WI: A National Homeland for the Roma?

MrP

Banned
One of the persecuted minorities in Nazi-occupied Europe was the Roma, who like the Jews were slated for outright extermination. But whereas the Jews eventually got a national homeland, the Roma remained stateless. They face various forms of discrimination in several European countries to this day.

I am currently reading Keith Lowe's Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, which paints a harrowing picture of Europe in the immediate post-war period. He focuses among other things on the mass deportations of various ethnic groups, which resulted in the unprecedented cultural homogenisation of most central European countries, and it made me wonder:

What if, after WW2, the Roma had been given a national homeland of their own? Not necessarily out of any generous feelings by the Allies, but perhaps rather the opposite, as a way to get them all in one place so they're out of everyone's hair.

One possibility might be Austrian Burgenland, which had a substantial Roma community before the war, perhaps with a bit of Hungarian territory added.

Thoughts?
 
Was there even similar Roma nationalism as Zionism? Had Romas even ever own nation like Jews had? I think that we need these two things leastly.

And one thing is where to it would be founded. Romas were and are still very markable diaspora. One option to Roma State would be in India, where from Romas originated. But I am not sure that Indians are very happy about that.
 
Of note, the Jews were never given any homeland within Europe, where 80% of them lived in the 19c.

The Roma never had any similar push as Zionism, because as a group, they never looked to a mythological homeland. The Jews looked to Israel/Zion, praying to it even while they'd never think to actually move there. The entirety of Jewish identity was "we were thrown out of our homeland, but one day the Messiah will come back and we will return." The Roma never had that mentality.
 
One of the persecuted minorities in Nazi-occupied Europe was the Roma, who like the Jews were slated for outright extermination. But whereas the Jews eventually got a national homeland, the Roma remained stateless. They face various forms of discrimination in several European countries to this day.

I am currently reading Keith Lowe's Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, which paints a harrowing picture of Europe in the immediate post-war period. He focuses among other things on the mass deportations of various ethnic groups, which resulted in the unprecedented cultural homogenisation of most central European countries, and it made me wonder:

What if, after WW2, the Roma had been given a national homeland of their own? Not necessarily out of any generous feelings by the Allies, but perhaps rather the opposite, as a way to get them all in one place so they're out of everyone's hair.

One possibility might be Austrian Burgenland, which had a substantial Roma community before the war, perhaps with a bit of Hungarian territory added.

Thoughts?

As always, people like to make the assumption that Israel was a direct result of WWII. It wasn't. The first Zionist settlement in Palestine started in the 1880s; by the time the Jewish DPs arrived, there were already well over half a milion Jews there. And it's definitely not like the Allies were trying to support the Jewish state, or else the British might have let all the Jews in immediately after the war instead of having them languish in camps until Israel declared independence. Which, I'd like to emphasize, occurred without any Allied impetus or aid, and in fact over strong British objections (but people who unilaterally withdraw from colonies don't get much say in what happens afterwards).

In fact, I can't think of any nation-state that was established for the first time in the wake of WWII that hadn't previously been a colony. After WWI, though, and you might be able to have much better luck, as this was a great time for the creation of random little nation-states, even without any strong previously-existing nationalist movements. Of the three countries with the highest Roma densities, two of them were Central Powers - A-H and Bulgaria. It seems very feasible to carve out a little Roma state, say between Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria. Such a thing would, however, require someone to speak for the Roma, and I'm not sure if such a person can be found (something gives me a feeling that Wilson's not going to be going for it).
 
Jokes asides...

Would roma want to move there? If some Jews are not sionist then by analogy.

Would you force them to move there?

How many would move there?
 
The modern or historical Roma migrated from the NW regions of the Indian sub continent. There is still a related group there. However old Roma traditions didi not regard this region as a 'homeland' but as a stopping off point after a exile from a region to the west.

The Roma never had any similar push as Zionism, because as a group, they never looked to a mythological homeland. The Jews looked to Israel/Zion, praying to it even while they'd never think to actually move there. The entirety of Jewish identity was "we were thrown out of our homeland, but one day the Messiah will come back and we will return." The Roma never had that mentality.

There was a very old mythology of a homeland, that may have related to Roma migrating westwards from India. That mythos does not seem to have any weight among the Roma for at least several centuries, possiblly for over a millenium.

One possibilty is a portion of the Roma forced into a state or province. Perhaps a Medival king in a effort to rid the region of 'Gypsies' and to repopulate a province devastated by multiple disasters, forces removal of the Roma to some restricted area. This would be very difficult, but not impossible if there is consistent long term effort in the kingdom. Eventually enogh Roma settle down and accept their province of kingdom, & then the place becomes a refuge & dumping ground for Roma not wanted & persecuted elsewhere.
 
