Panu Pulma, PhD, University of Helsinki, Finland
Closed doors. Nordic Romani policy from the 16th century to the EU era.
(Summary of the book: Suljetut ovet. Pohjoismaiden romanipolitiikka 1500-luvulta EU-aikaan.
Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki 2006)
With the exception of Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, all Nordic countries had a Romani population
in the early 2000s. The Nordic countries subscribe to the minority policy followed by the UN,
Council of Europe and EU, and thus the modern Romani policy followed in all Nordic countries
shares a common foundation and parallel objectives. However, the Rom populations in the various
Nordic countries are not homogeneous. Few in number, the Danish Roma arrived as late as the
1960s or thereafter, at first from Western Europe and later also from Eastern Europe. A minority of
the Norwegian Roma are offspring of immigrants of the late 19th century, but the majority only
moved there after World War 2. Several thousands in number, the Swedish Roma has roots in three
directions: the Swedish Kalderash Roma, who came to Sweden at the turn of the 19th and 20th
centuries and were originally from the Balkans; the Kale (Kàlo) who have emigrated from Finland
since the 1950s; and the refugee Roma, mostly of Eastern European provenance, accepted into the
country in the early 1970s and with very variable backgrounds – there are both Polish Lowara and
Roma from France and Spain. Finland has the largest and most homogeneous Romani population,
with the Kale population comprising groups of Roma who arrived through Sweden as early as the
16th century. In the 19th century, this group was strengthened by Russian immigrants who, however,
have merged with the Finnish Kale.
The Nordic, that is, the Scandinavian and Finnish, Roma have a partly shared and partly very
divergent history. The same also applies to the Romani policy. Sweden and Finland were one
unified nation until 1809 while the Kingdom of Denmark also included Norway until 1814. After
this, Sweden and Norway formed a union until 1905 while Finland was an autonomous GrandDuchy of the Russian Empire between 1809 and 1917. The different phases of the shared history
have also been reflected in the policies of the countries, also as far as minority policy, and in this
case Romani policy is concerned.
This study focuses on national and local Romani policy, as well as on the underpinning ideological
and societal views and objectives. Much attention is paid to the conceptions held about the Romani
population motivating such policy, as well as the criteria for evaluating the success of the policy.
Traditionally, European Romani policy is very international by nature, and therefore it cannot be
studied as a national phenomenon but within a wider international context, looking at it from a
comparative perspective. With their moving and alternating national borders, the Nordic countries
offer a challenging environment for a comparative analysis of Romani policies. The central research
tool used in this study is the concept of ethnopolicy coined by the Norwegian scholar Frederik
Barth. In defining the concept of ethnopolicy, Barth underlines the dynamic and flexible nature of
ethnic identity whereby both culture and identity take shape in constant interaction with other
cultures and group identities. In the Nordic countries, ethnopolitical organisation started already in
the 19th century, but in the case of the Roma, it is justified to refer to their spontaneous organisation
only as of the 1940s. In the pure “Barthian” sense, we can speak about ethnopolicy only from
thereon, but I have knowingly stretched the concept to also cover the earlier periods, trying to use
the verbal and written contributions of the local level actors to catch the interaction and contrasts
related to the interface between the Roma and the mainstream population.
First period: curiosity, rejection, integration (from the 16th century to the early 19th century)
The Roma came to Scandinavia in the early 16th century, mainly from the British Isles where
Denmark had close dynastic and commercial relations. The party known as the pilgrims of Count
Antonius Gagino first arrived in Copenhagen (1505) while in 1512 certain Stockholm documents
refer to the same group. As elsewhere in Europe, the “pilgrims” were granted the normal
hospitability but the first attempts to expel the gypsies that had remained in the country started as
early as in the 1520s It seems that the majority of the Roma had, indeed, left the Danish isles and
Jutland in the 17th century while Scania (Skåne) which was part of Denmark until the 1640s and
Halland which was under Norwegian rule, also became fixed abodes of the Roma. As late as the
second half of the 17th century, these people were still called ‘Tartars’ or ‘Black Tartars’ while the
term ‘Zigeuner/Sikøyner’ also started to be used towards the end of the century. Used partly
synonymously, partly as a separate and independent concept, this term was originally coined in
Northern Germany, similarly to ‘Tartar’.
