The time of the Roma in times of crisis: Where has European neoliberal capitalism failed?

Introduction

This paper argues that the economic and financial crisis that has ensnared Europe since 2008 has been instrumental in reshaping employment and social relations against the interests of majority of the working people. My focus is on the largest minority in Europe, namely the Roma, who are routinely demonised and have come to occupy the position of the ‘convenient scapegoat’ for European nation-states’ inability to provide solutions to their economic and political woes, the growing socio-economic inequalities within them, the usurping of national and global wealth by the few and, consequently, the emiseration of the many. The leadership of the European Union (EU) and the elites in most EU member states have been pivotal in engineering this entrapment of EU working people. The latter are increasingly and perilously obfuscating the deteriorating working and living conditions they experience with the creation of an artificial threat, that of the Roma, specifically, as well as of invidious ‘others’, more broadly.

My aim in this paper is to offer a critical appraisal of some aspects of the European version of neoliberal capitalism and explicate its role in nurturing racialised social tensions through the reshaping of the relations of production and the scapegoating of minority groups, such as the Roma. My account is informed by classic (Marx, 1847/1955, 1867/1990) and contemporary studies of capitalism (Harvey, 2005; Žižek, 2010), as well as by critical theory, such as Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1944/1973) thesis on the rise of anti-Semitism in pre-war Europe.

The paper begins by highlighting the importance of adopting a class analysis in explaining the impact of the crisis on social relations within the EU. It argues that this framing is necessary to enhancing our understanding about the attack waged by capital on the majority of the EU workforce and the attendant scapegoating of minority groups including the Roma. It then outlines its theoretical tenets by drawing on recent European history, such as some key lessons from the Holocaust. In doing so, it makes the case for a reorientation of public policy away from the so-called Roma problem to that of the nature of EU-style neoliberalism. In the next section, I offer empirical evidence from some key EU countries, mainly France, Germany and England, which point to the systemic problems permeating European neoliberalism and its quest for scapegoating vulnerable groups such as the Roma, in order to divide the working class and divert attention away from the inherently exploitative and problematic nature of capitalist social relations. Finally, I conclude by discussing some historical antecedents of the current crisis, the radical re-articulation of which could offer an exit from the current crisis of global neoliberal capitalism.

Crisis opportunism, class analysis and neoliberalism

The beginning of one of the most serious financial and economic crises in the history of capitalism is thought to have been in 2006 in the USA with the uncontrollable spread of house repossessions (Harvey, 2010). In September 2008 the investment bank Lehman Brothers went bust and the shockwaves spread rapidly across the globe. Since then, many pundits, experts and market specialists have vehemently argued that the crisis could have been aborted. For example, the US government-appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) (2011) reported that the causes of the crisis were, among other factors, extensive failures in financial regulation, remarkable breakdowns in corporate governance, ill-prepared policymakers with a lack of a ‘full understanding of the financial system they oversaw’ (2011: xxi) and, intriguingly, systematic lack and/or breach of accountability. In other words, this was not an inescapable catastrophe but a calamity that involved governments, institutions and powerful financial, economic and political actors. Yet, this begs the question: if the crisis was preventable, why did it occur in the first place? Or, more importantly, given that precious little was done to prevent the crisis, could the latter have been welcomed by some (dominant) actors as an opportunity to radically reform the system or some aspects within it?