One thing I have often wondered about is the creation of some sort of Roma national homeland in the USSR.

"Martin Holler (Humboldt U, Berlin). Towards a `Socialist Gypsy State': Plans for an Autonomous Region for Romanies in the Early Soviet Union. After the October Revolution, Soviet Romanies experienced the whole ambivalence of the Bolshevik nationalities program. Affirmative action for so-called `backward nationalities' and repression went hand in hand. Romanies were a small ethnic group and belonged to the 2% of the extraterritorial people that were spread all over the USSR. Nevertheless, a relatively great effort was made to include `Gypsies' into the building of socialism. Collectivisation, `political education' and alphabetisation were the catchwords, which resulted, among other things, in the creation of a `Gypsy alphabet' and the foundation of the Moscow `State Gypsy theatre "Romen"'. One of the most surprising Bolshevik projects was the founding of a socialist `Gypsy state,' with a cultural and (limited) political autonomy and Romanes - the `Gypsy language' (tsyganskii iazyk) - as the official language! `Gypsies' from all parts of the Soviet Union would have been settled in a compact, ethnically pure territory. Romani activists demanded parts of the Crimea, Southern Ukraine or the Northern Caucasus as areas for resettlement, while the Soviet authorities preferred Western Siberia or the Far East. Both the Romanies and the Bolsheviks referred to the Jewish example, especially to the `Jewish Autonomous Soviet Region of Birobidzhan.' Scientific expeditions in search of suitable territories were made and a special commission was set up. My paper presents the genesis and ideological background of the astonishing autonomy project and asks why it finally came to nothing. It is based on unpublished materials from post-Soviet archives." https://web.archive.org/web/20070706021922/http://www.gypsyloresociety.org/conf07abstracts.html

For more on Soviet policies toward the Roma, see http://romafacts.uni-graz.at/index....scrimination/soviet-union-before-world-war-ii The pattern is similar to that of other small Soviet nationalities--*korenizatsiya* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiya in the 1920's giving way to intensified repression in the 1930's. Still, what makes otherwise implausible ideas at least slightly plausible in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953 is that so much depended on the whims of one man. I can't see any reason Stalin would be sympathetic to the Gypsies but if for some reason he were, that could change a lot of things.

According to Brigid O'Keeffe, *New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union* (2013) in 1936 there was apparently serious discussion of creating a suitable territory for the mass settlement of Roma, to get them to overcome their "backward" nomadic ways. A. I. Khatskevich, Secretary of the Central Executive Committee's Soviet of Nationalities, said "let the Gypsies settle in a fixed place and later there will be a Gypsy Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic." (p.183 but no such republic or Gyupsy autonomous region or even so-called Gypsy sprcial territory was ever formed. As O'Keeffe notes, one problem is that by the time a Gypsy autonomous territory was being advocated, the failure of Birobidzhan was already apparent. "Soviet officials confronting Roma's demands for a Soviet Gypsy homeland--a similarly grand project which could [unlike Birbobidzhan] in no way rely on foreign financial assistance--no doubt kept Birobidzhan's depressing yet seemingly instructive example in mind. By the time that Romani activists began in the 1930s to campaign for the creation of a Soviet Gypsy homeland, Birobidzhan had already proven itself an expensive experiment whose results did not justify its costs, or the headaches it inspired in Moscow." (p. 186)
 
Jammu/Kashmir. Based on linguistic and genetic evidence, they were originally from somewhere near there. And if this is happening right after WWII, neither India nor Pakistan want the other to have it, so why not create a buffer state between them?

(Yeah I know it'll turn out badly, that's what happens when 1st-world Powers decide to play de-colonial cartography with other people's countries...)
 

MrP

Banned
The idea is that between 1945 and 1948, Europe went through a phase of forced population relocation wholly unprecedented in scale. Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, etc., were forcibly moved around in their millions in a way that permanently transformed the ethnic map, and made previously multicultural countries monocultural in a way that they had never been before. Central European Roma communities faced a degree of forced relocation:

In Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands of Romanies from Slovakia, Hungary and Romania were re-settled in border areas of Czech lands and their nomadic lifestyle was forbidden. In Czechoslovakia, where they were labeled as a “socially degraded stratum,” Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population.

So I'm wondering if, taking advantage of all the redrawing of borders and population transfers, the Allies might have said, "Let's carve a bit of territory out of two former Axis countries and call it the Roma national homeland, so they have a place of their own and we no longer have to put up with them inside our borders."
 
