Free Movement for Whom, Where, When? Roma EU Citizens in France and Spain

Abstract

EU citizenship is often regarded as the culmination of a process whereby the transnational mobility of “workers” has led to the granting of rights to “humans” qua citizens, with both legal scholars and ethnographers emphasizing its normative significance in this respect. Challenging such a narrative, this study sets out to highlight the contingent nature of a postnational EU citizenship, with reference to the lived experiences of migrant Roma. As a first step, we highlight the conditionality within EU law associated with the granting of rights to those enacting EU citizenship by residing within EU territory beyond their own member state. In a second step, we highlight the variable ways in which such conditionality is deployed in different national contexts, with reference to the frameworks in France and Spain. While the former has deployed these conditions in a manner that has excluded EU citizens, particularly migrant Roma, the latter—at least for a time—was more permissive in its granting of rights to EU citizens than EU law required. However, in a third step, we suggest that the lived experiences of migrant Roma in these two national contexts have not been as different as the legal differences suggest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on Romanian Roma in two municipalities near Barcelona, we demonstrate the ways in which a local politics of exclusion is legally possible, even within an ostensibly permissive juridical framework of citizenship. We highlight how the ambiguity of a multilevel citizenship not only opens up possibilities for multifaceted forms of exclusion, but also for various forms of resistance, both within and beyond a juridical citizenship framework.