Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Chapter 11. The Roma as ultimate European minority and ultimate outsider?

2017; John Benjamins Publishing Company; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1075/dapsac.74.12del

1569-9463

Chloë Delcour, Lesley Hustinx,

Minority Rights and Languages

Abstract In order to understand the paradoxical position of the Roma as the subject of both European inclusion programmes and persistent exclusionary practices, this chapter focuses on the interaction of both inclusionary and exclusionary frames used in discussions in the Flemish newspaper media following a human-rights violation. The case concerns the Belgian government’s expulsion of Slovak Roma migrants in 1999 (the Čonka case). Proceeding from the sociology of human rights and the principles of critical discourse analysis (CDA), we analyse 212 newspaper articles from the period 1999–2002. Based on this analysis, we identify the following connections between the inclusionary and exclusionary conceptualizations of Roma migrants: (1) an emphasis on the excluded character of the Roma, (2) the possibility that they are “deserving” of expulsion and (3) the dominance of the nation-state model within the context of migration. These results illustrate the complexity with which inclusionary and exclusionary discourses can be intertwined, thereby contributing to sociological research concerning human-rights practices and advancing CDA research on “discursive othering” beyond a sole focus on exclusionary discourses.