Title: MARGINALITY, ADVOCACY, AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF MULTICULTURALISM: NOTES ON ROMANI ACTIVISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE
Abstract: Abstract Activists who take up the cause of marginalized and discriminated cultural groups often find themselves in an ambiguous position in relation to the very people whose interests they seek to represent. Inspired by the ideas of multiculturalism, minority advocates turn the cultural identity of marginalized and discriminated minorities into the central focus of a political struggle for recognition. By so doing, however, they construct a particular sectional minority identity that not only fails to give full expression to individual identities, but is usually also "stigmatized" in the sense that it is popularly associated with standard stereotypical images and negative characteristics. This article identifies this ambiguity in contemporary projects of minority rights advocacy aimed at redressing the social and economic grievances of the Roma in Central Europe. It shows how activists in the articulation of their claims rely on essentialist assumptions of Romani identity. While these minority rights claims resonate well in international forums, they also run the risk of reifying cultural boundaries, stimulating thinking in ethnic collectives, reinforcing stereotypes, and hampering collective action. By reviewing some of the recent literature on multiculturalism in social and political theory, this article explores ways of dealing with this ambiguity. It concludes that minority advocacy for the Roma can avoid the tacit reproduction of essential identities by contesting the essentializing categorization schemes that lie at the heart of categorized oppression and by foregrounding the structural inequality that drives political mobilization. Key Words: minority rightsRomaCentral Europeadvocacymarginality Fieldwork for this essay was supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders, Belgium. An earlier draft was presented at the workshop "The Roma in Europe: Theorizing Marginality, Resistance and Integration" at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews, U.K., October, 2004. I am grateful to the participants of this workshop for a fruitful discussion. I would also like to thank Barbara Haverhals, the editors of Identities, and the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their constructive comments. Notes 1. The available literature on the Roma in Central Europe contains various crude numerical assessments of movement activity (Barany 2002 Barany, Zoltan. 2002. The East European Gypsies. Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics, Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]: 207; Crowe 1995 Crowe, David. 1995. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, London and New York: I. B. Tauris. [Google Scholar]: 105; Šiklová 1999 Šiklová, Jiřina. 1999. "Romové a nevládní, neziskové romské a proromské občanské organizace přispívající k integraci tohoto etnika". In Romové v České republice (1945–1998), Edited by: Lisá, Helena. Prague: Socioklub. [Google Scholar]; Vašečka 2001 Vašečka, Michal. 2001. "Rómovia". In Slovensko 2000. Súhrnná správa o stave spolocnosti, Edited by: Kollár, M. and Mesežnikov, G. Bratislava, Slovakia: Inštitút pre verejné otázky. [Google Scholar]: 179). Thus one finds authors reporting that, for example, in Czechoslovakia in 1990 there were more or less forty independent Romani organizations. In 1997 this figure had apparently risen to 113 in the Czech Republic alone. In 1999, the same authors tell us, Slovakia was home to ninety-two Romani organizations. Hungary in the beginning of the 1990s had eighteen of such organizations and the figure increased to about 250 in the latter half of the decade. Ostensibly, the numbers present straightforward evidence of the expansion of the Central European Romani movement in the 1990s. There is, however, less general agreement on the available figures than may appear at first sight. Not only can one find authors who cite much lower figures, the cited authors also remain extremely vague about the kinds of organizations they have counted or on what sources they have based their estimates. It is important to note, however, that Romani organizational growth is not only a matter of the number of organizations. Ultimately, numbers are less important than public attention. A small group of people or a small number of organizations may be quite successful in setting a movement into motion, especially if they are able to attract the attention of constituents, key public figures, and the media. 2. Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, for instance, provide an overview of the various group labels among those known as Gypsies in Bulgaria (Marushiakova and Popov 1997 Marushiakova, Elena and Popov, Vesselin. 1997. Gypsies (Roma) in Bulgaria, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]: 45–104). The authors discern complex patterns of identification and self‐identification among the people they study. Group designations are used to refer to different and sometimes overlapping groups, depending on the context in which these designations are used. For an interesting case study on Gypsy identity in Hungary, see the work by Michael Stewart based on fieldwork in the town of Harangos (Stewart 1997 Stewart, Michael. 1997. The Time of the Gypsies, Boulder, CO: Westview. [Google Scholar]). Stewart argues that "for the ordinary Gypsy in one of the unofficial ghettos on the edge of an Eastern European village or town, the maneuvers of Gypsy intellectuals on the national and international stages rarely mean much, at least as yet. Sometimes it seems that the Romany political parties spend more effort establishing their credibility among non-Gypsy authorities than among their own constituents" (1997: 4). 