Abstract
The Roma have been subject to racist stereotyping almost since their first recorded mention in Europe. But what impact has the recent economic chaos had on hate speech, asks
‘Most Gypsies are unsuitable for co-existence, unsuitable for living among people. These Gypsies are animals and act as animals … they should not be tolerated or understood, but punished.’ That is what Zsolt Bayer, a founding member of FIDESZ (the majority party in Hungary), wrote in January 2013.
The collapse of communism in 1989- 1991 unleashed many forms of expression, long suppressed by the coercive state. The dismantling of state censorship regimes resulted in an explosion of print and electronic media, with bold criticism of the government and the flowering of avant garde art and literature. This newfound freedom produced expression of more questionable aesthetics as well: market-driven media quickly learned to emulate their capitalist elders by pandering to the lowest common denominator, with stories and images of crime and sex. As Zbigniew Pelcynzski, a Polish political scientist with whom I studied, put it: ‘In Poland we were always praised for being great readers of poetry. But that was only because we couldn’t get pornography.’
The bogeyman of the ‘Gypsy criminal’ has now been supplemented, in the economic crisis, by the ‘Gypsy welfare queen’
Freedom also allowed uglier forms of expression to surface: racist speech or hate speech. The Roma minority, the largest ethnic minority in Europe, quickly became a favourite target.
The historical antecedents to this flowering of anti-Roma speech are not difficult to find.
Roma have been subject to racist stereotyping almost since their first recorded mention in Europe. In 1938, in an essay entitled ‘Combating the Gypsy Menace’, Heinrich Himmler, who later became head of Hitler’s SS, popularised the idea of ‘Gypsy criminality’, explicitly positing a link between anti-social behaviour and ethnicity. In 2010, Himmler’s words were reborn in the remarks of the Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi, who noted the ‘physiological, natural problems related to criminality amid some Romanian communities, especially among Roma-born Romanian communities’. Lest anyone think that such derogatory speech is now the province only of the benighted officials of the new Europe, one need only look to Italy, where the head of the National Alliance Party, Gianfranco Fini, said of the Roma in 2007: ‘I ask myself how it is possible to integrate people who consider theft almost admissible and not immoral.’ Or to France, where former President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) issued a communiqué in the summer of 2010 deploring ‘the situation of lawlessness that characterised the Roma people’. In the Czech Republic, the National Party – a far-right nationalist political group – ran television advertisements during the Euro-parliamentary elections in 2009 proposing a ‘final solution to the Gypsy issue’. In today’s Europe, anti-Roma speech knows no geographic boundaries.
Rally against ‘Roma crime’, Budapest, Hungary, 13 February 2009
It is tempting to place the blame for racist expression and other recent manifestations of extremism on the European economic crisis. However, the reality is far more complex, and one cannot attribute it solely, or even substantially, to the crisis. The seeds of extremism in Europe can be found in populist politics, active in good economic times and bad.
In the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Slovakia, for example, extremism with an expressly anti-Roma character became evident in 2006-2008, in times of economic prosperity. During this period, extremist political parties found popular and electoral traction by espousing an explicitly anti-Roma agenda. In fact, economic prosperity arguably created more reason to hate the Roma: long-standing Roma settlements in city centres became economically valuable real estate; with money to be made, pushing Roma to the margins of the city and society became good business.
The economic crisis has certainly contributed to the dynamic of anti-Roma rhetoric, but it was a dynamic born years earlier, in the collapse of communism and the accompanying sharp reduction in the social safety net.
Roma and non-Roma alike were guaranteed jobs (even if unskilled or semi-skilled) throughout the communist bloc, where governments maintained policies of near full employment, housing (even if rudimentary) and health care (even if bribes were needed to secure adequate levels). The collapse of this social safety net resulted in an increased number of impoverished and aggrieved people, Roma and non-Roma. Populist politics has exploited the fears of the aggrieved majority, which has grown more aggrieved in economic hard times.
Racist speech that was once considered the exclusive province of neo-Nazis and the lunatic fringe is now commonplace in mainstream European politics
The bogeyman of the ‘Gypsy criminal’ has now been supplemented, in the economic crisis, by the ‘Gypsy welfare queen’. Anti-Roma political parties and politicians have suggested that Roma are parasitically living off social welfare benefits and promise a crackdown on those who are milking the state. But in fact, as the World Bank demonstrated in a report of 2010 entitled Roma Inclusion: An Economic Opportunity for Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Romania and Serbia, only a small minority of Roma receive social welfare benefits. While unemployment rates of Roma are indeed higher than the majority throughout Europe, many of those Roma unemployed in the World Bank study were actively looking for work, again belying the stereotype.