Scandinavia also rapidly adopted the severe German-style legislation related to vagrants, aimed at
disciplining the groups of migrating vagrants, especially those of foreign origin. The centrally
administered monarchy, the “modern State”, developed in the early 17th century, especially in
Sweden. The development of the administrative structures and the strengthening of the army
proceeded hand in hand. Tighter social control was aimed at more efficient exploitation of the
population, be it about tax collection or the army’s recruitment needs. The severe vagrant legislation
served many needs, and the Roma as a migrating group looked down upon by the Church was
particularly the target of legislation.
In Denmark, the “foreign impostors” were declared outlaws as early as 1555, and the law enacted in
1637 in Sweden entitled the authorities to capture and hang all Roma men. This law was
completely alien to the Swedish legal practice, and nobody ever tried to enforce it.
In fact, the authorities followed the rules related to gypsies in the only way they knew: like any
other vagrants, the gypsies were expelled from the borough, in extreme cases from the province, but
only rarely outside the kingdom, as was the original meaning of the law. It is evident that the
tougher controls in Denmark made the Roma move towards Sweden, later also Finland, with more
liberal living conditions. There is information also about major Tartar raids in Norway, with the
Roma who were caught even being killed, but there is no such indication concerning Sweden.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the term “Tartar” started to refer to any people leading a migrant,
vagrant life in groups, often in families, and it is quite difficult to distinguish the “ethnic Roma”
from the whole. Indeed, by the 19th century, the Roma in Scandinavia had virtually assimilated into
the ‘Tartars’ who preferred to refer to themselves as ‘resande/reisende’, similar to the term
‘traveller’ in the British Isles or ‘reiziger’ in Holland. Genealogical studies have shown that the
background of a significant number of the Scandinavian travellers (resande) of the early 19th
century was associated with the armies of the 17th and 18th centuries, and with the related ill-famed
professions (whippers, hangmen) and with certain artisan and trading professions (horse keepers,
castrators, rag-gatherers, glass factory agents).
In fact, the army became the first and most important institution in the integration of the Roma.
Partly, they were forcibly recruited to the army like any other vagrants, but some of them signed up
on their own since being enlisted provided the soldiers’ families with a legal right to move around.
Especially in the 18th century, with the Swedish army mostly remaining in Sweden, there were
regular complaints about families and even larger groups vagabonding under the protection of safeconducts issued by the army. The army was a potent organisation the protection of which was a
strong guarantee against vagrancy allegations and even criminal charges. Moreover, the rapidly
expanding armies of the 17th and 18th centuries were international by nature, and anyone could
become a mercenary, not just those who professed pure Christian faith and received privileges and
liberties for the exercise of their religion.
The second institution which started to offer protection to the Roma in the latter half of the 17th
century was the small towns which sold them burgher rights. With the status of a burgher, the Roma
were free to roam the rural areas and sell knick-knacks, and as of the late 17th century it is typical
that those accused of vagrancy are mostly called by various trade names (wire drawers/tråddragere,
hookmakers/häckmakare) and not by ethnic epithets (Zigeuner). However, the complaint writs
indicate that they meant the Roma. Also the glass and rag paper mills used the vagrants as their
agents, issuing them safe-conducts.
The third institution to recognise that the century-long rejection policy was a failure was the
Lutheran Church. In 1560, the gypsies were mentioned as one group who priests were not allowed
to baptise, marry or bury. Many cases of excommunication of Roma took place in the late 16th
century. In the eyes of the Church, the Roma were a people without religion, with no wish to learn
the Christian faith, and the Church was also irritated by the gypsies’ skills in witchcraft, something
that the commoners both respected and feared. However, it is noteworthy that no Roma were
accused in the Swedish and Finnish witchcraft trials.
