The authors who have contributed to this volume have looked at responses to increasing poverty and hardship in the context of the expansion of global capitalism. As they show convincingly through their case studies, one important response to economic integration and rising levels of poverty/inequalities is migration.

‘Systemic changes’ in the global political economy (Friedman 2003, xiv), such as the neoliberal restructuring of Europe, are fundamental in understanding increasing levels of poverty/inequalities. The latter in turn provide an important impetus for migration. Market deregulation has increased the need for national economies to be competitive, and this has been achieved in part through dismantling the welfare-state – in the process disenfranchising vast sectors of the population and making many vulnerable to and at risk of economic marginalisation – and replacing the relatively highly paid workers from ‘successful’ states by cheaper migrant labour from poorer states (or relocating productive enterprises to countries where labour is cheaper – Turner 2003, 55). In this global configuration, west European economies are the net exporters of capital while relatively poorer postsocialist economies have become convenient pools of cheap labour (or provide cheap labour to relocated production). This arrangement provides a general framework for understanding migration and movements between east and west Europe in the last 20 years since the collapse of state socialism.

New migratory paths across the European continent, in turn, are shaping regional economic and political practices as well as social networks, creating new socio-economic landscapes.