Roma Expulsions Challenge Europe's Benevolent Self-Image

[blondeatlast]

Like Arizona, France has incredible food, a rich culture--and it's share of outright scapegoating and hatred.

From Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty



A Roma family walks past a police officer as they arrive at the Lille-Lesquin airport, near Lille in northern France, for their flight to Romania on September 16.

It is arguably modern Europe's flagship ideal: the freedom to move across borders and seek a better life elsewhere.

But in the Europe of Nicolas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, and others, the privilege has its limits -- and its paradoxes. Effectively excluded, it seems, is the one group singly most identified with a nomadic and peripatetic existence: the continent's 10 million-strong Romany population.

The expulsion in the past month of at least 1,000 Roma from France highlights an issue that has been simmering for years. It also challenges the European Union's benevolent self-image as a bastion of open borders, ethnic integration, and nondiscrimination.

The sight of impoverished citizens reluctantly exiting one of the EU's founding states to return home to Romania also coincides with a worrying rise across the continent of the far right, which has capitalized on a fear of immigration and racial minorities to burrow its way into the political mainstream. more at link

http://www.rferl.org/content/Roma_Expulsions_Challenge_Europes_Benevolent_SelfImage_/2163231.html

[Solly Mack]

1. k/r

[sufrommich]

2. As it should. nt

[Uzybone]

3. But everything is wonderful in Europe

[Starry Messenger]

4. k & r

[rocktivity]

5. How are they being rounded up?

Do half-Romanians qualify? Most important, have they committed the crime of being in the country illegally?

:shrug:
rocktivity

[sufrommich]

8. Romania is part of the EU. I think they can travel to any other part

of the EU without special permission.

[merqz]

6. the French cops

"id" people at will in the banlieus, needing nothing remotely close to reasonable suspicion to do so. The irony is that so many people who criticize the Arizona law (and rightly so) would never realize that cops in France have always had the power that allegedly turns Arizona cops into "fascists"

[mix]

7. Europe's benevolent image/self-image?

That's a fucking laugh.

[virgogal]

9. And the Swedes put refugees into camps for years.