This requires a closer look at what ‘crisis’ really means within capitalism. Texts in political economic theory emphasise the nature of the capitalist system of production and its insatiable demand for new markets (Harman, 2009; McLaren and Farahmandpour, 2005). More than that, they demonstrate how crises are inbuilt in the capitalist mode of production and, in effect, a sine qua non of its continuous quest for quantitative development (Kautsky, 1892/1910; Luxemburg, 1899, 1908/1971). Marx’s (1867/1990, 1894/1967) original analysis explicated the way in which capital operates and highlighted the inherent conflict between labour and capital. According to this thesis (Marx, 1894/1967) when the tendency of the rate of profit is to decline, as is the case with the recent global recession, various tactics can be activated to ameliorate the consequences (i.e. falling profits). In other words, capitalism has the ability and flexibility to cushion itself against continuously falling rate of profit and achieve a return to acceptable levels of profitability. Some of the mechanisms that allow capitalism to achieve this are wage reduction and labour cost compression, which are complemented by similar mechanisms, such as the creation and preservation of a surplus population (for example, through high unemployment or immigration) and an increase in the rate of exploitation of the labour force. This has some spill-over effects, such as deterioration in employment conditions, increase in unemployment and degradation of workers’ protection and employment rights. The latter include pension rights, welfare protection, education, health and other services that were put in place after the Second World War in order to secure capitalism’s longevity.

It is suggested that what the majority of European workers are currently experiencing is an onslaught on most of the fronts mentioned earlier, which points to one of the options capitalism activates as a means of exiting an economic impasse. In other words, capitalism targets workers in an attempt to reverse the falling rate of profit, which is what led to the economic crisis in the first place. It can be further argued that the recent economic crisis is nothing but an orchestrated attack on labour by capital, rather than an accidental calamity or failure of any markets, states or institutions to perform their roles effectively. In order to fully understand the nature of this attack, we need to employ a class analysis.

In this paper, I propound a class analysis, which, following Bourdieu (1984) and Kalb (1997), but also Marx (1894/1967), is a relational category. As Kalb (1997: 10) argued, class is ‘an analytical, relational and dynamic construct that sensitizes one to basic social mechanisms and key social relationships’. This requires an expanded understanding of class in order to include the whole field of force ‘that emerges when unequal, divided, sometimes even antagonist sets of people, with differential access to different sets of resources, try to survive, understand, and reproduce their mutually connected ways of life’ (Kalb, 1997: 5). This approach has the benefit of treating sections of the European population, such as the Roma, the so-called non-productive immigrants and so on, as part of a unified group. Unified not necessarily as a class in itself, but in terms of belonging to and forming a group with common characteristics, given the interconnectedness and interdependency of national labour markets and economies within global neoliberalism. In the next sections, I use the terms ‘labour force’, ‘workers’ and ‘poor’ to refer to some of these segments of the EU population, adding to the complexity of my account. While these terms signify overlapping through distinct social groupings, the appropriateness of their usage stems from the current social and economic reality, which has forced upon us some mutations and transformations

in the balance of power between the classes and groups that struggle at every moment for control over the worlds in employment and their proceeds. And in this struggle, it is the transnational class and the ‘modernizing’ fractions of the cultural bourgeoisie and high state nobility, allied under the banner of neoliberalism, that have gained the upper hand and embarked on a sweeping campaign to reconstruct public power in line with their material and symbolic interests. (Wacquant, 2009: 5)

In recent years, immigration within the EU as well as dealing with the ‘other’ have become two of the most fervently debated topics, while in some countries these issues have triggered a ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1972). Although the positive benefits from immigration for the host country have been documented (Facchini and Mayda, 2008), many EU countries, such France and Germany, have remained undeterred from excluding immigrants, documented and undocumented alike, from receiving welfare benefits (Escandell and Ceobanu, 2009). In a similar fashion, other countries, such as Spain, Italy and England, have reformed their entry and citizenship criteria in order to impose limits on immigration. The legitimisation of these policies stems from the 2008 economic and financial crisis, which has enhanced a ‘blame-the-victim’ approach, which, purportedly, protects the productive workforce from labour market rigidities. That is to say, when the pie is shrinking, having fewer people sharing it can act as a ‘relieving valve’. I argue that this line of reasoning is nothing but a smokescreen for a concerted effort on behalf of the ruling class to renew the conditions of submission of labour into capital. Thus, the resultant division of the workforce and society at large into ‘us’ and ‘them’ ruptures existing solidarities and aborts the possibility for establishing new ones. As such, it has to be viewed as an orchestrated attack against the unity of the labour force and a lever against the formation of potential class alliances. This is facilitated, mediated and materialised through appropriate ideological propositions, such as the one that views economic crises as opportunities.

