Compensating for the effects of emigration. Eastern Europe and policy response to EU freedom of movement

Abstract

Freedom of Movement (FoM) has paradoxical implications for Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries: it facilitates brain drain and general population loss but also enjoys continuously high appreciation from Eastern Europeans. Against this background, the article addresses the question: how do FoM-driven expectation gaps— gaps between FoM policy design and outcomes – trigger policy responses? Borrowing from institutional change theories the article identifies new institutions that are added to FoM at the EU level. It argues that these new institutions, called ‘layers’, are established alongside the existing EU principle for the purpose of addressing critique that arises from gaps. To preserve the status quo of the FoM principle and its function for the single market, the layers define incremental changes to the overall policy framework of FoM. They introduce a compensation mechanism for population loss and Commission agency on demographic change and migrant return.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.