The new Church Act of 1686 changed the Church policy: after that year, the priests were expressly
invited to take care of the “domestic gypsies” and their spiritual needs. This division became
permanent, and it was repeated in the central dispositions of the 18th century, issues in 1748 and
1772. The Roma born in Sweden were now considered to be full Swedish citizens while the Roma
seeking to enter the country were to be expelled. Of course, this principle did not apply to the Roma
alone, but the 1741 Act contained a long list of vagrants of foreign origin to be expelled, such as the
“Savoyards, ropedancers, conjurors and other comedians”.
During the 17th century, the Swedish Romani policy, in particular, started to be characterised not
only by rejection but also by a pursuit of integration, which was to become the dominant trend of
the 18th century when the rejection was targeted only at those arriving from abroad. Other
indications of integration of the Roma include information about those who had become tenant
farmers, or even landowners. This was, indeed, the direction the official policy wanted to take. King
Gustav III, who saw himself as an enlightened ruler, recommended in 1772 that land be reserved for
the Roma, and although this project remained on paper, it has obvious affinities with the
contemporary Austrian-Hungarian and Prussian pursuits.
Second period: lifestyle, nationalism and assimilation pursuits (from the 19th century to the 1950s)
During the 19th century, the Romani issue had two diverging development trends in the Nordic
countries: In Scandinavia proper, the Roma merged with a wider vagrant vagabond population,
referred to by the general name 'Tartars’ but designated with various names in different regions
(such as fantefolket, omstreifer in Norway, kæltringer, skøjere in Denmark). These vagrants of
southern Scandinavia wandered round paying no heed to national borders, forming “transnational”
networks. The local population often considered all these groups to be ‘gypsies’, and their code
language (Rotwelsch) also misled certain scholars to think that it was a Romani language. The
habits, profession and lifestyle of the vagabonds were clearly different from those of the
mainstream population, and soon enough they became the focus of vagrant policy, mostly in the
negative sense. The “burden caused by the Tartars” (tattarplågan) was a regular complaint in
certain areas up until the 1920s, the decade in which the group also became the object of racial
research and sterilisation policy in Sweden and in Norway. However, we cannot maintain that in the
19th century the interest or rejection vis-à-vis the group was based on the ethnic identifiers. It was
primarily a question of shunning based on their vagrant lifestyle which their contemporaries
associated with general immorality and criminality. The most serious attempts to put a stop to the
vagrancy of the ‘travellers’ were made in Norway where Eilert Sundt’s study on the fante led to a
special allocation by the Government to reimburse the fante children’s shelter, or orphanage
expenses. Eilert Sundt’s longstanding work among the fantefolket resulted in some interesting
sociological studies but did not amount to much more. In 1895 another priest, Jacob Walnum,
started voluntary charitable operations which expanded rapidly with the help of state support. The
Svanviken labour colony (1908) and the children’s shelters were soon also made models for
minority policies in other countries. The family-based labour colony and aggressive policy of taking
children into public custody played a key role in the efforts to try to settle the reisende in one place.
In 1935, Walnum’s association took the new name (Norsk Misjon blant hjemløse; Norwegian
Mission among the Homeless) which continued operations until the 1980s.
The Scandinavia ethnopolitical scene started to change after the 1870s when the second wave of
immigration from the Balkans started to reach the Nordic countries. The migration of the Kalderash
Roma first reached Denmark, and soon Sweden and Norway. Compared to other Scandinavian
countries, the Norwegian passport laws provided easier access to settlement in that country until
1888, and by that time some Roma families had even become naturalised Norwegian citizens.
Denmark, on the contrary, was extremely unwelcoming as regarded Roma, and in 1912 all Roma
caught in the Danish islands were expelled – to Sweden. When Sweden two years later banned the
immigration of the Roma, the Kalderash remained there, earning a living as funfair owners or
artisans. The attitudes of the country’s traditional traveller population was very negative towards the
new vagrants, and the travellers and gypsies did not like to meet in the same regions.
The Swedish authorities did not bother with the new Roma group, focusing their attention on the
‘Tartars’. However, the Danish and Norwegian authorities joined forces to prevent the return of the
Norwegian Roma to their home country in 1934. The 68 Roma who were returning from the
Netherlands through Germany were left at the mercy of the Germans. Most of the group perished in
the war-time concentration camps. So Kalderash only remained in Sweden.
