Roma expulsions challenge Europe's benevolent self-image

It is arguably modern Europe's flagship ideal: the freedom to move across borders and seek a better life elsewhere.

But in the Europe of Nicolas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, and others, the privilege has its limits -- and its paradoxes. Effectively excluded, it seems, is the one group singly most identified with a nomadic and peripatetic existence: the continent's 10 million-strong Romany population.

The expulsion in the past month of at least 1,000 Roma from France highlights an issue that has been simmering for years. It also challenges the European Union's benevolent self-image as a bastion of open borders, ethnic integration, and nondiscrimination.

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