Between East and West: Migration in the Enlarging European Union

The Copenhagen Council of the European Union (EU) sealed in December 2002 the ’reunification of Europe’ by declaring the admission of ten new member states on 1 May 2004, right before the June elections of the European Parliament (CEU 2002, 8). It is a political act, with an extraordinary symbolic value, involving most of the countries belonging to the former Soviet bloc. The signature of the EU treaties in Athens in mid April 2003 finalised this long and complicated process, starting after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and speeding up after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The enlarged European Union will acquire a demographic, political and economic weight worthy of the only remaining superpower: the United States. Its borders will be extended eastwards entering into contact with ex-Soviet republics and also, although minimally, with Russia through Kaliningrad, the enclave on the Baltic Sea surrounded by Poland and Lithuania. These geographical changes will affect the relationships between Russia and the EU and the EU immigration and asylum policy. The candidate countries had to fully adopt the community acquis and to adjust their migratory policies, as well as the control of their borders, to the EU standards. Purpose of this contribution is to shed light on the characteristics and typology of the migratory flows from Central and Eastern Europe and to give a short analytical picture on the interaction between migratory flows and policies in the new geopolitical space of the enlarging European Union.