The Finnish development took a different turn. There was virtually no Scandinavian-type ‘Tartar’
population in the country although the term was known and also used as a synonym for gypsy. In
Finland, the Kale Roma remained the only group vagabonding in groups of families, with new
living opportunities offered by Finland’s new status as a part of Russia. The Roma earned a living
mainly as horse traders and horse breeders, fortune tellers and beggars, but a consistent number of
Roma men were in public employment as whippers. As long as the landless were required to have a
place of service, meaning legal protection, as a guarantee against vagrancy, many Roma also tried
to acquire a leasehold or a part of a farm of their own. At the local level, the Roma were tolerated
without too many problems as their services were also needed, and most Roma families regularly
travelled their short and established routes. Notorious vagrants were only in the scarcely populated
northeastern and eastern parts of the country.
As in Sweden – Finland was paying close attention to the legislative developments in Sweden – the
focus on the gypsies was one of vagrancy policy. In principle, the same vagrancy criteria were
applied to the Roma as to other vagabonds, but the Roma were more easily convicted because the
law provided them with lesser chances of acquiring legal protection. As the Roma population grew
along with the rest of the landless population, forced labour was in practice a lesser threat. As of the
1850s, the Roma started to attract a new kind of interest. Language nationalism proper was still of
minor significance but the clergy started to demand more efficient measures to stop the Roma’s
vagabonding because they had been excluded from all religious education. As in Norway, the Roma
started to be seen as a target group for the Church’s domestic mission work. However, the Gypsy
Mission (today: Romano Missio) association was not established until 1905. The Gypsy-affairs
Committee operating in the 1890s not only saw this as a lifestyle problem but also a national
problem in a certain sense. The Roma were considered to be a group that renewed their own vagrant
and immoral lifestyle precisely through their own language. Therefore the Committee
recommended the establishing of specified state boarding schools to gather the children of the
Roma. Through forced education, the children would not only be taught religion and civic virtues
but their own language would be rooted out. That would eventually lead to the destruction of the
gypsy culture which the Committee considered to be a self-evident long-term objective. However,
the Committee’s report never led to political measures; it was found that the proposals were not
only unrealistic and expensive but also unethical. At that time, Finland was fighting for its own
national existence, and the language question was extremely sensitive from the political point of
view. The idea of destroying the Roma nationality by prohibiting the use of their language was very
disagreeable to many government servants. The small and weak Gypsy Mission was left with the
practical implementation of gypsy policy on the one hand, and on the other it was taken care of by
the local authorities who either deteriorated or facilitated the Roma’s chances of earning their living
legally. In general, the local bodies focused on the hampering measures.
In fact, Finland had no real Romani policy during the four first decades of the 20th century; the
poor, agricultural country became independent in 1917 and went through a devastating civil war in
1918. The Roma were far too small a group and a local problem to raise any political interest on the
national level. In the Roma’s own narratives, the 1920s and 30s are remembered as the “golden
era”, with a livelihood earned easier in the more prosperous rural areas compared to the period of
structural change after the 1940s, although the closing of the Russian border in 1918 had had an
adverse impact on the life of the Roma in eastern Finland. Moreover, Finland never went through a
flourishing period of racial theories and eugenics policies as the Scandinavian countries did.
Third period: Ethnopolitics and rise of ethnic consciousness
World War 2 and the ensuing new international order had a decisive impact on the status of the
Roma in the Nordic countries. The Norwegian Roma were the only Scandinavian gypsies to be
persecuted by the Nazis, but the consequences of the war were also dramatic in Finland. Roma men
had fought in the Finnish forces, such as the men of the Jewish and Russian minorities –
paradoxically side by side with Germany in 1941—1944, but from the Finnish perspective, the war
was a continuation of Finland’s defence against the Soviet aggression of 1939—40. The war ended
with Soviet victory in the sense that Finland had to cede vast territories to the Soviet Union. These
areas in Finnish Karelia were also regions with a dense Roma population as the evacuees from the
ceded territories included almost two thirds of the Finnish Roma. The resettlement of the Roma in
the new areas was a complete failure, leading to social misery which continued for years after the
war.
