The past two decades have brought immense changes to Europe. From political and economic transition following the collapse of communist regimes to European Union membership, countries in CEE have faced transitions on many fronts. With membership of the EU came increased European integration, including more access for individuals to the labour markets in other EU countries. While the wins and woes of economic ‘transition’ have been fairly well documented within individual countries, less is known and understood about changes in human mobility resulting from EU membership. The free mobility of labour within the EU (albeit with limitations) has led to increased access to various EU labour markets and has hence changed the dynamics of European migration flows. This book has aimed to provide a conceptual, methodological and empirical framework for better understanding and further studying post-accession migration. The various chapters have showed impressive changes in terms of substance, scale and structure of migration flows within Europe after the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007. The empirical case studies on migrants in receiving societies and upon return accounted for the complexity of migratory flows and of intentions and behaviours of migrants, both after arriving in the receiving societies and upon return to their home countries. Likewise, the theoretical and methodological parts of the book have clearly shown that there is not one optimal, but rather numerous approaches and methods to study and explain those flows and the social, geographical and structural changes preceding and following them.

In this final chapter, we want to summarise the findings, expressing what may have remained constant versus changed in contemporary mobility, presented in terms of the new and potentially overlooked theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of post-accession migration. The first section looks at post-accession mobility, drawing particularly from the case studies in this volume, in terms of both structural influences at the macro level and migration strategies taken at the micro level. This section will first underline core structural changes that are presented across the case studies and then will highlight the macroeconomic and geographical perspectives and emerging research issues linked to them. The section then turns to analysis of individual strategies for migration, again summarising findings from the various case studies. It closes with a discussion of how to place the observed dynamics of post-accession migration into existing theoretical frameworks.