The Challenge Of East West Migration For Poland

One of the major features of the social landscape of the new states of Eastern Europe and the former USSR is migration, whether voluntary or coerced. The decline of communism in both East and Central Europe, as well as the fall of the Soviet empire has created new population and ethnic problems. The recent exodus has proved to be the largest migration wave reported in Europe in over 40 years. The problem of foreigners in Poland is a subject scarcely studied and insufficiently described. This volume has been compiled on the basis of papers prepared for a Social Sciences Seminar series at the School of Slavonic Studies, London, which was devoted to migratory movements in Poland since 1989. This volume thus contains the latest data and results of research (quantitative as well as qualitative) on the movement of foreigners into Poland. It is a groundbreaking work.

This title was first published in 2001. The first comprehensive, combined socio-economic and political analysis of the trends and mechanisms of international migration from and into Poland since 1945, from the point of view of the forthcoming enlargement of the European Union.

Patterns of Migration in Central Europe brings together new material on migration in the region: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the last ten years, these countries have changed from being countries of emigration to countries of immigration. As the next candidates for membership to the European Union, migration has become a particularly important topic for these countries. This book is designed as a key text for those interested in the development of the region and in European migration more generally.

The Kaliningradskaya Oblast, Russia's Baltic enclave which soon will turn into an island amid the enlarged EU and NATO, constitutes a twofold challenge to European politics: Due to its economic, social, historical, geographical, strategic, and cultural peculiarities the detached region may become a source of instability. However, due to the same peculiarities the region also bears the potential to serve as a pilot-region for an EU-Russian partnership. To meet the latter perspective all actors concerned need to engage in a dialogue-based, coordinated, and problem-solving approach. This study provides recommendations to a wide range of actors on how to approach the Kaliningrad challenge in a proactive manner. It presents a policy paper drafted by a group of Kaliningrad experts from eight countries and is complemented by fourteen issue-oriented chapters which provide in-depth reasoning on the suggestions made by the group. Hanne-Margret Birckenbach is professor of political sciences at the University of Giessen, Germany. Christian Wellmann is deputy director of SHIP--The Schleswig-Holstein Institute for Peace Research, Germany.

The book offers comparative and in depth analysis of circular migration by empirical analysis of seven pairs of countries.

This study explores the representation of international migration on screen and how it has gained prominence and salience in European filmmaking over the past 100 years. Using Polish migration as a key example due to its long-standing cultural resonance across the continent, this book moves beyond a director-oriented approach and beyond the dominant focus on postcolonial migrant cinemas. It succeeds in being both transnational and longitudinal by including a diverse corpus of more than 150 films from some twenty different countries, of which Roman Polański’s The Tenant, Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Trois couleurs: Blanc are the best-known examples. Engaging with contemporary debates on modernisation and Europeanisation, the author proposes the notion of “close Otherness” to delineate the liminal position of fictional characters with a Polish background. Polish Migrants in European Film 1918-2017 takes the reader through a wide range of genres, from interwar musicals to Cold War defection films; from communist-era exile right up to the contemporary moment. It is suitable for scholars interested in European or Slavic studies, as well as anyone who is interested in topics such as identity construction, ethnic representation, East-West cultural exchanges and transnationalism.