Migrants or European Citizens? Roma between Old Myths, Everyday Marginalization and New Dynamics of Racial Segregation

This chapter focuses on the issue of the Roma mobility within Europe in a context of multilevel governance that stress the role of local government as the priority area responsible for the promotion of their inclusion. In this way we intend to offer a contribution to the current debate on the politics of European mobility, analysing some evident obstacles that still do not allow to recreate a unitary system of post-national membership even if considered a constitutive feature of the socio-political formation of the EU. On a theoretical level, the first part of the presentation, in particular crosses European and Romani studies with critical work on international migration to show the European strategy of Roma inclusion as an ethnic governmentality oriented to empower the role of Romans in the growth and stabilization of current neoliberal assets of development. On an empirical level, we will present the experience of the Romanian Roma migrated to the peripheral city of Cosenza, in the region of Calabria, with a focus on the practices and discourses implemented by the local government and other social actors to reterritorialize their identity and cope with their emerging needs. Following this perspective, we will discuss the structural and cultural factor that can explain the emergence in Cosenza of racial developments that over years tends to aggravate Roma inequalities as well as the multiple crisis shaping national citizenship, introducing further axes of hierarchical differentiation in social and economic relations whilst projecting, in the larger scale and context of Europe, new risks of political exclusion and more serious forms of vulnerability.