Euro fracture: rhetoric or something more?

The French are kicking out the Gypsies, a move that only appears unpopular with the EU bureaucracy. First up, the Guardian with Treatment of the Roma: the shame of a continent

A memo from France's interior ministry this week confirmed that President Nicolas Sarkozy's war on Traveller camps had an explicit racial dimension, with Roma people being deliberately targeted. By doing so, it has jolted the European commission out of indulging the Sarkozy stunt, and into a full-throated attack on Paris. It has stirred overdue introspection in France about how minorities are treated, even while its politicians stampede to use the law to persecute those few Muslim women who wear a face veil. And it has highlighted how Europe's largest minority, the 10 million-plus Roma people, suffer right across the continent's boundaries.

For France is not alone. The systematic discrimination against Roma in eastern Europe – where Gypsy children have often been routinely packed off to schools for the "mentally deficient" – is an acknowledged if underreported reality. But with the EU's eastward expansion and the migration that followed, eastern attitudes have been spreading west. While the Danes have been seeking to expel some Roma, Swedish police have been caught illegally forcing others out of the country. As Germany has repatriated Gypsy children to Kosovo, the Belgians have driven a camp out of Flanders and the Italians have used the presence of Roma as reason to declare a state of emergency.

I liked this line the best:

Rolling caravans do not lend themselves to rooted integration, and especially when they are decoupled from standard western ideas about property rights.

Migrant population that doesn't respect property rights...so basically a roving criminal gang?

Sarkozy rages at EU ‘humiliation’

The veteran commissioner was forced to apologise publicly late on Wednesday, telling the AFP news agency that she “regretted the interpretations that were made of [her] comments. In no way did I wish to establish a parallel between the second world war and the actions of today’s French government”.

But Mr Sarkozy replied vividly to her comments on the margins of a European summit in Brussels.

“The comparison with the second world war and what happened in our country – it is an insult. It is a wound. It is a humiliation. It is an outrage. We don’t talk this way between European partners.”

In defiance of Brussels’ questioning of France’s policy, Mr Sarkozy said he would continue to dismantle illegally built camps.

A new political fault-line in the EU. Eurosceptics have called the EU fascist and beyond national control. Sarkozy says Germany is also moving out Gypsies and the Guardian editorial confirms, most of Europe is expelling Gypsies. The U.S. has a similar conflict, as states try to deal with illegal immigrant populations. The difference is the EU is not as powerful as the federal government and heads of state in Europe still have more power than state governors in the U.S.