Roma Inclusion Policies Shaped in European Domestic Contexts

The generation of European policies on Roma inclusion deserves critical examinations by scholarship on the transformative effects of European policy making in power relations of states, civil society, and different publics in domestic arenas. The most common, though not exclusive, approach used in researches on the Europeanization of public policies is to scrutinize the adaptation of state practices, civil society actions, and public debates to the bureaucratic power and normative language of the European Union. Less attention has been paid to uncover the responses by state regimes and governance models to invitations and contestations at the conjunctures of top-down European Union policy formations and diverse civil society aspirations. The paper, based on practical involvement in contemporary Roma Inclusion policy debates, will offer an anthropological reading of the recent formations of National Roma Inclusion Strategies, a compulsory policy tasks for the new member states of the European Union. This reading will be informed by conceptual schemes proposed by anthropologists of policy debates and formations (Clarke, Newman, Shore, Weidel,) and by frame analysis of social movements and citizenship studies (Benford and Snow, Bacchi, Isin). By multi-sited ethnographic observations, and contextual reading of texts, statements, and performative political acts, I will examine how the encounters of European Union and domestic civil society discourses generate different state practices and also results in transformative effects of the official European Union and domestically relevant civil society frames.