Following the logic of ‘crisis opportunism’, crises ought to be exploited as a means of promoting the dicta of global neoliberal capitalism. Crises, then, are the most expedient conjectures for discarding the old and ushering in the new. This attitude to crises has been repeatedly (p)raised in mainstream media and was most lucidly exemplified, among others, by Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s chief-of-staff (in Blinder, 2009) ‘You don’t ever want a serious crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid’. After 2008, this crisis opportunism has been galvanised with much-needed ideological justification for the renewed onslaught of global neoliberal capitalism that would ensue. Invariably this new phase of capitalism (i.e. accelerated global neoliberalism) is premised upon a set of policies which range from fiscal discipline, privatisation, liberalisation of trade/interest rates/financial processes to deregulation and promotion of secure property rights (Williamson, 1994). This array of policies, also known as the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson, 1990), is a reform agenda which is applied with differential emphasis and focus in different countries. Nearly always, though, it is accompanied by a ‘necessitation discourse’ (e.g. austerity policies in England), which makes its adoption seem unavoidable. In other cases, it is also held as a cure to all economic, social, political and other ills of economically weaker countries (e.g. Greece).

From the late 1960s, the global elite has been contemplating the idea of a new world order, whereby crises could enable governments to curtail important social, economic and political benefits that were gained through struggle in the first post-war years. The timing the elites chose to make this strategy publicly known coincided with the dollar crisis and the attendant abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement. The agreement reached at Bretton Woods in 1944 was the vehicle for the creation of a global order, which dictated the safeguarding of peace and prosperity and was premised upon the creation of a secure framework for international political negotiation and trade (Harvey, 2010). However, the new reality brought about with the war in Vietnam and the two oil shocks in the 1970s required the renewal of the terms of this agreement. In economic terms this materialised with the abandonment of the fixed exchange rate with gold and its replacement with the fixing of all world currencies against the dollar. The financial architecture that was put in place with the unification of the global financial markets in 1986 enabled the shockwaves of capitalist rigidity, failure or malfunctioning in one place to be felt everywhere else in the world. This created the financialisation of the global economy, which can only be analysed with categories such as new imperialism or fictitious capital (Fuchs, 2014). Nowadays ‘competition between capitals and the need to expand accumulation result in attempts to create “financial motivations” that have a high risk but allow very high short-time revenue rates’ (Fuchs, 2014: 13). Thanks to this transformation, capitalism is not only different to what it was in Marx’s day, but radically different to what it used to be in the 1960s.

Politically, neoliberal capitalism ‘is relative democracy: democracy but not too much’ (Unger, 1999: 68). Two countries that exemplify this are Italy and Greece, which both had EU-imposed bankers replacing nationally elected prime ministers in the wake of the economic crisis. The EU citizenry has reacted to this debunking of democracy, at best, with apathy, which further gives rise to a depoliticised form of politics that currently prevails in large parts of the EU (Munck, 2005). At worst, citizens in an array of EU countries have resorted to forms of collective and self-punishment, manifest through the rise of extreme right wing or even fascist political parties, such as the National Front in France and Golden Dawn in Greece, respectively. In short, the EU version of neoliberalism corresponds to systemic political changes which range from the weakening of civil society to the replacement of democratic power with market power (Sinha, 2005). For example, privatisation has led to conflict between politically determined and market-determined decisions, while the promotion of an unregulated market offers enough power to firms to override democratic processes (MacEwan, 2005).

Occupationally, as well as in terms of labour market arrangements, neoliberalism rests upon the operation of unfettered international competition, which purports to offer workers some security by reducing production and employment-associated costs in order to compete within and win world markets (Radice, 2005). This approach is underpinned by the free movement of labour, which is a cornerstone of the EU’s (neo-)liberal agenda and aims to create a transnational labour market by increasing labour supply and, therefore, reducing wages and undermining the power of organised labour. As Harvey (2010: 66) argued, ‘wage repression because of superabundant labour supply and consequent lack of effective consumer demand is a much more serious problem’ than profit squeezes and it can help us understand what lies behind the crisis of 2008.

