roma, which lends itself to tolerance or acceptance of the Roma by complicating the Gypsy Threat Narrative’s simplistic reductions.

As expected, those who identify as an ethnic minority in their country are significantly more comfortable than are others with Roma neighbors, scoring 0.49 points (p = .000) higher on the scale, holding all else constant. Not surprisingly, those who know Roma as friends or acquaintances are significantly more comfortable with Roma neighbors, scoring 1.47 points higher on the scale (p = .000), on average, than those without Roma friends or acquaintances. We include these controls as measures of social distance and interpret the findings to mean that reduced social distance is negatively correlated with acceptance of the Gypsy Threat Narrative.

Examining the hypotheses generated from the Gypsy Threat Narrative, we see that, on average, Christians are less comfortable with Roma neighbors than are the reference category of non-Christians (b = −0.26, p = .000). Confirming our expectations, the index of consumer goods is significantly and negatively correlated with the comfort with Roma neighbors (b = −0.03, p = .004). Holding all else constant, possession of one additional item included the index is correlated with lower reported comfort with Roma neighbors. Likewise, those who are currently employed score significantly lower on the comfort with Roma index (b = −0.16, p = .000), holding all else constant. Finally, those who score higher on the left/right scale, meaning they identify on the political right, are significantly less comfortable with Roma neighbors. A one point move to the political right, all else being equal, is associated with a small but significant decrease of 0.12 points on the comfort scale.

Each of the hypotheses we developed from the Gypsy Threat Narrative is supported. We note that our models do not demonstrate causality. Nonetheless, we interpret our findings as evidence that acceptance of the Gypsy Threat Narrative, and expression of associated attitudes, is related to one’s social characteristics. Next, we consider the implications of these findings, and our interpretations, for research about Roma tolerance and for the growing Roma inclusion movement.

Discussion

With some exceptions, previous studies of Roma exclusion have been limited in scope, focusing almost exclusively on specific countries. This is particularly disappointing because historical accounts of Roma discrimination across Europe reveal their constructed status as perpetual outsiders, and thus scapegoats for social, political, and economic ills throughout the EU.⁶ Our articulation of a Gypsy Threat Narrative that crosses political boundaries and regimes led us to consider the struggle of the Roma in Europe as a whole. This is an effective analytical strategy for a number of reasons. Over the past decade, European governments leading the charge of “Europeanization” enacted policies that abused Roma rights and essentially codified their stateless status. There was little difference between the “old democracies” (French, Italian) and postcommunist governments (Romanian, Bulgarian), which calls for scholars to consider a stable, pan-European root cause of anti-Roma sentiment. Our model revealed that just 10 percent of the variance in Roma attitudes can be attributed to the country level. Analyses that focus on single states, or particularly shocking examples of Roma discrimination, cannot account for the range of state sponsored exclusion, nor the many degrees of anti-Roma expression, from outright violence to subtler attitudes, found across Europe.

We argue that Roma discrimination in Europe, manifested in anything from state policy to individual attitudes, is supported by a Gypsy Threat Narrative. Narratives help people make sense of the world and relate to others by simplifying complex realities into relatively simple moral guides. Because they make existing social relationships sacred, they may serve to perpetuate social hierarchies, divisions, and exclusions. Although several images of the Roma circulate in European politics, especially given recent movements promoting inclusion, the story of the Roma as outsiders who contest the moral values of mainstream European life continues to hold sway among many in the EU. Cultural narratives provide the conceptual resources with which state policy and activist frames are built. State policy or pro-Roma activist frames that fail to confront the Gypsy Threat Narrative, then, are unlikely to make significant progress.

The aggressive anti-Roma campaigns in Europe, for example, in Italy and France, belie the idea of a post-nationalistic EU built on tolerance and inclusiveness. In fact, an unintended consequence of the “European project” is arguably increased nationalism with serious consequences for socially constructed outsiders. “Europeanness” provides the platform for exclusion and despite centuries-long Romani presence on the continent, Romani “foreignness” prevails in both national and transnational narratives. As Trehan and Kóczé explain, “the ‘Gypsy problem’ discourse tends to construct the hardships that Roma experience (unemployment, poverty and other manifestations of social exclusion) as essentialized by-products of their own culture (i.e., Romanies are inherently ‘socially unadaptable’ and intellectually deficient)” (2009:55).

Our perspective complements the literature that applies postcolonial notions of orientalism to Europe, West and East (see Bukowski 2006; Kligman 2001; Said 1978; Verdery 1993). Lacking a “home” nation-state, Roma are perpetually cast as “foreign” and unwilling to integrate. European nations, as an example, are now proud to be both French or Italian and also European, but still defined against the uncivilized, un-European “other.” These Europeans still see themselves “as people steeped in history and rooted in the modern world and in a ‘progressive’ cultural domain where the colonial ‘other’ was treated as a people without history or a deep attachment to the land” (Mac Laughlin 1998:1014). EU expansion has also intensified efforts by Eastern European nation-states to defend their Europeanness, thus creating their own others. In this context, Bakic-Hayden’s concept of “nesting orientalisms” is helpful to theorize the reproduction of othering and orientalization within Eastern European countries (1995).

The “European project,” in the context of our study, is an ideology envisioning a unified European history and future. Our analysis suggests that a successful realization of this project will require explicit attention to the role of the Gypsy Threat Narrative in legitimating anti-Roma prejudice. For example, since 1993, the Copenhagen criteria for EU accession include provisions for minority protection. Yet these top-down provisions fail to directly dispel popular attitudes sustained by a cultural narrative that casts the Romani as a threat. To the extent that policy casts Roma as historical outsiders deserving paternal care as they adapt to contemporary norms, it in fact enacts the central aspects of the Threat Narrative. EU policy delegates to national governments the task of implementing and funding EU initiatives, which effectively disenfranchises the Roma and places them between the EU and states’ desires to appease and satisfy EU requirements (see Simhandl 2006). While EU policies bolster constitutional changes in the new Eastern European democracies, these legal changes are not matched by tolerant attitudes in the general population (see Kovai 2012). The resulting tension gives way to populist, anti-Romani government policies.