3. See http://www.romadecade.org 4. These are parties that have a reference to Romani identity (Cigány or Roma) in their party name. See http://www.valasztas.hu 5. For the 2002 elections, for example, a number of newly established Romani parties participated, among them parties such as the Hungarian Romani Party, the Democratic Romani Party, the Democratic Party of the Hungarian Gypsies, and the Democratic Party of Hungarian Roma. All claimed large support from among the Roma, but none of them achieved any meaningful results. 6. See http://www.volby.cz and http://www.mvrc.cz 7. The bad experiences of Romani activists in Slovakia with giving up their membership in an ethnic party in order to run for a mainstream party renewed an interest in ethnically based Romani politics in the beginning of the 2000s. A number of Romani parties in Slovakia, most notably the Romani Civic Initiative (ROI-SR), in the autumn of 2000 were involved in a rather ambitious attempt to unite Romani politicians in an electoral platform for the parliamentary elections of September 2002. Two Romani parties participated in the 2002 Slovak parliamentary elections. In the end, ROI-SR did not do better than 0.29 percent of the votes; even in the district of Spišská Nová Ves, where the party received most of its votes, they only managed to attract 1.83 percent. The Political Movement of the Roma in Slovakia (ROMA), a new Romani political party at the 2002 elections, scored in general a mere 0.21 percent; only in the district of Rimavská Sobota they managed to attract the marginally better score of 1,354 votes (3.27 percent). 8. The standardization of the Romani language is a project that is inextricably bound up with the project of the formation of a unified transnational Romani identity. So far, there is no generally accepted norm or standard language among speakers of the Romani language. According to one study on the subject, this means that "in general all dialects of Romani are equally acceptable for their speakers while all Roma consider their own dialect the 'best' and the 'purest'" (Bakker and Kyuchukov 2000 Bakker, Peter and Kyuchukov, Hristo, eds. 2000. What is the Romani Language?, Hertfordshire, U. K.: University of Hertfordshire Press and Centre de Recherches Tsiganes. [Google Scholar]: 24). Not all those who are considered as Roma speak a variant of the Romani language. 9. There are at least two strands of political theorists who have called for the recognition of cultural groups. One group of authors have placed their call in the wider context of their criticism of political liberalism. Vernon Van Dyke is often referred to as one of the pioneers in criticizing traditional liberalism for its exclusive focus on individuals and the state and its ignorance of cultural and ethnic groups as "right-and-duty-bearing units" (Van Dyke 1977 Van Dyke, Vernon. 1977. The individual, the state, and ethnic communities in political theory. World Politics, 29: 343–369. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 343). Others—most famously Will Kymlicka—have argued that the liberal tradition does not need to be seen as incompatible with a limited group-differentiated treatment of cultural groups (Kymlicka 1995 Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford, U. K.: Clarendon. [Google Scholar]). 10. Similar dilemmas and debates have come to mark identity-based movements in other parts of the world. For instance, studies of the indigenous movements in Latin America have shown a context where activism has evolved from an earlier paradigm where it meant "self-appointed foreigners speaking on behalf of groups, to the repositioning occasioned by the growing recognition that many groups have generated their own spokespeople and agendas for engaging the state and international non-governmental organizations" (Warren and Jackson 2002 Warren, Kay B. and Jackson, Jean E. 2002. "Introduction: Studying Indigenous Activism in Latin America". In Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America, Edited by: Warren, Kay B. and Jackson, Jean E. Austin: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]: 6). As a result, indigenous activism in this area has reached out globally to challenge the coercive power of the national state. Andrea Muehlebach (2003) Muehlebach, Andrea. 2003. What self in self-determination? Notes from the frontiers of transnational indigenous activism. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 10(2): 241–268. [CROSSREF][Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] has offered a detailed exploration of the debates and controversies relating to the recent attempts of indigenous movements to give voice to local injustice by employing a universal language of self-determination and raising their issues at the level of the United Nations. 11. I thank Stephen Reicher for bringing Verkuyten's article to my attention. 12. I thank Iris Marion Young for sending me her forthcoming article and for allowing me to cite from this work. 13. An example of this type of research can be found in Krista Harper's exploration of possible alliances between the Roma and the environmental movement in Hungary (Harper forthcoming Harper, Krista. "forthcoming. Does Everyone Suffer Alike? Race, Class, and Place in Hungarian Environmentalism". In Sustainability and Communities of Place, Edited by: Maida, C. Oxford, U. K., and New York: Berghahn. [Google Scholar]). I thank Krista Harper for bringing this topic to my attention.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 26
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