Not long ago, Europe was symbolically reunited – at least, such might be the perception of the first eastward enlargement of the European Union on 1 May 2004. The accession of eight Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to the EU gave rise to further dismantling of those barriers between East and West that had been erected in the Cold War era. What followed was a softening of divisions across European societies and an intensification of mutual contacts and flows of knowledge and ideas. Many varied social phenomena in the East were expected to converge with those in other parts of the continent. Migration patterns, regimes and policies ranked among those phenomena.

At the beginning of 1989, when the Poles – and slightly later, citizens of other CEE countries – were granted unlimited freedom of international travel, a considerable part of western public opinion and western states reacted with anxiety, if not phobia. It was feared that freedom of movement – a basic human right that for decades prior to 1989 the West had unstintingly supported – could result in excessive flows of people from CEE to the West.

The East-West exodus did not happen, however. This was because the former communist countries of Europe, still aptly perceived in the late 1980s as politically and economically similar, set different goals for themselves and chose various strategies for transition to democracy and market economy, thus undergoing massive change. An important outcome of that change was a growing capacity to contain within the region itself the vast migration potential that had accumulated over the period of communist repression. This is why in the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Bulgarians, Romanians, Ukrainians and other CEE nationals opted for migration to other former communist countries, notably to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, instead of following in the footsteps of their fellow countrymen who (in much smaller numbers than expected) headed for the West.1 In comparison with Western Europe, the Czech Republic and some other economically booming CEE countries were both geographically and culturally closer for the migrants and thus involved less risk for the pioneers of international mobility of people from Ukraine, Romania or other source countries.