Aidan McGarry's Romaphobia is a study of European Roma communities, lifeways, culture, and political attitudes. Dr. McGarry, principal lecturer in politics at the University of Brighton (UK), notes that in most places the Roma people are treated as dangerous outsiders and are associated with criminality. Thus the title “Romaphobia”, or fear of the Roma. Fear and cultural stereotyping drive racism against the Roma, across Europe.
Romaphobia explores six topics in depth: the marginalization of the Roma; anti-Roma xenophobia and territoriality; external pressures on Roma identity; spatial segregation of the Roma in Eastern Europe; protest challenges to anti-Roma racism; and the implications of European Union citizenship for the Roma. In these discussions, the book demonstrates how easily and thoroughly marginalized communities can be ignored, despite efforts to resist racism and express Roma culture and political interests. In this, the Roma experience may reflect a broader pattern of social exclusion facing migrant, refugee, and immigrant groups in European societies.
McGarry argues that the Roma lack a place-based identity formed through long attachment to a specific location. For them, the sense of being “at home” is lacking, for individuals as well as the wider Roma culture. Since the community practiced nomadism, moving from place to place in search of water and pasture, Roma came to identify their home as simply the place where they or their relations presently live. The absence of a permanent home, and a place-based identity, makes the Roma vulnerable to being ignored, or worse, by those who claim defined territories as their own.
Romaphobia, says McGarry, has led to the Roma being denied basic social services, excluded from democratic participation, and marginalized in popular culture. Like other people around the world who face social exclusion, the Roma have struggled to achieve basic rights, engaging in both political protest and cultural resistance. They have established the International Romani Union based in Prague, and on April 8 of each year, celebrate Roma Nation Day.
McGarry suggests that the most effective way to curb Romaphobia is to promote greater understanding of challenges the Roma's face, and to recognize their distinctive culture as arising from rootlessness and nomadism, not from inherent deviance or criminality. The story of the modern Roma, in fact, offers lessons for others, about the value of cultural pluralism and acceptance of difference, in a world of nation-states and dominant cultures which can be intolerant of outsiders and mistrustful of those who preserve an ancient, nomadic way of life.
