Roma Migration [antikvár]

Michael Stewart1ForewordIn August 1998, just after the Schengen EU countries had promised to consider changingthe visa requirements for Romanians, the satirical Romanian weekly, Academia Catavencu,carried the headline: "Watch Out Swans of Europe, Here We Come!" The joke referred toan incident notorious within Romania at least when Romanian migrants (of uncertainethnic origin, but believed to be Roma by most Romanians) had been accused of killingand roasting Viennese swans during a sojourn in the Austrian capital. In the face of thedouble standards, the hypocrisy, the bureaucratic nonsense and the sheer medieval thinkingabout migration issues in 'united Europe,' Academia Cafavencu's sublime mockery mayseem the only approach likely to cut through the horse shit. That is, until you receive a booklike this one in your hands.For here, at last, is some well informed, solidly researched and soberly thought throughanalysis of migration in its economic, social, political and human contexts.2 Of course,the occasion of the research was the local, Hungarian hoo-haa consequent on the 'flight/migration' of the Zamoly Roma to Strasbourg (a political storm very helpfully documentedfrom several diverse angles by several of the contributors here). But the research projecthas gone far beyond the confines of a debate shaped by a paranoid political rhetoricwhich now, as so often in the past, seeks to lay the blame for Hungary's miseries on somebloody foreigners aided by treacherous (former?) Hungarians now living abroad. It is fash-ionable to accuse social science of irremediable parti pris, but in this book we have a casein which true dividends are paid by even that minimal extra degree of objectivity whichderives from a 'scientific/research' discourse. For, in the face of political strategies (on allsides) that inevitably reduce and simplify social reality in order to mobilise constituencies,research such as this complicates and dissolves firm lines of demarcation. It takes no specialforesight to see that because it does so, this book will be attacked from all sides in the hothouse of today's Roma issue in Hungary.There are a number of general merits to this book. First, and foremost, it demolishesthe simplistic suggestion that Hungarian Roma migration is either merely a response to