‘States rights’ comes to Europe

How many divisions does the European Commission have?

Yes, P, but in response, why is the Champs Élysées lined with trees?

I’m not sure this is really a matter of moving the EU in the direction of a Federal Democracy more than it is of a supranational club reminding its members that a) there are rules to being in the club (such as do not use the agents of state coercion to target ethnic minorities) b) if you break the rules while in the club there will be consequences. If France truly decided to leave the EU it wouldn’t set off a European civil war (though the political-economic consequences would be pretty extreme) because the EU couldn’t/wouldn’t try to forcibly retain France within the Union.

As for the Economist – here’s a little thought experiment one can try when attempting to figure out what it’s take will be on an issue. ‘What would a centre-right investment banker think?’ – remember to tailor all your arguments to the prejudices of upper-middle class white males – even if you have access to empirical data that is widely available and would contradict these prejudices they must be ignored. Subscriptions might suffer as a result

If the Parliament and Commission prevail, as they should, it seems to me that this will change the effective political structure of the EU, in the direction of a federal democracy.

I wish I could join in such an optimistic hope. The EU being what it is, Reding is being slapped down and forced to apologise for stating the obvious in a less than exquisitely diplomatic manner. Almost all European PMs are basically expressing sympathy for Sarkozy and regretting Reding’s “uncareful words”.

Revealing enough, Sarkozy’s response was something along the lines of “if Mrs. Reding likes the Roma, Luxembourg can have them”. Hence, Mrs. Reding is not being acknowledged as a properly European authority – she’s only as good as the country backing her. Since it’s tiny Luxembourg, well, who’s that woman telling the Empereur what to do in His lands?

As incorrect as it is, this charade shows how much the EU is about preserving individual interests, and which little regard national authorities hold for European institutions. When European institutions aren’t even allowed to cry out agains ethnical cleansing without being mobbed by national primma donnas, I guess we are a long way from moving towards federalism.

I seem to remember that the French rejected the proposed Constitutional Treaty five years ago. France has been an independent nation for a millennium and has never agreed to become an administrative region of a larger state. Yet you’re arguing that France’s claim to independence is equivalent that of South Carolina. Not a particularly compelling argument. Neither is the implied argument that expulsion of non-nationals is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow.

IIRC the slave states wanted slaves to count for the purpose of apportioning representation but not for apportioning taxation.
Thus the compromise.

I’m not “closer to the action” (any more) but what comes to mind is what happened after Austria formed a right-wing government including an extremist party. The EU at the time expressed concern and appointed a kind of watchdog. Nothing ever came of it but it was a sign that the EU for once tried to uphold “values” as opposed to just being an integrated economy. The EU has always been mainly about a certain economic, “free-market” regime and disputes with member states have almost always been about enforcing and policing that regime. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has long had modest powers to enforce human rights standards in Council of Europe member countries and some progress has resulted from its jurisdiction but it is actually not connected to the EU.

Nowadays EU integration goes much farther than just the economic sphere and there are bound to be increasing conflicts as a result. There is however no obvious reason to expect the EU to be a progressive force vis-a-vis the member states. In the case of the Roma in France, at stake is the principle of nondiscrimination of EU citizens which is a core issue of the EU. By that I mean that a country shouldn’t discriminate against citizens from another country as long as it is a EU member. The analogy would be California discriminating against Okies, not Mississippi discriminating against black Mississippians.

It’s a useful analogy in some respects but there’s quite a few problems with it. One is that the democratic legitimacy of the EU is a great deal less, both in practice and in the minds of the electorate, than that of the government of France. In the case of US states that tried to prevent their black citizens from voting, this was plainly not the case.

Pr Q said:

If the Parliament and Commission prevail, as they should, it seems to me that this will change the effective political structure of the EU, in the direction of a federal democracy.

Liberal democracy is always in latent tension between minority rights and majority rule. The Roma question, when it occasionally crops up, makes that tension manifest.

A federal democracy by definition gives more power to subsidiary jurisdictions. In this case it is the subsidiary jurisdictions like France & Italy that are the source of the problem.

Ideally the Roma would have a land of their own where they could ply their traditional trades in complete freedom. But the Roma don’t seem to have much of a national feeling.