The Swedish Roma, about 700 in all, led the traditional vagrant life after the war. More and more
Roma tried to camp on the outskirts of larger cities, especially Stockholm, which induced the social
welfare and health authorities of the city to pay attention to the poor hygienic conditions of the
camps and to the inadequate school attendance of the children. In the early 1940s, Sweden had
already tried to organise camp schools but the responsibility for the arrangements was unclear and
the municipalities were negative towards the assistance they were supposed to offer the Roma
arriving in their municipality. Ethnologists were also interested in the Roma population, their life
and customs. As a result of an initiative in the Swedish Parliament (Riksdagen) – the Swedish
Government set up a committee in 1952 to study the situation of the Roma in Sweden. The
committee completed its report two years later, and in 1957 the City of Stockholm set up its own
committee to shed light on the status of the Roma living in the city.
Both this committee and the municipal authorities had stressed that improved housing conditions
and children’s school attendance were the first priorities. However, the Swedish Government took a
different view. The Government introduced a system created for the Baltic refugees, with the
Government agency for labour market issues assuming the main responsibility, resulting in the
employment and adult education issues being prioritised. The hygiene of the camps was also
improved but the results were only partially achieved. It was not until the 1960s that things changed
substantially: owing to the Government’s extensive housing construction programme, the camp
gypsies were settled in municipal rental houses. At the same time, an extensive municipal network
of gypsy consultants and social workers was created, assigned with the task of working with the
Roma families, the schooling of the children being the first priority. The housing conditions of the
Swedish Roma were improved considerably but at the same time, an increasing number became
dependent on welfare because their mobility-based livelihood ended.
Although the secretary of the Swedish Romani-affairs committee was C.-H. Tillhagen, a renowned
ethnologist, no attention was paid to the Roma culture in Sweden. The unambiguous objective of
the chosen policy was to provide the Roma with a social situation that was equal to that of other
Swedes, while the Roma culture was seen as a relic on its way to extinction, and the clear aim was
to assimilate the Roma as inhabitants of the Swedish folkhem (“people’s home”). The situation
changed in the early 1960s as the books by the novelist Katarina Taikon attracted great attention,
and she assumed the leading role as the spokesperson for radical Romani policy. She found support
primarily among the left-wing politicians and academia while the organisation of the Roma
themselves remained modest. At the rhetorical level, some Swedes had already in the 1950s
compared the treatment of the Roma to the situation of the blacks in the US and South Africa, but
the Swedish Social Democrat minority policy did not recognise special rights for the minorities but
their right to become Swedish.
The Swedish Roma policy assumed two new dimensions in the late 1960s. Part of the more active
Swedish foreign and refugee policy, the country decided to help the Roma living under poor
circumstances in southern Europe by means of a refugee policy. This approach was underpinned not
only by the more active role taken by the Council of Europe in the Romani question but also the
expulsions of French and Spanish Roma groups that had taken place in Sweden. In 1969, there were
as many as 200 non-Nordic Roma in Sweden, and the politicians decided to include the Roma in the
Swedish refugee quota, starting to accept Roma from the Southern European camps, including those
in Italy, as of 1971. In this first stage, about 250 refugee Roma arrived in the country, with an
intensified service organisation created for them.
The second challenge was related to the neighbouring country. In 1954, the Nordic countries
created a common labour market and a regime of passport-free border crossings, and as a result
Roma also started to emigrate from Finland to Sweden. Due to their poor level of education, the
Finnish Kale Roma were faced with big problems in Sweden but the Swedish assistance
programmes designed for refugee Roma did not apply to the Finnish Roma as they were Nordic
citizens. In 1969 the Nordic Council obliged the respective Governments to take joint action to
solve the Roma problems, and this led to regular co-operation between the authorities, also
involving representatives of the Roma’s own organisations. The Finnish Romani organisations paid
much attention to the problems of the Roma who had emigrated to Sweden, and in 1972 a Finnish
gypsy association was founded in Stockholm, to become the most active Romani organisation in
Sweden for a number of years. 1973 saw the founding, on a Finnish initiative, of the Nordic
Romani Council, also including some Norwegian and a few Danish Roma.
