Beyond Recognition? Locating “Roma Representation” in Italy and Spain

Identity politics are among the most compelling and criticized issues in contemporary politics as well as scholarly debates, where the recognition paradigm has been challenged, revisited, and critiqued over the past few decades. As a way of trying to look at how issues of recognition and representation play out in different settings for the same minority, this chapter offers an overview of how Roma minority participation has factored into the policies addressed at their “integration” in Southern Europe since the establishment of the first EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies. By drawing upon extensive fieldwork and interviews with policy makers and Romani activists, this chapter looks at the role that Roma’s participation played in the policies aimed to “integrate” this part of the population in two different, yet comparable contexts. What emerges is a significantly different approach in the two settings (Italy and Spain), yet in both cases, failings are political in nature. “Plugging” participation as a top-down requirement, based on an ethnic dimension that is never explicitly articulated nor is reflected in civil society organizations, seems in both cases to lead to processes of misrecognition, rather than representation.