I don’t see the current EU Parliament being a likely source of salvation. The swing to the Right at the recent EU elections is unlikely to make that forum sympathetic to Roma claims. The EU Parliament is currently split between the Left and the Centre-Right, the latter pushing its own resolution:

a competing resolution tabled by the centre-right European People’s Party group and members of the European Conservatives and Reformists group stresses that Roma are subject to rights and obligations.

A mutual obligation “rights & duties” approach is the best way to go. A civic contract for the Roma would require Left-liberals and Right-“corporals” to give up ideological ground to actually fix the problem.

Now that would be a sight for sore eyes.

“Ideally the Roma would have a land of their own where they could ply their traditional trades in complete freedom. But the Roma don’t seem to have much of a national feeling.”

Ideal for whom? The Roma don’t want a land of their own. What would they do with it? Become farmers and shopkeepers? The problem is that the modern nation-state, which is fundamentally about clear geographic demarcations of territory and governmental control of the populations within that territory, is at odds with traditional nomadic forms of life. The extraordinary thing is that of all European nomadic groups, only the Roma have had a sufficiently strong culture to resist assimilation and settlement. A culture that powerful and distinct is one that is almost certainly going to have elements that are repulsive to the dominant culture.

Belle Waring makes an implicit comparison of the Roma and the Jews, which is not an unreasonable one. Both Jews and Roma developed very powerful cultures that allowed them to replicate themselves and resist assimilation over generations, and both cultures have elements that are disturbing and unpleasant to the dominant culture, however politically incorrect it may be to say so.

“If we want to get the analogy precise, AFAICT, it would be California announcing discrimination against Missippippians but actually applying it specifically to black Mississippians.”

None of these analogies is perfect of course but I was referring to the Okies that during the depression moved to California, put up camps and were loathed by the Californians mainly because they were poor and kind of nomadic. I don’t presume that tourists from Oklahoma would have been treated the same way.

Serial troll and sockpuppet deleted

The State has no problem with people that move around – it has nothing against commercial travellers or tourists, even tourists with camper vans – it’s just communities that move around and hold themselves apart from the settled community that trigger conflict. And the problem is the apartness, not the mobility. QV Northern Ireland and its “peace line”.

(Note: if relevant, my wife’s father’s family were dust bowl refugees to California from Oklahoma.)

In point of fact the California legislature did pass a law making it illegal for people from Oklahoma to enter the state, as well as (I believe) for those lucky enough to be here to help or encourage them.

And the problem is the apartness, not the mobility. QV Northern Ireland and its “peace line”.

The peace line, IIRC, was put up after the fact – it’s a big concrete wall intended to stop Protestants throwing things at Catholics and vice versa.

I would actually disagree that the problem is the apartness. The British government has no problem with people from Lincolnshire staying in Lincolnshire, or people of Pakistani descent living in Southall. It might (partly understandably) have a problem with there being a large number of people in Britain who don’t have a fixed address, as this makes it tricky for them to be taxed and/or arrested as required.

What ajay 27 said. They can’t install a police station, post office, departments of sanitation and social services, etc in those camps, that’s the problem.

I’m just boggling at the idea of an increase in the power of the EU central government representing an increase in federal democracy. Federal SOMETHING, maybe, but democracy? Hardly….

The British government has no problem with people from Lincolnshire staying in Lincolnshire, or people of Pakistani descent living in Southall. It might (partly understandably) have a problem with there being a large number of people in Britain who don’t have a fixed address, as this makes it tricky for them to be taxed and/or arrested as required

AFAIAA, the government doesn’t have much problem with Gypsy communities and has passed various Acts dealing with the problems of taxation, education etc. The trouble comes in at the local level, where local authorities don’t fulfill their obligations under those Acts, because they know that doing so would involve creating camps and facilities (or giving planning permission for same) in locations near to voters who don’t want Gypsies living next to them.

As an inhabitant of an inner city, I can of course take the completely objective view of this; it’s quite extraordinary how clear and well-defined the legal and moral issues are with respect to the human right of gypsies to have accomodation provided for them near other people’s houses.

Just the usual British jingoism. First, the EU parliament can make as many resolutions as it wants, they dont change anything, which is in my opinon sad, but nevertheless a reality that stands in stark contrast with the virtual one created by the British media. Second, the election process is more democratic than the one in British national election and third, Britains own minister are appointed indirect just like the commission and yield much more practical power than the commission will ever have over those that do appoint them.

So no “staate rights” didnt come to Europe, rather the economist is playing xenohpbic bottons by pretending that is the case.