An example of how the narrative surfaces into state policy frames is the recent Romanian nation branding campaign. The campaign ran in Italy and Spain, in response to various incidents in Western Europe, allegedly perpetrated by Romani ethnics of Romanian origin. As Kaneva and Popescu (2014) argue, the visible intent of the campaign was to model an exemplary image of the Romanian citizen in contrast with the Romani ethnic of mere Romanian origin. The official disavowal of Romani immigrants cannot be detached from EU demands and pressures regarding Romania’s desired accession to the Schengen area. Despite putative Western European calls for inclusion, the displeasure of key EU states with Roma immigration elicits discriminatory measures meant to address precisely EU wishes (Kaneva and Popescu 2014). In this context, Roma activists must address the foundation of the European project and call the EU on its purported values, as well as highlighting the paternalistic contradictions between a monolithic European identity and a discourse of tolerance and inclusion. The cultural discrimination faced by the Roma, rooted in the Gypsy Threat Narrative we have described, coupled with their economic position at the bottom of the economic scale requires a politics of redistribution to remedy the economic injustice, as well as activism framed to counter the Threat Narrative.

The EU’s language of “equality of opportunity” clashes in practice with the cultural undercurrent, which simply does not afford the Roma an equal chance, regardless of stated EU law. A telling 2014 European Commission report on Roma integration documents the tension between policies and outcomes (European Commission Reports 2014). The report shows that early educational policies for the Roma have met with some success at increasing Roma school attendance, but the same report relates that initiatives to curb Roma unemployment did not reach results. The employment situation of the Roma did not improve and fared even worse in some cases, with only 21 percent of Roma women and 35 percent of Roma men in paid work across the EU member states. The report links these results with persistent discrimination, and tellingly, the results across surveyed nations show a mix of Eastern and Western European states at the top of discrimination percentages,⁷ reinforcing our findings. With the “decade of Roma Inclusion” (and arguably 10 years of targeted policies) coming to an end in 2015, the EC is still reporting that “advancing in this situation requires determined action and investment in human capital by Member States” and adds that “the potential for job creation through Roma self-employment, social entrepreneurship, and by using innovative financial instruments have hardly been exploited” (2014:5). The language of the report itself, dominated by “integration” and “mainstreaming,” is an indication of the top-down approach predominant in EU policy across states.

Our analysis also has implications for pro-Roma activism. Sigona and Trehan (2009:viii) argue that,

from the point of view of the Romani people the European process of unification has opened some hitherto nonexistent possibilities of communicating … and claiming their rights … in a more efficient, more legitimate manner. But it has not altered the basic pattern of persecution, or perhaps it has added new dimensions to it.

We agree and suggest that pro-Roma advocates communicate an activist frame that counters the pan-European Gypsy Threat Narrative. A successful activist frame will include the Roma as an important part of the European story, both East and West. The rift between old and new EU members and between Eastern aspirations and Western defensiveness strands the Roma in a political no-man’s land. The pervasiveness of anti-Roma attitudes points to the necessity of recognizing European commonalities rather than differences, and emphasizing a common rhetoric to undercut the frame of “Eastern European Roma problem” and recast it as pan-European anti-Gypsism. Work like ours underscores the difficulty of the activists’ framing task by connecting public opinion to a powerful, enduring cultural narrative rooted in a selective history which many Europeans uncritically accept. Thus, the work of pro-Roma activists is not only to identify those most likely to resist a new narrative but also to counter widely held, culturally supported “common sense” depictions of the Roma as itinerant, criminal, and lazy.

An important implication of our research is that the existence of a latent anti-Roma sentiment renders them a perpetually vulnerable population. The Roma do not only become public threats during particularly poor economic or political situations, but rather they remain a constant target of discrimination. Sociopolitical and economic downturns provide an opportunity for groups with various political or economic interests to capitalize on Roma vulnerability. In sum, contrary to much group position and ethnic threat theory, anti-Gypsyism is not a function of competition over scarce economic resources. Competition over resources occasions the explicit resurgence of anti-Roma attitudes grounded in European culture but does not fundamentally produce it— its source is the Gypsy Threat Narrative.

Our cultural analysis of the Gypsy Threat Narrative is, of course, preliminary, but the findings remained robust while accounting for measures of other explanations of threat and racial prejudice (Blumer 1958; King and Weiner 2007; Quillan 1995). In unreported exploratory models, we included country-level measures of inequality, ethnic heterogeneity, size of Roma population, migration, and UN human development measures, but none produced statistically significant results. Culturally, anti-Roma sentiment is common across Europe, but future research should consider the degree to which country-level structural factors might influence individual-level anti-Roma attitudes. It would also be useful to consider how the Gypsy Threat Narrative compares with similar phenomena, particularly Islamaphobia. For example, Bunzl (2007) writes that Islamophobia is based on fears about the future of European civilization. We would not be surprised if the “Gypsy Threat” reflects similar fears, and suggest that scholars consider how the history of antiziganism may inform contemporary work on Islamophobia. Work such as this will not only help scholars attain a more nuanced understanding of European ethnic relations but will also be of use to those actively working to achieve a more just social world.

Footnotes

Authors Note

The authors equally contributed to the writing of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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