Wednesday, June 26, 2013
D1.18A (Oudemanhuispoort)
Due to contemporary constellations in Europe there are more and more people falling into the so-called category of semi-citizens (Cohen, 2009). The proposed paper investigates how citizenship regimes (Shaw & Štiks 2010: 6 – 7) (re)-construct the position of populations categorized as Roma. A specific focus lies on the examination of post-Yugoslav citizenship regimes currently being formed (or have recently been formed) also due to particular processes of EU integration. My hypothesis is that although Roma were mostly re-positioned within the new citizenship regimes following the criteria for the EU accession, their position in the new polities is still characterized by unevenness. Following this hypothesis, I also investigate how Roma can be perceived as Fourth-Ordered Semi-Citizens (Cohen 2009: 72). I argue that although most of the states in question did develop group-differentiated rights (Kymlicka 2002) for Roma, these rights were merely there to mask the latent (ethnic and social) hierarchization. In the case of Roma, this hierarchization was also based on the cultural representations that carried elements of cultural racism. My position is that, due to this special position, Roma can be perceived as both post-Yugoslav, post-socialist, but also as the European subaltern using Spivak’s term (1988). Although there have been some studies arguing that Roma are a subaltern (Trehan 2009), they have not offered a comprehensive understanding about how their position of subalternity is relevant with regards to citizenship regimes, which I will try to do in my paper.
