In 2015, Europe faced a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the
Second World War, as more than a million individuals arrived on the
continent. The contemporary refugee crisis has brought barbed wire
fences, internment camps, and “no-man’s lands” back to the European
landscape. We are not only in the midst of a “migration crisis,”
however. The situation in Europe should also be understood as what
Zygmunt Bauman has called a “migration panic.” A “migration panic,” like
a “moral panic,” reflects and magnifies an alleged threat to a society.
Mass migration has been reshaping European societies for at least 150
years, but it has not always induced the same responses.
What then, are the causes of migration panics, and what outcomes have
they produced? This talk will turn to the history of Roma in the
Habsburg Empire, a group long stigmatized for its allegedly intractable
mobility, to reflect on these questions. We don’t typically analyze the
history of refugees and Roma together, although both groups have been
fodder for migration panics and objects of state efforts to govern
migration. It is striking that before Europeans began to panic about
refugees, Roma were the most visible targets for anxieties about freedom
of mobility in the expanding European Union.