Active pressure led to results in 1976 as the Swedish Riksdag implemented a larger foreign policy
reform, and also gave the Finnish Roma the same rights that Swedish and the refugee Roma had.
The Roma now had universal rights concerning, for example, curators’ services or the teaching of
the mother tongue. In the early 1980s, there were about 1,500 Swedish Roma, some 1,700 nonNordic Roma and 3,100 Finnish Roma living in Sweden.
It was typical of the organisation of the Swedish Romani policy that the work with the Roma was
decentralised and divided among various administrations, with no clear coordination between them,
until the new Invandrarverket (Immigration Office) started to coordinate the Romani question
through civil servant action in the early 1970s. Municipal administrative autonomy was another
factor hampering uniform policy, although the Stockholm Romani policy was never directly
contrary to the national pursuits. However, the reluctance of Stockholm, for example concerning the
Finnish Roma, was must stronger than that of the state authorities. The Stockholm and Helsinki
authorities regularly co-operated but the objective of Stockholm was to make Helsinki curb the
immigration of Finnish Roma to Sweden. The active housing policy exercised by the City of
Helsinki in the 1970s did, indeed, contain the pressure to emigrate but at the same time, it increased
the internal migration of the population towards the capital.
The Norwegian Romani issue surfaced anew in 1953 as some of the Roma that had survived the
German concentration camps started to try to return to Norway. This resulted in a lengthy legal
battle regarding the citizenship of the Roma. In 1956, the Ministry of Justice admitted that the
returning Roma evidently had had Norwegian citizenship and thus the right to stay in the country,
but the immigration of new Roma was prevented using all available means. The guilty conscience
of the Norwegians was particularly reflected in the press which was very active in the defence of a
tiny Roma group against the Oslo authorities. The conditions of the Roma living in caravans forced
the authorities, including those in charge of schools, to act, and children started to be taken into
public custody, with poor results. The Government and the City of Oslo ended up in a long-lasting
controversy because a plan of action was created in the 1960s at ministry level, with
implementation left to the City of Oslo. The City, however, refused to implement the orders of the
Ministry, pleading its municipal autonomy. As early as 1962, Norway established an advisory
committee for the coordination of Romani policies, however, with no Roma representation. The
failure of the housing policy of the Norwegian Roma led to some of them spending the winters in
Denmark at a landfill close to Copenhagen while others moved to the south of Sweden where they
also found houses thanks to the generous Swedish housing policy.
Towards the end of the 1960s, the Norwegian authorities approved the premise that the Roma
constituted an ethnic minority entitled to their own language and culture. The schooling question of
the Roma children started to be steered by the experience gained, for example, from the schools for
the Sámi. The Swedish “rehabilitating assimilation policy” was openly criticised. It is also
significant that with the exception of the late 1950s, the ‘Misjon’ focused on the assimilation of the
travellers was not actively involved in the implementation of the Romani policy. During 1970—73,
the Roma question was debated by Parliament under strong unanimity. The State took over the cost
of the Romani policy, and the coordination body (Råd for sigøynerspøsmål) was established. The
persistent controversy between the Norwegian State and the City of Oslo was thus resolved in a
détente, and Oslo established an official organisation for the Romani issues, concentrating on
housing and educational affairs. The camp life era ended in Oslo, also marking the end of state
Romani policy. The municipal social welfare and educational authorities took over the affairs of the
almost 200 Norwegian-based Roma.
Denmark got a new Romani regulation in the 1960s with the arrival of Roma from elsewhere in the
EEC. Denmark was also part of the Nordic passport-free zone, and so the Danish Aliens Act no
longer had any restrictions related to ethnic groups. So the Norwegian and Swedish Roma and
‘Tartars’ could travel freely in the Nordic countries. However, settling down in the country was
regulated by the normal dispositions related to work permits and documents. In 1972 the Danish
Ministry of Social Affairs instituted a “contact committee” to study the status of the Roma arriving
mainly from Eastern and Southern Europe, and on the initiative of the Roma, Copenhagen launched
certain housing and training projects, subsidised by the Danish state. Denmark did not establish any
centralised organisation for Romani issues, and did not enact any special Roma-related legislation.
