ABSTRACT
In the way Said (2003) expressed concerns about the Orient as an alter-ego of Western societies projecting their own cultural norms and rules of identification onto the epistemologically construed external Other, the Roma are politically imagined as the ‘internal Other’ (Balibar 2009) of the European model or Europeanness. Yet, Balibar (2009) considers that Roma need to be socially integrated, but social integration is a neoliberal problematisation in itself, and his statement confirms, once more, that Marxist realist analysis can, unfortunately, overlap discourses of power such as neoliberalism. They are seamlessly portrayed as an unrevealed subject1 (e.g. ‘who are the Roma ?’)2, under continuous scrutiny, inquiry and assessment of its peripherality, as part of a dialectical politics of appropriation and re-subjectification3 of a boundary subject, strengthening the political imaginary of a European core identity. This brings similitudes to Black People in America and Jews in Europe (Kalmar & Penslar 2005), “subjected to a kind of internal Orientalism” (Wilson III 1981: 63), a Western colonising knowledge of the Other entangled with governmental practices, which aimed at exorcising the idiosyncrasies of an imagined non-Westerner or non-European which grounded their existence and expansion.
