The financier and philanthropist George Soros is urging the EU’s member states to make a greater commitment to the integration of the Roma in its next long-term budget, arguing that the EU is currently “the main positive force” capable of helping to arrest the worsening condition of Europe’s largest minority group. 

Speaking to European Voice last week, he said that the EU should make specific provisions in its long-term budget for Roma education. If it did so, it would be possible within a decade to make an “important difference” to the integration of a group estimated by the European Commission to number 10-12 million.

Soros underlined the urgency of his call for a greater intervention on the EU’s part, made during a visit to the European Parliament on 8 November, by arguing that the Roma are the group most vulnerable to the effects of the economic crisis. He also framed his argument within a broader picture of an EU that is undergoing a “process of disintegration…that is self-reinforcing”.

The eurozone’s crisis is forcing the EU into “closer co-habitation”, but with “the EU…now divided between creditors and debtors”, the EU had become “a shotgun marriage”.

Soros, who has given $120 million (€89m) to help the Roma over the past two decades, warned that the economic crisis and the eurozone’s problems are already making the situation for Roma “substantially worse”. They were “bearing the brunt of the xenophobic, anti-immigrant line” evident in parts of Europe.

He argued that the public mood was undermining political willingness to do more for the Roma at a national level, as “national governments have to respond to the popular mood”. While “a central bureaucracy like the Commission is naturally inefficient and can’t make much headway against local resistance”, the EU, he said, is “now the one thing working for the Roma”.

Soros believes that more use could be made of the EU’s structural fund – “the main material source of support for the Roma” – to improve the health, housing and employment opportunities of Roma, but stressed the need first to tap funds that are already available. “When you look at Romania, which uses only 3% of the structural funds, there is a lot of room,” said Soros, whose philanthropic foundation, the Open Society Institute (OSI), has written a guide intended to help Roma projects secure funding.

However, Soros urged the EU to increase funding in one specific area – for the education of Roma. He argued that a special line should be added to the EU budget for Roma education, just as the EU has, for example, earmarked funds for the European University Institute in Florence.

The Roma Education Fund, run by OSI and partly supported by the Commission, has helped more than 180,000 Roma. The fund spent €9.8m in 2010, with €2.6m coming from the OSI.

The fund, he said, could increase by “one-third to one-half” every year without encountering absorption problems.If the fund were to expand at that rate, several hundred thousand Roma could receive tutoring and personal mentoring over the next five years. That would, he argued, make a major contribution to the emergence of a Roma elite capable of offering a counterpoint to stereotypes.

Soros argued that educational support needed to be provided on a large scale to ensure that Roma who emerge with a good education are not simply absorbed into the majority population, losing their Roma identity in the process.

Soros, who is now 81, also argued that support for the Roma could help the EU as a project. Disintegration of the EU “could be catastrophic, both economically and politically”, he said. “So you have to somehow arrest it. And the only way to do it is to recapture the positive aspect of integration. That used to be an ideal and fire the imagination of the previous generation, to which I belong.”