The Finnish Romani policy started in the 1940s. The Romano Missio became active again but the
Roma themselves also started to organise and make demands for improved circumstances. The
authorities and the politicians did hear the initiatives of the Romano Missio, and in 1953 the
Government instituted a Gypsy Affairs Committee to study their situation and the necessary
measures. Founded in the same year, the members of the Romanengo Staggos association were
heard but they did not get their own representative on the Finnish committees, either. Although the
Finnish Roma were not camp-based gypsies but had mainly settled down in houses, the Committee
still considered that the biggest problem was the mobility of the Roma and their habit of
vagabonding in summer. In the view of the Committee, the core of the Romani issue was their
lifestyle. They had to be settled, enrolled in the population registers and take up normal paid work.
Most Roma still lived in the countryside but the migration towards the larger cities had already
started. After the war, many low-quality gypsy houses popped up, especially in the outskirts of
Helsinki, with the children taken to shelters in the wintertime, in particular. The Romano Missio
started to establish children’s shelters with state and the City of Helsinki subsidies, and the policy of
taking children into public custody became a visible part of official Romani policy in the 1950s.
This work also received the blessing of the Committee, because it was seen as the means of
distancing the new Roma generation from the “tribe customs”. The children’s shelters paid no
attention to Roma culture, and no Romani language was spoken. As in Sweden, the issues about
their culture and language was ignored in Finland, and the objective of the Romani policy was seen
to be the adaptation of the Roma population to the normal Finnish way of life.
A study on the Roma population showed that they were among the poorest people in the country,
with the adults typically suffering from ill health. The livelihoods of most Roma were the traditional
artisan and horse-trading professions which were in rapidly decreasing demand because of the deepgoing structural change of the Finnish rural areas in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, handicrafts were
limited to women only, while Finnish Kale never did any of the metal work which many central
European Roma were involved in.
The only concrete outcome of the Committee work was the establishing of a state Advisory Board
for Romani Affairs. It was charged with the task of coordinating the Romani issues between various
authorities, and Romano Missio was heavily represented. In practice, the Romani policy was left to
the municipal authorities, and only Helsinki founded a special advisory board, and the tenure of a
gypsy curator in 1964. Until the late 1960s, Finnish Romani policy was mainly a policy of taking
children into public custody, and the long-term objective was the assimilation of the Roma,
although this was never a publicly set target.
The impact of the stands taken by international organisations, above all the UN and the Council of
Europe, started to show in Finland as late as the 1960s, as the media started to discuss the status of
the Roma from the perspective of racial discrimination. In this sense, the trend was the same as in
Sweden, only a few years later. The more active Swedish Roma policy, and the work of Katarina
Taikon and the Zigenarsamfundet founded in 1963, was made known in Finland through two
channels. On the one hand, the media started to report about the Swedish movement in their Romani
policy, and on the other, the Roma emigrating from Finland informed their former countrymen
about the developments in Sweden. In Romani issues, the political developments in Finland and
Sweden started to be linked on many levels.
The decisive turn in the Finnish Romani policy was the founding of Suomen Mustalaisyhdistys
(Finnish Romani Association) in 1967 as an element of a wider radical wave of organisation. The
association activists were partly young radicalised Roma, partly members of the mainstream
population, including some journalists. The Romani Association and the extensive information
operations mobilised by it rapidly attracted great public attention, removing the political initiative
from the old actors, Romano Missio, in particular, which lost its status as the expert organisation.
The Romani Association was fiercely critical of the passive Advisory Board and Romano Missio,
above all the children's shelters it maintained. This resulted in the dismissal of the old Advisory
Board and the establishing of a new body in 1968. Now the Board also included representatives of
the Roma, and the new Chair, the young MP Jacob Söderman, prompted in just a few years a wide
series of legislative reforms through which the Roma acquired a special status in areas such as
social welfare and housing policy. The inclusion of the Roma in the formulation of the national
Romani policy shifted the weight of the operations towards Romani culture and educational policy
based on it. The cultural political activeness of the Finnish Roma made their culture widely known
not only in Finland, but also in Sweden, and the organisations of the Roma actively pressured the
authorities and politicians of the two countries. The Roma had also learned to refer to international
conventions which the Nordic countries had also officially endorsed.