Given the significance of the capital–labour relation, the key to understanding the current crisis is the major weakness of labour and the significant strength of capital. At the EU level, this is instantiated through the labour policies put in place, which, on one hand, support the free movement of labour, while on the other, create divisions between ‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’ workers and the working class. This strategy forms part of a concerted effort by the ruling class to:

control labour by putting individual workers in competition with each other for the jobs on offer. To the degree that the potential labour force is gendered, racialised, ethnicised, tribalised or divided by language, political and sexual orientation and religious beliefs, these differences emerge as fundamental to the workings of the labour market. They become tools through which the capitalists manage labour supplies in tandem with privileged sections of the workforce who use racism and sexism to minimise competition. (Harvey, 2010: 61)

European-style neoliberalism and the spectre of the Holocaust

The ongoing crisis has given impetus to feelings of insecurity, marginalisation and victimisation among minority groups such as the Roma, while, at the same time, it has led to their criminalisation and to mounting hostility against them. In this context, the virulence of the persecution of such groups in many EU countries such as France, Germany and England has to be viewed not only as an outcome of the current economic crisis, but also as part of a coordinated effort to restore class power from above. That is to say, it is a structural characteristic interwoven into the current fabric of the EU version of neoliberal capitalism rather than an aberration from ‘normality’. It is the ugly, yet true face of the EU: a form of ‘European Union Realism’, that is to say a crude representation and encapsulation of the social relations in the richest economic area in the world.

In this light, the resurgence of the marginalisation and stigmatisation of many Roma and other minority groups within the EU has to be approached as the outcome of the re-organisation of labour and restructuring of class relations. According to one of the richest people in the world, Warren Buffet, ‘there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won’ (Buffett, 2011, in Sargent, 2011). This win of capital over labour is the product of the restoration of class power that neoliberal capitalism has helped solidify (Harvey, 2005) and is characterised by wage suppression, flexibilisation in the workplace, a deterioration in working conditions and the precarinisation of employment; in a nutshell this situation leads to the gradual dismantling of the world of work (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). The workers then, instead of mobilising to protect their rights in unison with other oppressed segments of the population, are divided between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and fight against ‘artificial enemies’, such as the Roma, non-productive immigrants and any other groups conveniently construed as the ‘other’. That is to say, instead of combating structural injustices that lie at the core of the capitalist system of production, the labour force is invited to compartmentalise these issues by racialising them. In this way, systemic failures of the capitalist mode of production are masked under the rubric of ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ differences or even under the alleged inability of specific groups to be integrated into mainstream society, incompatibility of lifestyles between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and so on.

Despite the urgency and severity of the issues currently facing many Roma groups in the EU, this is by no means a new situation. Their demonisation and resultant persecution is by now a familiar tactic employed by the ruling class to tear apart the working class in pursuit of its own interests. A case in point is the fascist National Socialist party before the Second World War, which invented an enemy, namely the Jews, but also homosexual people, the Roma, communists and other groups, in order to divide the working class and justify the atrocities it would commit in the name of national unity and racial purity (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1944/1973). In a similar fashion, the Roma principally, but also other minority groups, are currently being construed as the enemy by an increasingly repressive and non-democratic EU leadership. This strategy obfuscates the organised onslaught on the working class, who turns against itself thus further diminishing its own potential to act as a social class for itself (Marx, 1847/1955) and take part in the restoration of class power from below. Inevitably, the rebalancing of class power is left entirely to the capitalist class who acts under the auspices of the state. These power dynamics have left the majority of EU member states void of any democratic, political, moral and axiological legitimacy. Instead of sovereign entities in support of their citizens’ interests, they are increasingly being transformed into arenas where local, that is national elites, compete for power and access to the international markets and the global arena of capital. The troubled life and slow death of the (people of the) Eurozone is nothing but an exemplification of the war waged by the European ruling classes in their fight for a bigger share in the global market. This route requires the subordination of the working class and is not travelled for the first time. The history of scapegoating and racism in Europe goes as far back as the establishment of the European nation-states and was most recently played out in the build-up to the Second World War.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1944/1973) analysis serves as a powerful reminder of the creation of scapegoats in order to manipulate the mass of the working people and disguise the organised barbarism committed by the Nazis. According to this account, the targeting of the Jews (and all those groups mentioned earlier) was nothing but an act of concealment by the leadership of the National Socialist party of their pursuit of domination of the working class:

