I will distinguish three phases in the post-1989 period in which the policy relevance and scholarly appraisal of the role of CSOs have been discussed along different lines. First, I will discuss the reasons of the rapid rise, in the immediate aftermath of 1989, of civil society organizations, which include nongovernmental, faith-based, and grassroots organizations (NGOs, FBOs, GROs). This European pattern followed a more global one, according to which researchers and national and international policy makers considered CSOs as potentially effective partners and channels in attempts at challenging the “authoritarian” remainders of postauthoritarian regimes and transforming them into liberal democratic, economically sustainable, and “minority-friendly” states that would be able to address more effectively issues of poverty, development, and inequality.
This first phase, in which a relatively positive image of CSOs and their capabilities to “make a difference” dominated, would quickly be followed by a second phase in which, at the policy front, CSOs have increasingly been “governmentalized.” The governmentalization of civil society designates a trend in which the professionalization of CSOs is occurring hand in hand with their attachment to the more formal and institutionalized governmental structures at state and suprastate levels, thereby often (though not necessarily) diminishing their activist independence (van Baar 2011a). Accordingly, the scholarly assessments of CSOs have also become more mixed with, at the one end of the spectrum, those who consider the institutionalization of activism as an inevitable result of the activists’ professionalization and their aim at exercising power within official governmental structures and, at the spectrum’s other end, those who understand this governmentalization as a troublesome reduction of CSOs to mere service deliverers or, even worse, puppets of an omnipotent and destructive neoliberalism. At the policy level, this second phase was coinciding with the trend in which the largest donor of Roma-related development programs, the EU, mostly shifted its support toward the direct funding of its candidate member states’ governments, even though many other donors continued to fund Roma-related CSOs directly. This trend took place at the same time as negotiations about the EU access of these states continued and, finally, led to the eastward enlargement of the Union in 2004 and 2007. Some donors stopped their funding of Roma-related CSOs in the new EU members directly after these entered the EU, which required some of these CSOs to shift their activities more eastward to those countries that are (still) not EU member states.
We can distinguish a third phase that has started relatively recently with the “ethnic turn” in EU policies. This turn designates the move in EU support for the Roma toward the explicit devising of policies for Roma, a shift from generic to specific Roma-related policies that is particularly embodied by the 2011 launch of the so-called EU Roma Framework (European Commission 2011a). Apparently against the idea behind this framework, in many EU countries CSOs have been sidelined or deliberately excluded from the processes toward the development, implementation, and evaluation of the so-called National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS) that these states were encouraged to devise in this framework’s context. Consequently, we are currently facing, it seems, a phase in which Roma-related CSOs have increasingly less to say about how Roma policies are (to be) envisioned, designed, implemented, and assessed.
This chapter discusses the ways in which we could explain this post-1989 development, including the rise of nongovernmentalism and its development toward the current, third phase. Simultaneously, I will reflect on the ways in which researchers have assessed the rise and impact of nongovernmentalism, particularly vis-à-vis the abilities of CSOs to impact political and policy debates, agendas, and transformations. I will argue that, in Roma-related scholarship, the assessment of the emergence of the “non-governmental” as a category of rule and research has frequently and primarily been led by a largely counterproductive idea that we need to be either “for” or “against” CSOs. In line with the approach to the Romani movement that I have discussed elsewhere (van Baar 2011a; 2012b; 2013), therefore, I call for a critical “anthroposociology” of Roma-related activism and nongovernmentalism, in which these phenomena are interrogated in their historical and interdisciplinary settings and assessed not so much in moral terms but, rather, vis-à-vis their critical potentiality to make a difference to the situation of the Roma and to the ways in which we see and study them.
Roma Activism and the Post-1989
Governmentalization of Civil Society
In the aftermath of 1989 and until well into the 1990s, Western (European) governments, donors, and IGOs primarily perceived new and already established Roma-related CSOs as entry points into postauthoritarian societies in Central and Eastern Europe and as actors who could (possibly) effectively challenge authoritarian legacies and the ways in which these were considered to impact issues such as the discrimination, poverty, and marginalization of the Roma. Initially, relatively well-established, Western-based NGOs with a background in advocacy work that had begun in the 1960s and 70s—most notably, Minority Rights Group International, Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch (later Human Rights Watch)—as well as new associations such as the Project on Ethnic Relations and the Open Society Institute (OSI), played an important role in bringing to the fore the violations of the rights of Central and Eastern European Roma. In their reports of the early and mid-1990s, which were considerably based on information received from domestic Romani activists and scholars, as well as from local or national advocacy and dissident groups that were already established during the socialist era, these CSOs presented the situation of the Roma as a “human emergency” (van Baar 2011b; 2018). Indirectly, these informal and more formally organized local groups of activists, intellectuals, and other advocates played a crucial role in how, through the vital and indispensable link of several of these international NGOs, the Roma gradually emerged onto the agenda of IGOs, the EU in particular (Ram 2010; van Baar 2011a). At about the same time, established and new Western-based CSOs with a background in community building, local development, microfinancing and poor relief—among them several FBOs—started to fund (usually) small-scale initiatives dedicated to improving the living circumstances of Central and Eastern European Roma.
Both in the case of advocacy work and in that of several development projects, IGOs and larger donors such as Cordaid, OSI, and Western (European) ministries of foreign affairs and development assistance started to perceive of (the founding and funding of) these local civil societal initiatives as tools to put pressure on postauthoritarian governments and their approaches to Romani minorities. Somewhat similar to how CSOs were seen in the 1980s in the broader framework of development in the Global South, in the European Roma-related context, these “nongovernmental” channels were often represented as “having a set of comparative advantages in relation to public sector agencies such as cost effectiveness, less bureaucratic operating styles, closeness to communities and reduced prevalence to corruption” (Lewis 2005: 211). Thus, one of the characteristics of the rise of nongovernmentalism was, David Lewis (2005: 211) suggests, the somewhat naïve and conservative idea that CSOs were “essentially private, non-state protectors of the public interest.” At the same time, in the case of the Romani movement, a distinction between this first phase and a second one, in which civil society has increasingly been governmentalized, is difficult to make. This difficulty relates to the global conditions under which the post-1989 support for Roma-related CSOs had started.
The post-1989 Romani movement has been confronted by a dilemma that has largely emanated from a “perverse confluence” (Dagnino 2008) of two different processes, related to two different political projects: a participatory democratic project and a neoliberal one. The Romani movement has profoundly been influenced by postsocialist processes of democratization, which have coincided with the development of new public spaces; new forms, subjects, sites, and scales of citizenship; decentered forms of governance and the increased participation of civil societal actors in decision-making linked to public and policy issues. Dissident movements with roots in opposition against communist regimes, human rights and social movements that appeared in the West since the 1960s, and the momentum