In many cases, the attraction of populist and extremist politics, including racist politics and expression, is a reaction to a variety of changes wrought by European Union membership, including the EU guarantees of free movement and the protection of minority rights. In addition to a rise in anti-Roma expression, we see in some of the same countries with significant Roma populations a rise in anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment, wrapped up in hostility to the EU. In 2009, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi publicly rejected the notion that Italy is or should be a multi-ethnic society, and he and his political allies used anti-Roma and anti-immigrant speech as a means of rallying the faithful.
Should we accept anti-Roma speech as a necessary evil in a democratic society? How best to regulate racist and hate speech in today’s Europe?
A dotted line between hate speech and violence?
European states have traditionally been less permissive than the United States in tolerating hate speech in law, and, in many cases, in practice. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe was eager to legislate against the revival of Nazi ideology. In contrast, the US, in ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, took a reservation with regard to free speech, recognising that US constitutional protections might be incompatible with the hate speech prohibition in the convention.
After the collapse of communism, a few European states, like Hungary, developed legal doctrine fairly close to the free speech absolutism of the US. But even Hungary, in 2009, banned a racist anti-Roma organisation, the Magyar Garda (which immediately reconstituted itself under a different name and continues to be active, pointing to the many practical problems inherent in ‘prohibiting’ hate speech).
While the US legal norms may seem quite permissive compared to Europe and the rest of the world, there is also a broad social consensus in the US that racist and hate speech is unacceptable. A federal, state or local government official who states on the record that African Americans are genetically predisposed toward crime would quickly find himself out of a job. The contrast to Europe is stark: far from a social consensus against anti-Roma speech, many European states seem to accept it and European politicians routinely exploit it. In the past three years, the president of France, the foreign minister of Romania, the minister of justice of Denmark, Hungarian parliamentarians and numerous other officials, many of them representing mainstream political parties, have engaged in racist speech against Roma. None have suffered any lasting adverse political consequence – indeed, the calculus of many engaging in such speech was that their political standing would be enhanced by anti-Roma rhetoric. Racist speech that may have once been considered the exclusive province of neo-Nazis and the lunatic fringe on the internet is now commonplace in mainstream European politics.
The US medicine of counter-hate speech is inapposite in this context.
Media in Europe frequently serve to amplify anti-Roma rhetoric and too rarely try to counter it. A few progressive media outlets run stories sympathetic to Roma or editorialise against racist speech, but they are in the minority in terms of numbers and readership. Roma lack the economic and political clout to engage in effective counter-speech: most Roma media outlets have proven not to be economically viable, relying on western donors for support, and in any case they do not reach a broad audience. Roma voices in mainstream media are largely non-existent. And Roma as an organised political force are still insignificant: rather than mobilise around issues of concern, too often they vote under pressure of anti-Roma hostility, vote-buying and intimidation. This is changing – a concerted campaign by activists in Serbia to encourage Roma to self-identify resulted in a 40 per cent increase in the number of Roma counted in the recent census, and a grassroots voter registration campaign in the same country resulted in greater popular input into the election of Roma representatives. But it will be a long time before Roma achieve the political influence of African Americans in the US.
It is simplistic to draw a neat causal line between hate speech and violence against Roma. But the constant drumbeat of anti-Roma speech from officials, without political consequence and not countered by effective speech conveying a different message, creates a climate where violence is more likely to occur. A campaign billboard depicting Roma as social parasites (as has happened in Slovakia) begets the politician calling for a ‘revolution against nomads’ and, ‘gypsies’ camps’ (as in Hungary), which begets the blogger calling for Roma to be banished or killed (again, in Hungary). When neo-Nazis feel emboldened to march through Roma communities with flaming torches as they did in Hungary last year, it should not be surprising when violence occurs.
Arguably those who suffer in an economic crisis are more susceptible to extremist messages of intolerance, and these messages are apt to spread more readily and efficiently through open societies that put a premium on free expression. But the value of open societies is that they can continuously reinvent themselves, respond flexibly to crises and, over the long run, maximise economic opportunity and respect for individual freedom. In the end, the causal relationship between economics and human rights violations is beside the point. Economic prosperity and protection of fundamental rights are important goals in and of themselves; there is value in pursuing both, and one need not, and should not, come at the expense of the other.
Societies cannot become tolerant simply through government fiat. But the state can set a powerful example in promoting tolerance and modelling behaviour for its citizens. One need not criminalise expression in order to help establish a new norm of behaviour. A zero tolerance policy toward racist speech by government or political party officials is a critical first step in changing public attitudes. Political parties and governments in Europe should adopt a simple rule: any official engaging in racist speech should be compelled to resign. Such a policy and practice would signal that certain kinds of speech are unacceptable in the public sphere and in polite society. This is not the same as changing hearts and minds, but it would be a step in the right direction.