Integration as an essentially contested concept : questioning the assumptions behind the national Roma integration strategies of Italy and Spain

Abstract

Integration is a term that can fittingly be included in what W. B. Gallie labelled ‘essentially contested concepts’, since it has become a key term in both academia and policy-making and yet can be used – as it is – for a variety of meanings. While usually understood to address the situation of migrants, it has also recently been applied to Roma minorities in Europe, the vast majority of whom are European citizens and a minority of whom have left their country of origin. This chapter builds upon a discourse analysis of the National Roma Integration Strategies in Italy and Spain and on interviews with the policy-makers in charge of them, in a bid to understand what the term ‘integration’ means for Roma minorities according to the authorities. Through this analysis, I show how the politics of (dis)integration can affect not only migrants but also ethnic minorities who are represented and treated as similarly ‘foreign’ to the mainstream’s imagined community. In this sense, Roma-specific integration policies do not challenge wider structures of inequality. Even if they are well intended, they can contribute to the normalisation of a hegemonic narrative that sees a certain section of society – namely a national middle-class white society – as the bar for normality.