Changing forms of ethnicised poverty: Reflections on Loïc Wacquant’s article

In his article, Loïc Wacquant discusses issues of ethnicised poverty and hypersegregation and the state’s role in their emergence. The essay convincingly sums up the main tenets of his book. Wacquant attempts to transcend the futile terminological debate that has taken place in Julius Wilson’s works of a similar theme and on the category of ‘underclass’ which was used by Wilson. The terminology debate blocked the road towards a meaningful discussion of these extremely important social problems.

Wacquant introduced a new system of categories that is suitable for shedding light on the very different causes and consequences of ethnicised poverty in Western Europe and the United States. That Wacquant has introduced new categories is significant but I am afraid that even that accomplishment cannot prevent their misinterpretation. There have been hardly any categories in the social sciences that have not been misinterpreted for one reason or another. Suffice it to refer to categories like ‘poverty’, ‘marginalisation’, ‘exclusion’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, ‘social class’ or ‘ethnic ghetto’. Apparently there is no way we could defend our ideas from misinterpretation. All we can try to do is to define our categories as precisely as possible, and in this essay Wacquant excels in doing so.

Perhaps because I come from Eastern Europe, for me the most interesting part in the essay is where Wacquant discusses the state’s rather active role in the emergence and reproduction of the precariat or underclass. It seems that Wilson – perhaps partly because he wrote Declining Significance of Race as early as the late 1970s – over-emphasises the role of technological and economic changes and pays little attention to the state’s relative autonomy in managing these dramatic transformations. Note that the emergence and reproduction of the underclass are closely related to the activities of a neoliberal state. A fully developed neoliberal state similar to that seen in the United States would be inconceivable under the conditions of, say, the (West) German social market economy or a Scandinavian welfare state. Consequently, instead of speaking of differences between the United States and Europe, we should speak of the difference between the neoliberal state of the United States and the social market economies and welfare states that are – or at least were in the past – functioning, albeit with varying efficiency, in much of the advanced part of Europe.

But even that contrast only works as long as we ignore the situation of the Roma, which reflects the inability of the advanced European welfare states and the European Union to manage that problem. In recent years the European Union admitted among its members numerous post-Communist countries in which the situation of the Roma is disastrous in terms of welfare and human rights: 30 to 50 per cent of Roma children receive primary education in segregated schools and about half of the Roma population live in hypersegregation. The pasts of African-Americans and of the European Roma are undoubtedly different, as most of the ancestors of African-Americans were slaves. However, there are several similarities in the present exclusion of the Roma of Europe and of African-Americans in the United States. Think of the way some West European states, including France, are handling the problems of the limited number of Roma immigrants and refugees. If we take into consideration the case of the Roma, is it justified to declare that there are not – and there have never been – ethnic ghettoes in Europe?

The situation of the Roma has undergone the most dramatic transformation in recent decades in the former Soviet-bloc countries, more than anywhere else in Eastern Europe. It is those very countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and former Yugoslavia) that have the most populous Roma ethnic minority populations. To put the above rhetorical question into context, let us briefly examine the various forms of exclusion of the Roma in Hungary in the past more than a century.

Since the end of the 19th century, the forms of exclusion of the Roma population of Hungary have undergone several changes. The beginning of this period was marked by a sharp and rigid exclusion in terms of welfare and access to the labour market, and that was coupled by a strong residential segregation. In one of our earlier books (Ladányi and Szelényi, 2006: 176–182), we used Max Weber’s term ‘lower caste’ for this form of exclusion. The ethnic boundaries were almost totally impenetrable and that drastic exclusion affected not just part of the Roma population but practically all of it. Perhaps the only exceptions were the musicians of Gypsy origin whose musicality ‘captivated’ the upper class. They were treated by the majority society as a ‘privileged caste’.

That situation only began to change from the late 1940s when, in successive stages, many new jobs were created in newly organised co-operative farms and recently built factories. Though the Roma were hired as unskilled labour and often worked under dirty and dangerous circumstances in seasonal and very badly paid jobs, their pay was more or less steady and these jobs gradually opened the way for these former outcasts to move, step by step, to at least the lowest level of the hierarchy within society. With time the level of schooling and the rate of employment increased among the Roma, and many of them moved to urban areas or from the Gypsy row outside villages to the inner parts of villages. Towards the end of the state-Socialist period, the Roma had secured a firm position in the lowest level of the social hierarchy.