The Jews are today the group which, in practice and in theory, draws to itself the destructive urge which the wrong social order spontaneously produces. They are branded as absolute evil by absolute evil. … Now that power is no longer needed for economic reasons, the Jews are designated as its absolute object, existing merely for the exercise of power. (1944/1973: 137)

The time of the Roma in times of crisis

In this section, I discuss how the 2008 crisis has been profoundly transforming social relations with some key EU states, with an emphasis on the effect it has had on the Roma people. As growth within the EU has been declining, unemployment has been increasing. Some argue that a yet-more-flexible economy is in the making while others talk about the further casualisation of employment, a serious loss in workers’ rights and the worsening of working conditions (Callinicos, 2010). Although the precise impact of these developments on the European Roma is less well known, the ramifications for groups with similar characteristics, that is to say those with low socio-economic status, are discernible. For example, the economic crisis has led to high unemployment, which has become one of the most pressing issues in the EU. In late 2010 and early 2011, 15 out the 27 EU countries had unemployment rates of over 8% while 10 countries saw unemployment rising beyond 11% (Eurostat, 2011). In late 2013, unemployment in the Eurozone area was around 12%, while five of its member states (namely, Portugal, Cyprus, Croatia, Spain and Greece) had a higher than 15% unemployment rate (Eurostat, 2013). In other words, unemployment has become the matrix of socio-economic failure for many EU countries while the labour market has become the field par excellence of the denial of the right to employment and concomitant exclusion of a sizable part of EU citizenry from key institutions as well as social, economic and civic activities.

Among other things, unemployment is associated with lower levels of physical and mental health (Jin et al., 1995). In addition, unemployment and economic insecurity play a significant role in the reshaping of social relations. A recent study by the Europe Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI, 2010) pointed out that racism has soared during the economic crisis and immigrants, foreigners and other marginalised groups, such as the Roma, are increasingly identified as the victims of intolerance, negative discrimination and racism. In addition, as far as the Roma are concerned, they have been associated with acts of discrimination both at an institutional as well at a personal level (OSCE, 2008b). The history and intensity of the hostility and marginalisation of the Roma has been extensively discussed elsewhere (Liégeois, 2007; Revenga et al., 2002). While it manifestly predates the current financial and economic crisis, it has been accentuated by it and has taken on new dimensions. Here, I focus on the anti-Roma hostility that coincided with the crisis.

No single term is adequate to grasp the diversity and richness of what is commonly referred to as the ‘Roma’ and no agreed terminology has thus far been developed to refer to the various Roma groups living in Europe. Some influential organisations, such as the EU, prefer the term ‘Roma’, which is often used from within these communities (European Parliament, 2008). However, in other countries different terms are utilised. For example, in the UK the umbrella term ‘Gypsy, Roma and Traveller’ is used to embrace all communities residing there. However, the term ‘Gypsy’ is widely rejected across Europe as pejorative. At any rate, adopting a single term to refer to all groups is not only practically difficult but also problematic. Here I adopt the term ‘Roma’ to refer to the groups who live in Western, Central and Eastern Europe and the term ‘Gypsies and Travellers’ to refer to those groups living in the UK. While some Roma groups lead a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle, this is mainly pursued within a single country of residence. In any case, the majority of Roma people are sedentary (Liégeois, 1994). The European Roma are historically rooted in most countries in which they currently live (Themelis and Foster, 2013) and the historical embeddedness of the European Roma cannot be disputed more than for any other European group (Themelis, 2008). In other words, the Roma are ‘a true European minority’ (Council of Europe, 1993), whose history forms an important part of European history. Nevertheless, the European Roma are in many contexts perceived as transient, foreign or even ‘alien’ groups (Bhopal and Myers, 2008). This treatment has given rise to a representation of the Roma as a ‘problem group’ and has led to a focus on their alleged criminality, outlandishness, incompatibility of lifestyle and other problem characteristics in comparison to the dominant society (Themelis, 2009). In order to break away from such a myopic treatment, another approach has been propounded, which focuses on the Roma identity and views the increasing importance of Romani issues within national and European public policy agendas, as a type of racialisation of politics and policy. This is nowhere more obvious than in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, where, in the context of post-communist transition the development of a politicised Roma discourse prevails.