During the 1970s, the social and housing situation of the Roma improved substantially while the
focus in the 1980s was on Romani culture and on Roma children’s school attendance. The
government agencies started to employ Roma experts, and in the 1990s, the Advisory Board on
Romani Affairs also got a Secretary General who was a Roma. The expert officials with a Roma
background started to become the channel of national Romani policy, and the role of the Romani
organisations clearly weakened. In the 1990s the Roma were officially defined as an ethnic
minority, with the ensuing special rights, which was also in line with Finland’s international
commitments. However, the factual development in the social situation of the Roma was seriously
lagging behind the legally defined minority rights.
Ethnopolicy and ethnic awareness
The history of the Romani policy in the Nordic countries shows that from the very beginning, the
policy has been characterised by a strong international dimension. During the early centuries, the
policy was, however, steered mainly by the objectives of national discipline policy – the Roma were
just one element in the extensive entity of problems related to vagrants - and the ethnic dimension
did not play a significant role in the formulation of the policy. It is, in fact, difficult to draw a neat
line between the Roma and other vagrant groups, and also from the social history perspective, the
limits of the groups are blurred, especially in Scandinavia.
The rise of language nationalism introduced a special dimension to the Romani policy towards the
end of the 19th century, but it seems to have played a minor role than was the case with other
minority groups. The definitions in terms of social and vagrant policies did, in fact dominate the
Romani policy objectives well into the 1960s, and the Romani language, for example, was only
seen as a hindrance to assimilation. However, no determined action to assimilate the Roma was
taken in practice. The race hygiene policy did not gain much ground in the Nordic countries,
although the so-called ‘Tartars’ fell victims to it in both Sweden and Norway. On the other hand,
the ethnological or sociological interest in the Romani population was also modest although there
were individual enthusiasts in all the Nordic countries (Eilert Sundt in Norway, Arthur Thesleff in
Finland, C.-H. Tillhagen in Sweden). The Roma were also a marginal group in political terms.
The ethnopolitical awakening took place in all Nordic countries starting from the 1950s. The first
trend was assimilation or adaptation policy but the international system, such as the UN principles
and European human rights conventions, laid the foundation for the Roma to be defined as an ethnic
minority. However, this was not an automatic process – the political structure was not moving on its
own initiative but had to react under pressure. The development of new international
communications played a very significant role, as well as the ensuing international surfacing of the
race question. The merits of the media in “revealing” the situation of the Roma minorities were
undeniable in the 1960s. However, the ethnopolitical organisation of the Roma themselves was
even more significant. Only as they raised their own voice, did the debate start to include the
question of their spontaneous culture and language as well as the imminent need to protect them. In
Finland to some extent, but also in Norway, the ethnic organisation had a link to the rise of the Sámi
question and to the radical organisation of that people. In Sweden, on the contrary, the links are
rather to be found in the Swedish refugee and immigration policies. The adaptation to the Swedish
folkhem and the “Swedification” of the minorities were the dominant lines of action, and the
adoption of minority rights was, in fact, postponed until Swedish membership in the EU in 1995.
The nature of Romani policy was strongly Nordic as of the 1960s. Romani policy was a topic for
the Nordic Council, obliging the countries to co-operate among the government officials. But the
mobility and organisation of the Roma is also a pan-Nordic phenomenon. The organisational will
and skills of the Finnish Roma, in particular, also influenced the formulation of Romani policy on
the Nordic level. At the same time, the Roma’s own view of their special nature and culture was
crystallised. The development of the Roma identity was not separate from the development of the
Romani policy but as of the 1960s, the international Roma movement had created a historicalethnical narrative of the Roma. This process has created an ethnic minority which defines its own
nature and history not only for itself but also for the mainstream population. As any identity, it has
been created and formulated in interaction with other groups and their identity interests.
(Translation: Liisa Laakso-Tammisto)