They were still at the lowest rung of the hierarchy because the work they did was of the lowest prestige and because a considerable proportion of the Roma children attended segregated schools: ‘Roma classes’, or classes ostensibly set aside for the mentally retarded. In our book we called that type of exclusion ‘lower class’.

We clearly differentiated the ‘lower class’ from the ‘underclass’, the latter being typical of the era of transition to a market economy. Unlike the members of the ‘lower class’, those of the ‘underclass’ were denied all useful functions in the emerging division of labour of the fledgling market economy.

By comparison, though in the interwar years the Roma lived in full residential segregation and though the work of, say, the teams of Roma adobe brick makers was seasonal, dirty, unhealthy and despised, there was a genuine need for it because most of the village houses were built of adobe bricks. Or take the example of factories under Socialism: though, as a rule, unskilled labour done by the Roma was hardly appreciated and was poorly paid, in that division of labour the contribution of the Roma was badly needed because mechanisation was so underdeveloped that the factories could not have operated without an ample supply of unskilled hands.

When, however, the factory industry of state Socialism collapsed, in the emerging division of labour the mass of undereducated and unskilled labour instantly became redundant. In that particular respect, similarities can be found between the large-scale loss of jobs in the wake of the post-Communist crisis and deindustrialisation in the Western world two decades before.

As a consequence of underclass formation, the Roma ethnic group, which used to be more or less uniform, fell into several parts along class determinations. The data at our disposal show that at around the year 2000, nearly 40 per cent of the Roma (and of those considered to be Roma) experienced multiple exclusion; about 10 to 15 per cent set out along the road to the middle class; and about half of the Roma were in the unpredictable and uncertain status of being between the underclass and on the road to the middle class (Ladányi and Iszelényi, 2006). Those groups differed in terms of welfare and economic situation. Moreover, they also differed in terms of factors that are biologically more determined than those discussed above, e.g. fertility.

The data at our disposal indicate that in the ethnic ghettoes – including ethnic ghettoes in Hungary in around the year 2000 – fertility norms can change within periods that are short by historical standards. During a period of about 40 years after World War II, the demographic scissors between Hungary’s majority society and those experiencing abject exclusion showed a tendency to close. By contrast, in recent decades those scissors have opened again. Today the fertility rate among the Roma is conspicuously higher than the national average, especially in the rural ethnic ghettoes.

Contrary to popular belief, that has little to do with what is often termed as ‘Gypsy culture’ or ‘the attitude to have children just to get welfare relief’. Demographic trends typical of the Roma of Hungary today can also be seen among peoples living in extreme poverty and/or conditions of lasting exclusion in several other parts of the world. What is more, similar fertility tendencies could be seen among the Roma of Hungary in the period between the late 19th century and the middle of the 20th century – an era when child benefits were non existent but when the exclusion of the Roma became more painful by comparison to an earlier period.

By the early 21st century an almost unbridgeable gap appeared between the poor, on the one hand, and the poorest, on the other, at the lowest level of the Hungarian social hierarchy once again. That gap can be ascribed to social causes rather than ethnic characteristics.

In some cases, underclass formation may be just a temporary form of social exclusion. In countries where the government pursues a policy of assimilation, members of the underclass might find their way to the lower class. However, in countries pursuing exclusionist policies, the majority of the members of the underclass might once again fall back to the status of lower caste exclusion. Numerous signs indicate that during the past six to eight years in Hungary the latter tendency can be seen.

One generation of the hopelessly unemployed follows on the heels of the other; a considerable part of the individual strategies to reach middle class status collapse; massive sections of the Roma who are between the underclass and the middle class are finding it increasingly difficult to eke out an existence; impoverished Roma families have no other option but to move from towns and prosperous villages to poorer rural areas; the size of the population of urban and rural ghettoes has been rising; the labour market and the so-called ‘community work’ are radically separated; increasingly the authorities have the tendency to treat the welfare problems of the Roma as law-enforcement issues to be solved with paramilitary means. As a consequence, Hungary has been witnessing the re-emergence of the lower caste. If in the future efforts are made to rectify that process, it is going to take many decades.

As for Loïc Wacquant’s thought-provoking article: in my view, in the countries where serious attempts have been made to establish Eastern European versions of the neo-liberal state, it is justified to speak of the underclass and of ethnic ghettoes – even if in several respects they differ from what we can see in the United States.