In recent years, rising hostility has been evidenced against many European Roma groups and, especially after 2008, their living and working conditions have dramatically deteriorated. In this section, I start by exemplifying, analytically, the relationship between the Roma and some immigrant groups. I then move on to explore the link between the economic crisis and the worsening of the treatment of Roma groups by focusing on France, a country that has been wrestling with social unrest and rising dissent by its disaffected urban and suburban population for a long time. I then offer some further examples of anti-Roma (and anti-immigrant) hostility, mainly from Germany and England, but also other EU countries, in order to explain the relationship between the reshaping of neoliberal capitalism and enmity against the ‘other’.

In October 2005, the forgotten youths of Paris, that is unemployed teenagers ‘from destitute suburban housing projects’ (Sahlins, 2006), took to the streets after the electrocution of two French young men of Malian and Tunisian descent, who were trying to flee the police. The protests soon spread to more than 274 sites within the city of Paris and beyond. As a result, several schools and other public buildings, and approximately 10,000 cars were incinerated in three weeks of civil unrest. In March 2009, Muslim youths clashed anew with the police, while tensions and uprisings in the French capital seemed to be interwoven in its contemporary social fabric. At the same time, the far right, represented politically by the National Front, was raising its political influence among a disaffected urban working class and all those discontent with, and disaffected by, rising unemployment and inequalities within the French society and with declining living standards. To all these acute social problems, the French government responded with disproportionate force against the Roma (and non-productive immigrants), a set of acts with high symbolic significance. To be precise, the expulsion of approximately 700 Roma people with Romanian and Bulgarian background from various sites in France in August 2010 was shocking, though not without precedent. In July of the same year, the French National Assembly passed a law that banned the practice of Islamic face covering. On the ‘face of it’, this is about women’s emancipation and, in effect, about ‘égalité’, one of the cornerstones of the French Republic. However, something else was at play here. As Scott (2010) observed this was ‘part of a campaign to purify and protect national identity, purging so-called foreign elements – although many of these “foreigners” are actually French citizens – from membership in the nation’. It is part of an inimical bid by the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his government ‘to capture the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim [and anti-Roma] animus that has brought electoral gains to the rightwing National Front party and to disarm the Socialist opposition, which has so far offered little resistance to the xenophobic campaign’ (Scott, 2010). Lest there are any doubts about the determination of the French government of the time to make political capital from the situation, it chose that moment to announce another two policies directed against the Roma and immigrants, namely ‘the criminalisation of entire families rather than just individuals and the stripping of citizenship from immigrants with criminal convictions’ (Brooks, 2010). The dynamism of the French government has been described as ‘a chilling moment in French history, a cynical mobilisation of racist feeling that risks unleashing an even worse atmosphere of pogrom and violence against minorities, immigrants and all black people’ (Kimber, 2010).