Pete, that’s true – but the question is, why do the Roma get a hostile reception? They’re at least nominally Christian – many are Catholics, and others are Orthodox or Protestant – so there shouldn’t be religious animosity toward them (they didn’t kill Our Lord and they owe no loyalty to the eastern hordes). Except in dress, they don’t look particularly different from non-Roma eastern and southern Europeans. So what prevented them from assimilating, either as individuals or collectively? It seems to me that the answer lies in their culture, which has many distinctive elements that bind young people tightly to the community and prevent them from choosing to disappear into the dominant majority (itinerancy and child marriage are perhaps the most important of these elements). The fact that their culture has characteristics that are distasteful to the majorities around them reinforces their isolation and fosters their existence as a distinct minority.

If you insist on analogies with American history, I’d go back to the failure of federation-via-treaty with the Articles of Confederation and the later debate over federal supremacy in the Constitution. One really must make that choice.

I got the impression (from classical literature) that the Gypsies in Eastern Europe were heavily romanticized, in Fenimore Cooper’s Mohicans sort of way.

Leave us, proud man, we are a wild people; we have no laws, we torture not, neither do we punish; we have no use for blood or groans; we will not live with a man of blood. Thou wast not made for the wild life. For thyself alone thou claimest license; we are shy and good-natured; thou art evil-minded and presumptuous. Farewell, and peace be with thee!

surely the answer to the question “what prevented them from assimilating” is simply “they keep moving around”, no

Not necessarily: it doesn’t seem to be the case in Spain, for instance.

Pete –
The State has no problem with people that move around – it has nothing against commercial travellers or tourists, even tourists with camper vans – it’s just communities that move around and hold themselves apart from the settled community that trigger conflict. And the problem is the apartness, not the mobility. QV Northern Ireland and its “peace line”.

I suppose that’s what I meant. I took the line from “Seeing like a State” by James Scott, which develops the idea quite fully, and I thought it was quite sound. In the book also “people who move around” was more about people who are difficult to count and keep track of. I won’t try to reproduce, and therefore butcher, the argument or evidence here. It’s a terrific book and worth the read.

Really? Did it survive constitutional challenge?

(I’ve always thought that the right, listed in the Articles of Confederation but left out of the corresponding section of the Constitution, of ‘free ingress and regress’, which is what this would violate, was the most clear possible case for something on which one could actually hang a successful 10th Amendment challenge…)

The EU commission made some tactical mistake. Firstly the EU created a lot of problems in form of the Euro, which has cost a lot to stabilize. Secondly the EU, because it has but a fraction of the required funds and is not allowed to borrow, was helpless against the crisis of the Euro and the recession. Thirdly they made the grave mistake of demanding more money at a time when all member states are forced into austerity measures. Thereby they have made sure all 4 big members need to resist any increase of the commission’s power now to fend of any attempt to enlarge the common budget, which would be political poison for the big4’s governments. (Consider how more money for the EU would be seen in Britain with the upcoming budget cuts)

Pete #35: “The Roma that are not assimilated are decendants of those that have managed to get a hostile reception everywhere they went.”
It may have something to do with their origins as traveling show people as well. The disjunct between performer and audience in that ancient dynamic. At least my understanding of their roots involves South Asian theatrical troupes on what became a never-ending tour of the hinterlands; in this case, Europe etc.
Also there would appear to be a strong vein of traditional paranormality amongst the Roma, both tangentially espoused and obliquely observed.
Nobody likes that stuff, hardly.
Not to mention fortune-telling. Not to mention a non-materialist regard for private property. Not to mention an unshakable sense of not just otherness but intrinsic, superior otherness.
Unless you’re going to outcompete the host peoples at their own economic games – in which case of course there would be an even more vicious intolerance and resentment – you’ll end up at the bottom of things.
Then people won’t like you, for being at the bottom, and singing and dancing in spite of your lowly state.

54: I suppose so. And to associate sexual crimes and domestic violence with gender (as in discussing the problem as if committed mostly by men against women). How do you feel about it?

“The law did not target people from Oklahoma specifically; it prohibited bringing in an non-resident “indigent.”

In a nutshell, the Roma in France are, or are perceived as, “nonresident indigent” who are also a visible and cultural minority.

Why, what about drugs and prostitution, as alleged by Monsieur Hortefeux, the Interior Minister?