Brussels takes on France over Roma

Only a few months after the European Union weathered the threat posed to the euro by the sovereign debt crisis of Greece, it faces a fresh challenge to another of its foundation stones: the right to free movement within the EU for every citizen of a member-state.

This latest threat is embodied in the spat that has broken out between the EU and one of its largest members, France, over the treatment of Roma migrants, also termed gypsies. On Wednesday, Brussels took on Paris, with the European Commission initiating legal proceedings against France for its failure to comply with EU laws that guarantee the free movement of citizens within the region.

France has been given until October 15 to rectify the situation and transpose EU law into national law. If it fails to do so, it could face legal proceedings that would end up before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

The EC, however, did not legally challenge France on the far more embarrassing charge of discrimination against an ethnicity, choosing instead to send Paris a letter seeking more clarifications on its Roma expulsion policy.

Since the beginning of the year, France has expelled by force or with a ¤300 payment per head over 8,000 Roma who had exercised their EU free movement rights to migrate from Romania and other eastern European states. Since early August, almost 100 illegal Roma camps have been dismantled.

Paris insists it has a legal right to expel Roma who stay for longer than three months without demonstrable means of supporting themselves financially or to deport any EU citizens who becomes a threat to public order. But Brussels is worried that the French action is discriminatory against an entire ethnic group, which infringes EU free movement law.

<B>Broader issues</B><BR>
The legal minutiae surrounding France’s actions are certainly open to debate, as is the question of who is in fact to blame for the failure of Europe to better integrate its Roma citizens with the mainstream. However, the broader tendencies in Europe pointed to by the ongoing drama are a cause for perhaps even greater concern. 

It is a time of economic crisis, high unemployment and austerity packages in the continent. With emerging economies like China and India displaying a dynamism Europe seems to struggle to match, a range of ugly propensities are threatening the area’s post-second world war evolution away from borders and friction and towards openness and cooperation.

The second world war was preceded by an economic depression with well-known, catastrophic consequences. The creation of the EU was an attempt to put the horrors of history firmly behind Europe.

That the Roma dispute has led to an evocation of that brutish past is telling. Last week, European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding compared the French campaign against the Roma to Nazi behaviour during the world war, following the leak of a government circular that implied making a public spectacle of dismantling Roma camps was a government directive. A war of words ensued between Brussels and Paris, ending in Wednesday’s action against France.

While Reding’s comparison is thought by many to have been overblown, the fact that internal migration within Europe is in the spotlight at a time of economic crisis is worrying. From Italy to the UK, politicians are pandering to local populations’ anxieties by taking an anti-migration stance. In Italy, Roberto Maroni, the interior minister, announced plans this month to make it easier to expel EU migrants with insufficient resources to support themselves.

In the UK, the Labour Party’s new leader, Ed Miliband, has raised the alarm over wages being driven down by Polish workers.

The spectre of the Polish plumber taking away jobs from the local citizens of rich western European countries is once again being raised, after having faded away in the years since the enlargement of the EU in 2004.

Next year, countries like Germany will have to open their borders to workers from Eastern European countries, a transitional period following enlargement that restricted these flows having come to an end. There are serious worries about the impact on local jobs. Far-right anti-immigration parties have been strengthened in recent elections in Sweden and the Netherlands.

These tendencies are not merely worrying for Europe, but have implications beyond its borders. Trade protectionism and further clamps on immigration from non-European countries are part of the same impulses. It is Brussels’ job to keep these at bay, but the economic crisis may have weakened the EU’s hand. For the rest of the world, this is not good news.