But what was the ulterior meaning of the Sarkozy government’s actions against the Roma and various groups it perceived as the ‘other’? How can we understand and explain the attack on groups who occupy a marginal position in the labour market and pose no threat to the French state and the rest of the workforce? Understanding France means understanding contemporary Europe. The French government aimed to show that it can be taken seriously by its European counterparts and its domestic electorate. The point it was trying to make was that France is a masterful state which is willing and able to exercise its force, no matter how brute and disproportionate the latter is. The deportation of a few hundreds of Roma people did not resolve the social, economic or other problems facing France. The sending back to Romania and Bulgaria of children, who comprised a big proportion of the Roma people under attack, has to be seen as a symbolic act by the French government to show its resoluteness to exercise control in its own territory, that it can put its house in order. But who is the French government trying to persuade of its ability to bring ‘order’? What is at stake here? The French government’s intention was to create a scapegoat, that is to say ‘an easy target for politicians seeking to distract attention from problems at home by playing on fears over security’ (Hollinger and Bryant, 2010). In addition, there was something bigger at stake, which can help us extrapolate useful lessons for the rest of the EU too. France plays a leading role in the EU and, together with Germany, they are at the helm of the Eurozone economy. The impact of domestic actions in either of these countries extends far beyond their borders as the two countries have the ability to influence the policies of their counterparts within the Eurozone and EU more broadly.

Incidentally, similarly tough measures against the Roma were announced at the same time in Germany, though the latter initially publicly distanced itself from the French approach. Specifically, in the summer of 2010 Germany forcefully repatriated to Kosovo approximately 12,000 Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians. This massive act of repatriation was undertaken without due consideration of the well-being of deportees and the most vulnerable among them, the children. According to a report by UNICEF (2010: 7) serious concerns were raised about ‘the return of individuals without a secure residence status to Kosovo’, as well as about the fact that ‘the best interests of these children have not so far been considered a priority, despite the fact that over half of these individuals with Roma background are children and almost two-thirds of them were born and have grown up in Germany’. Despite UNICEF’s (2010) warnings that the deportation could lead to severe trauma and chronic illness for many of the adults and prevent the children from exercising their right to educational, medical and welfare services, the German government looked poised to use its sizable economic and political power to create a problem rather than to resolve it.

The aggressive approach of both the French and German governments was swiftly emulated by England, who prepared legislation, also in the summer of 2010, allowing its authorities to evict Traveller families from campsites they legally abided in. This follows forced evictions, such as part of the Dale Fare community, a Traveller camp site in Essex, South East England. The local council, namely Basildon Council, devoted approximately a third of its annual budget, that is £8 million (BBC, 2012), to evict 86 Traveller families in what was coined as the ‘battle of Basildon’ (Barkham, 2011). In order to execute its plan, the council needed the support of the state, which was abundantly provided. The coalition government Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, was openly associated with an anti-Traveller stance long before he took up this crucial post. While still Shadow Minister for Communities, Pickles wrote:

Communities across the country are going to face the bombshell of having a traveller camp dumped on their back yard, whether they like it or not. Councils are powerless to resist these regional targets and are being bullied into building on the green belt or using compulsory purchase powers to provide the land for travellers. It’s not fair that hard-working families have to save up to get on the housing ladder while Travellers get special treatment at taxpayers’ expense. (Pickles, in Brown, 2008)

The shift to overt hostility against Travellers was successfully marked and would soon become the new realpolitik within England. David Cameron (2011), the British Prime Minister, officially signalled this turn through a carefully crafted speech he delivered to a German audience in February 2011:

We must build stronger societies and stronger identities at home. Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them … It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things.

This type of liberalism, I argue, is European neoliberalism, which is emerging renewed from the ashes of the financial and economic meltdown. Its main difference from its predecessor is that, while it upholds allegiance to basic human rights, the rule of law and democracy, it concurrently seeks to compartmentalise and eventually dismantle them. Consonant with this type of European neoliberalism is the principle underpinning the state-led expulsions of Roma groups in France, Germany and England and other countries. In this way a unifying form of discrimination is created by powerful European states with the pretext of acting to protect human and other rights for the majority of their citizens. Invoking liberal values has long proven to be a sine qua non of political rhetoric as the European citizenry is sensitised to the ‘unreconstructed’, ugly racism of, say, the 1950s. The latter, would take the form of ‘no Irish, no Roma’ signs outside pubs, harassment, and verbal or physical abuse, but would now seem as an anathema to the liberal consensus. Nevertheless, the tensions this liberal pact masks are not to be underestimated. As Žižek (2010) points out:

