The 2004 and 2007 EU Eastern enlargements facilitated the mobility of citizens from CEE countries, including European citizens of Roma ethnicity, which in turn contributed to the Europeanization of the ‘Roma issue’. This article examines the politics of Roma ethnicity by giving a synthetic, yet we hope comprehensive, overview of how recent Roma migrations from EU Member States (particularly from Romania) to the Spanish state can be understood and analysed in relation to both pre-existing policies for the Spanish Gitano communities and to wider European dynamics and structures.

Integration is a term that can fittingly be included in what W. B. Gallie labelled ‘essentially contested concepts’, since it has become a key term in both academia and policy-making and yet can be used – as it is – for a variety of meanings. While usually understood to address the situation of migrants, it has also recently been applied to Roma minorities in Europe, the vast majority of whom are European citizens and a minority of whom have left their country of origin. This chapter builds upon a discourse analysis of the National Roma Integration Strategies in Italy and Spain and on interviews with the policy-makers in charge of them, in a bid to understand what the term ‘integration’ means for Roma minorities according to the authorities. Through this analysis, I show how the politics of (dis)integration can affect not only migrants but also ethnic minorities who are represented and treated as similarly ‘foreign’ to the mainstream’s imagined community. In this sense, Roma-specific integration policies do not challenge wider structures of inequality. Even if they are well intended, they can contribute to the normalisation of a hegemonic narrative that sees a certain section of society – namely a national middle-class white society – as the bar for normality.

This article analyses how Roma are represented in official policy narratives in Italy and Spain by comparing the four cycles of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in the two countries. By tracing the representations that the Italian and Spanish governments hold (and make) about the Roma, I sketch out the different categories that EU‐ropean countries recur to as organizing principles to “other” underprivileged minorities. Based on the tailored‐approaches in which both Italy and Spain engage in framing Roma as either a “national” minority or not, I suggest that constructing or “producing” a minority in our imagined communities as characterized by national, cultural, social or migrant characteristics relies more on political expediency than on objective analytical categories.

Abstract:This article aims at problematizing the relation between identity recognition, economic redistribution, and political representation in the debate around Roma inclusion in contemporary Europe. Given that culture has increasingly become politicized, by analyzing the emergence of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture I reflect on the political and economic potential and drawbacks that cultural identity holds in a European society in which capitalism has turned into a cultural trait.