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Thousands of Romania’s Roma, also known as Gypsies, have been heading for the relative wealth of Western Europe, and setting off a clash within the European Union over just how open its “open borders” are. Migration within the 27 nations of the European Union has become a combustible issue during the economic downturn. The union’s latest expansion, which brought in the relatively poor nations of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, has renewed concern that the poor, traveling far from home in search of work, will become a burden on wealthier countries. The migration of the Roma is also raising questions about the obligations of Romania and Bulgaria to fulfill promises they made when they joined the union. Romania, for instance, mapped out a strategy for helping the Roma, but financed little of it.

Nicolas Sarkozy of the state of France has demanded that the Romanian government do more to aid the Roma at home. He vowed to keep dismantling immigrant camps and angrily rejected complaints from EU Commission officials that the French authorities were illegally singling out Roma for deportation. Mr. Sarkozy has tried to revive his support on the political right by deporting thousands of them, offering 300 euros, about $392, to those who go home voluntarily, and bulldozing their encampments. The European Commission has threatened legal action against Paris over the deportation, calling it disgraceful and illegal.

This case illustrates the problem the EU has in enforcing compliance of the terms of the accession talks of new states. In addition, this case puts the power relation between the EU and its state governments under palpable pressure. Lastly, the case showcases the difficulty involved in integrating Europe.  More than a common market, the EU states have open borders.  This appreciably decreases the power, and indeed sovereignty, of the state governments such as France and Germany—governments that were hitherto used to being in the driver’s seat.  So it will be interesting to see whether Sarkozy bows to the EU government or the ECJ (the EU’s Supreme Court) when he is under what must be strong domestic pressure to get rid of the Roma.

Relative to Arizona’s new immigration law, France’s deportation of a race of people is radical. Yet whereas in the US France’s policy would produce a vitriolic response from the media and the left, in the EU it is largely the EU government that is objecting. This difference points to a difference between American and European culture.  Perhaps due to the relatively recent history of racial slavery in some of the American states, there is more sensitivity to race in the US—yet there is also racism in the US. Perhaps the racism in the US is one on one now, whereas the racism in the EU is in some state policies.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/world/europe/17roma.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

While it may indeed take much effort and skill to compromise on disparate budget numbers or whether to have a public health-insurance option, these compromises are rather narrow.  Yet they are the stuff of members of Congress.  I don’t believe that they relish making them; it can be quite difficult to for the elected representatives and Senators to explain their votes for bills that differ from the stated positions. The problem, I contend, is that our politicians are not thinking big enough when it comes to compromising.  In fact, were they to enlarge the domain in which they compromise, they could keep closer to their stated positions.  This sounds counter-intuitive, so I’ll provide an example.

Take Rep. Barney Frank, who with Sen. Chris Dodd headed the work on the health-insurance law of 2010.  Frank would undoubtedly have preferred a pubic option, yet he believed he had to drop it because of the power of the extant private health-insurance companies. Now take virtually any Republican representative in the U.S. House. The republican position was to oppose the expansion in medicaid, which will subsidize health-insurance for those Americans unable to purchase it on their own.  Neither Frank nor any of his republican colleagues are happy with the resulting law. Had they all taken a bigger-picture view, they would have realized that they both could have seen their respective pristine positions in action.  Specifically, had Frank looked at his home state of Massachusetts, he could have realized that leaving health-care policy with the state governments (with the federal government no longer resisting state action, and perhaps even encouraging it) could have resulted in some instances of universal coverage and others more market-driven.  Indeed, perhaps a state such as Oregon would have gone single-payer while Texas relies more on private enterprise. Perhaps Frank and the republicans in the House could have agreed on a minimum federal standard—effectively saying what being an American entitles one to in terms of health-care—while leaving it up to the several states to tailor their own health-systems to their respective political climates.

I contend, moreover, that federalism can provide a means by which many of the disagreements between the two major parties can be resolved.  Artificially funneling these differences into U.S. government law has the effect of stultifying the political process on the federal level.  Ultimately, our elected officials (and ourselves) would need to accept a certain degree of tolerance, for there would indeed be states which enact domestic laws with which you and I disagree.  The United States, being on the scale of an empire with its fifty republics, is inherently diverse, just as other empires have been.  England and Egypt were hardly of the same culture and yet they were both provinces in the Roman Empire.  So too are Vermont and Oklahoma quite different culturally.  To expect that “one size fits all” in the United States, or back in the Roman Empire (or the British Empire, or that of the Mongols or Persians), is to clog our political plumbing, which in turn puts pressure on the system until it implodes or explodes.  Part of the solution is looking for candidates who think outside the box (or pipe).