To belong or not to belong: the Roma, state violence and the new Europe in the House of Lords

Abstract

Issues of national sovereignty and membership in the body politic are central to many current political and legal debates surrounding ‘New Britain’ and Europe. Traditional understandings of citizenship and belonging are grounded in the ideal of a territorially limited and defined nation state. In this article, I explore a series of judicial and political decisions surrounding the fate of Roma or Gypsies, both as claimants to refugee status in Britain, or as subjects of domestic legal controls. I argue that these decisions construct this nomadic Other as a fundamental danger and challenge to the coherence of the legally protected body politic of the nation state ‘Britain’. I argue that the deconstructive excess found in the construction of the Roma as dangerous nomads, without allegiance to a fixed and geographically delimited nation state, might contain the kernel for a possible re-imagining of the basis of our understandings of citizenship and belonging.