Abstract
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Our paper will focus on the interactions between Roma rights INGOs like the Prague-based International Romani Union (IRU) or the Roma National Congress (RNC), and European International Organisations (IOs) through the lenses of social psychology.
Though they form an ensemble of drastically diverse groups, be it genetically or socio-culturally, Romani communities do share one common experience: that of oppression, disenfranchisement and discrimination. To this day, the Roma are Europe’s most vulnerable minority group. In an international system where states have long predominated, and without a kin-state to advocate in their favour, Romani communities were long at a significant disadvantage.
The consolidation of supranational organisations and of a corpus of national minority rights in Europe (in particular in the context of the European Institutions’ enlargements to Central and Eastern Europe) provided an window of opportunity for Roma rights INGOs to frame Roma not only as a migration-related, social problem but as potential rights recipients, on terms similar to national minorities. Activists resorted to several labels: ethnic minorities, landless nation, or transnational minority, stressing their pan-European identity, in order to attract the attention of IOs (an attention often refused at the national level), becoming some sort of “privileged customers” for European IOs, who often co-opt civil society organisations to uphold their disputed narratives of democratic legitimacy.
We will attempt to examine this NGO-IO relationship, through the lenses of identity studies concepts, such as “identity negotiation” as defined by W.B. Swann Jr or “identity salience” as defined by W.B. Gudykunst, who tackle identity as the dynamic result of social interactions, substituting individuals with international actors.
While avoiding organicist dérive, we will extrapolate and adapt said concepts to develop a new model to highlight how NGOs, here Roma rights advocates, shape their identity and practices in order to conform to the expectations of IOs on which they depend for funding, validation and achieving their political goals. Inversely, as identity negotiation is a two-way street, we might also interrogate the identity formation of Institutions like the European Union or the Council of Europe (centered around the idea of democratic values) and how their interaction with civil society groups, especially transnational ones, allow for agency, validation and strengthened internal coherence.
The objective of our paper will be to draft that new theoretical framework, and try to apply it to the relationship between Roma NGOs and European institutions, how their interactions redefine or consolidate their respective identities and ultimately the very issues they take on. We tend to think that their identity (the series of narratives they use to legitimate themselves or their projects) are crucial in moulding international actors’ behaviour on the international state, and said identities seem to be too scarcely studied (Cho, 2007 ; Symons, 2011), although our approach is not entirely new (Park, 2013).
Should our framework prove useful, we will re-use it in the context of a potential future PhD project, that we hope will feature extensive field work within NGO-type actors. For now, our project will focus on Romani organisation, building on interviews when possible and drawing mostly from the literature – and our research question could be laid on as such : “To which extent identity negotiation between NGOs and IOs did reshape the so-called Roma question?”
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