The "Gypsies" of Europe and the Roots of Contemporary Statelessness

The deportations of Romani people from France in the fall of 2010 and Italy’s fingerprinting of Romani children in 2008 revived questions about the insecurity of Romanies’ citizenship that have beset these communities since the emergence of the modern nation-state in the 19^th century.   I focus on the ways in which authorities in the unifying nation-states of Germany and Italy, in particular, removed citizenship rights from people they labeled as Zigeuner or Zingari, forcing them into a category of “exception” and creating a group of functionally stateless peoples.   European ideas of “Roma” today are based on a concept of Romani statelessness with its roots in these 19^th century exclusions.