From Silent Marginality to Spotlight Scapegoating? A Brief Case Study of France's Policy Towards the Roma

This article addresses the way in which the Roma were framed as an important 'security issue' on the French public policy agenda during the Sarkozy presidency. By pointing out continuities and discontinuities in the association between 'immigation' and 'insecurity' in official discourse, it analyses the somehow unexpected and sudden scapegoating of the Roma as responding to immediate political imperatives, but also as an expression of a mounting trend of nationalism. The fact that, in France, public space is officially ethnicity-blind contributed, paradoxically, to the rapid stigmatisation of the Roma as a group.