The idea is that between 1945 and 1948, Europe went through a phase of forced population relocation wholly unprecedented in scale. Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, etc., were forcibly moved around in their millions in a way that permanently transformed the ethnic map, and made previously multicultural countries monocultural in a way that they had never been before. Central European Roma communities faced a degree of forced relocation:



So I'm wondering if, taking advantage of all the redrawing of borders and population transfers, the Allies might have said, "Let's carve a bit of territory out of two former Axis countries and call it the Roma national homeland, so they have a place of their own and we no longer have to put up with them inside our borders."


Isn't the essence of the Roma people the fact that they want to travel freely - confining them to a specific homeland effectively destroys their way of life
 

MrP

Banned
Isn't the essence of the Roma people the fact that they want to travel freely - confining them to a specific homeland effectively destroys their way of life
In Eastern Europe they were facing forced sedenterisation no matter what. That was the official policy in OTL Hungary among other places. The difference is whether they would become sedentary in their own country, where they could at least preserve their language and ethnic identity, or another where they would be forcibly assimilated.
 
Isn't the ancestral home of the Roma India?

I'm not familiar with their beliefs but do they believe they have always been in Europe as a people?

Do they even see all Roma as belonging to the same group or nation i.e the Roma's spread out in different countries of Europe?
 
In Eastern Europe they were facing forced sedenterisation no matter what. That was the official policy in OTL Hungary among other places. The difference is whether they would become sedentary in their own country, where they could at least preserve their language and ethnic identity, or another where they would be forcibly assimilated.

So they can lose their traditions in their own land or lose their traditions in someone else's land.

Surely the solution is to allow them to follow their own traditions not to buy them off with a piece of land?
 

MrP

Banned
Surely the solution is to allow them to follow their own traditions not to buy them off with a piece of land?
I'm not thinking in terms of best-case scenarios, but in terms of what would have been plausible in the circumstances of post-WW2 Europe. The "solutions" to minority "problems" applied at the time seldom took into account what said minorities actually wanted.

In fact I found in Lowe that in the late 1940s the phrase "final solution" was still being used in Eastern Europe, and with much the same sinister connotation:

Government officials [in Czechoslovakia] called for the 'total expulsion' of Hungarians--all 600,000 of them. They spoke in chilling terms of finding a 'final solution' to the Hungarian problem, while stating baldly that 'we do not recognize national minorities.'
 
The idea is that between 1945 and 1948, Europe went through a phase of forced population relocation wholly unprecedented in scale. Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, etc., were forcibly moved around in their millions in a way that permanently transformed the ethnic map, and made previously multicultural countries monocultural in a way that they had never been before. Central European Roma communities faced a degree of forced relocation:



So I'm wondering if, taking advantage of all the redrawing of borders and population transfers, the Allies might have said, "Let's carve a bit of territory out of two former Axis countries and call it the Roma national homeland, so they have a place of their own and we no longer have to put up with them inside our borders."

I get what you're saying, but the fact of the matter is that despite the large forced migrations, there was no creation of new states at this time. Poland was moved, Germany truncated, Kaliningrad established, various ethnic enclaves removed...but no nation-state was founded.
 

MrP

Banned
I get what you're saying, but the fact of the matter is that despite the large forced migrations, there was no creation of new states at this time. Poland was moved, Germany truncated, Kaliningrad established, various ethnic enclaves removed...but no nation-state was founded.
Well the Saar Protectorate was on course to become its own country until a referendum showed that the local population preferred to join West Germany instead, but your point is taken.
 
Well the Saar Protectorate was on course to become its own country until a referendum showed that the local population preferred to join West Germany instead, but your point is taken.

I'd argue that the Saar was intended less as a nation-state and more as a way to, at worst, remove the heart of German industry, and at best to steal it for France. I mean, unlike the half-hearted Alsatian nationalist movement, I've literally never heard of any Saar-nationalist movement. Even the autonomist movement in the brief Saar Protectorate never used nationalist rhetoric, as far as I can find.
 
Isn't the ancestral home of the Roma India?

Yes & no. the migrated there from somewhere to the NW in ancient times. Their old mythology is they were driven from & exiles from some ancient homeland. there is some small indication the Roma who departed India were thinking they were returning to that home land. this mythos is very old and is supposed to have been largely forgotten among the Roma for half a millinea or more.

I'm not familiar with their beliefs but do they believe they have always been in Europe as a people?

Do they even see all Roma as belonging to the same group or nation i.e the Roma's spread out in different countries of Europe?

No, there are large cultural and language differences between Roma groups. When they do cross paths they tend to fued & focus on the differences.
 
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