Tackling Welfare Gaps

The main goal of the study is to see how the existing and perceived welfare gaps contribute to setting a new political and social agenda in Europe in the post-Cold War context. The study focuses on welfare gaps and on both individual and group strategies of solving what could be described as a welfare gap dilemma.

A major consequence of the very existence of welfare gaps is the interest that both individuals and groups take in the overcoming what they see as a hindrance to improving their lives. Of the many ways of solving this "welfare dilemma", migration and various transborder activities seem among the most common choices. Migration is treated here as one of many possible individual and group survival and adaptation strategies. Survival and adaptation strategies are defined for the purpose of this study as adaptive measures taken by groups and individuals in response to the new challenges of the transition in Central and Eastern Europe. These strategies are devised and implemented in a situation when individuals and groups are faced with a deterioration of their social and economic position and are challenged to adapt to a new social and economic reality in order to counter the negative developments and maintain - if possible improve - their own position.

To what extent these strategies may succeed depends, however, on many external factors, such as the pace and the depth of the European integration and the implementation of a more liberal or a more strict migration policy. The study looks, therefore, also at the processes that contribute to changing the European migratory landscape, in the first place the EU enlargement process.

To understand recent developments and get insight into what lies behind the new emerging patterns in migratory flows between the post-Communist and Western/Northern Europe, the study looks at how the large-scale institutional factors - the collapse of the Communist system and the process of the European integration - have contributed to the emergence of the new social, economic and political challenges and how these new challenges are addressed on the micro-level by a new set of social practices - survival strategies with migratory component - that are largely a result of the new way of functioning of social networks and social practices.

The very existence of welfare gaps is an important migratory push-factor. This study examines therefore how the economic and social transition in Eastern Europe has contributed to the emergence of a new set of push and pull factors in migratory exchange between Poland and Russia on the one side and Norway on the other. In order to shed more light on these processes, this report contains not only general considerations, but also two case studies - one on the emergence of the new pattern of migration between Poland and Norway, and another one looking at the growth of the Russian community in Norway in the post-Soviet period.