Progressive liberals are, of course, horrified by such populist racism. However, a closer look reveals how their multicultural tolerance and respect of differences share with those who oppose immigration the need to keep others at a proper distance. ‘The others are OK, I respect them,’ the liberals say, ‘but they must not intrude too much on my own space. The moment they do, they harass me’.

The governments of many EU states, and especially some powerful ones among them, such as France, Germany and England, share some crucial characteristics. First, the legal, political and symbolic force they use against some of the most marginalised groups in their societies is disproportionate to the threat posed by the latter. In fact, this force only serves to reassert the powerlessness of the targeted groups. At the same time, though, it serves as a reminder of the real interests of the state, reaffirmed as they are in times of crisis. Hence, instead of protecting the most vulnerable, the state becomes a force field that internalises class relations (Harvey, 2005: 11) in that it exerts its power, real and symbolic, to deny subordinated groups the right to abode, employment, health, education and so on. The message from these types of state violence is simple: in dire economic conditions the state is poised to protect its ‘true’ citizens from ‘episodic intruders’, such as immigrants, and unwanted others, such as the Roma. At the same time, these self-same nation-states do nothing to deal with the real problems endemic in their countries, such as unacceptably high unemployment rates, spiralling social inequalities, unprecedented poverty rise, continuously suppressed wages and so on. By contrast, they mask the shifting of class power from the poor to the rich and the further worsening of the position of the working class, which is divided along false lines and is thusly prevented from taking action against those truly responsible for its emiseration.

Conclusions

Although crises are inherent features of capitalist development, the exploitation and even manufacturing of crises on a grand scale, such as the one that threatens to dismantle the EU, are characteristics of the current and most virulent stage of capitalism (i.e. global neoliberal capitalism). In this vein, we should not be taken aback by the inability of most EU governments to actively promote social stability, economic recovery and political credibility within their borders, or even for a return to the quasi-democratic political system that EU citizens used to enjoy until very recently. Instead, we ought to identify, explicate and openly discuss the origins of the current crisis in order to expose it for what it is: a welcomed opportunity by the ruling class to reorganise production and employment in order to restructure the balance of forces in its favour.

While minority groups, such as the Roma, are more often blamed rather than recognised for their multiple contributions to the societies in which they live, since the beginning of the financial and economic crisis they have also been given the role of the collective scapegoat, the ‘suitable enemy’ (Fekete, 2009). This practice is deeply destabilising and socially divisive as it pits segments of the population against each other. Yet, this is not an entirely new phenomenon. The deepening of the economic and financial crisis has exacerbated the socio-economic position of most European Roma, immigrants as well as of other vulnerable groups. This development has to be approached as an outcome of the widening of structural inequalities that underpin the crisis within the increasingly neoliberalised Euroscape. In this conjuncture, most politicians in Europe ‘would rather not examine the cause of the economic crisis roiling the continent—many were complicit in dismantling the checks and balances that eventually led to the current recession—“criminal gypsies” come in very handy’ (Hallinan, 2010). However, the recent history of Europe should serve as a reminder. As Bauman (1989) eloquently reminds us about the causes of the Holocaust, lack of democracy was a problem. European states, instead of sliding further down the anti-democratic and xenophobic road that burst Europe asunder in the 20th century, should remind themselves that ‘what happened to the Jews has been instrumentalized and transformed into an ideology of legitimation for the present system’ (Postone, 1980: 98). The European Roma, while they are similarly used as a tool for the instrumentalisation and ideological legitimisation of the structural violence and unfairness of the current system, they should not be left to experience the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust. Now, more than ever, the working people of Europe ought to defend society against the neoliberal assault and turn the crisis of the system into an opportunity for the people.