Maxwell School of Syracuse University

As aging populations force Europe to examine its attitudes toward immigration and assimilation, one European minority group—the Roma (or “gypsies”)—emerges as an intriguing anomaly. An estimated seven to nine million live in Europe, most in Central and Eastern Europe, where they migrated from Northern India centuries ago.

“They are a fascinating group,” says Erika Wilkens, a doctoral student in political science who has published a book about the Roma with Mitchell Orenstein, director of the new Center for European Studies, and Dena Ringold of the World Bank. “They have never had a homeland or a government to advocate for them. The most marginalized Roma have poverty rates 10 times higher than other impoverished groups. For very complex and interconnected reasons, many are unemployed and uneducated, and few own property. They are often considered a thorn in the side of society, yet somehow they have survived centuries of attempts to assimilate, exclude, eradicate, and exterminate them.”

The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe has made the Roma situation only more desperate. “They have been hit the hardest by the transition,” says Wilkens. “Under communism, some Roma had jobs, but they were the lowest skilled workers, with the least to gain from privatization. This has made their plight increasingly salient to international organizations, NGOs, and the European Union.” The EU has told candidate nations to address Roma poverty or risk exclusion.


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A Goekjian Summer Grant from Maxwell’s Global Affairs Institute allowed Wilkens to meet with Roma-related policy makers, scholars, and NGO leaders in Hungary and Romania. She also attended a Budapest conference on the Roma, with leaders from the World Bank, the Open Society and the European Commission, plus seven prime ministers and several deputy ministers from the region. “They acknowledged that there is a Roma problem and it needs to be addressed,” reports Wilkens. “While the impact remains to be seen, even at a rhetorical level this support is historically unprecedented.”

Wilkens plans to focus her dissertation on institutional responses to exclusion and challenges for minority integration, using Roma as a case study. “Many Roma, perhaps from years of persecution, have created an internal identity that is rooted in an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality,” she observes, adding that this may, in turn, have perpetuated the gypsy stereotype of mystery and deception. “I’m exploring how policy approaches have perpetuated or alleviated these tensions.”