How did EU enlargement affect immigration policies in Eastern European countries?

Two decades have passed since most of the formerly communist Eastern European countries joined the European Union. This period offers enough distance to begin evaluating how EU membership reshaped immigration governance in the region. The post-communist transition that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union left Central and Eastern European (CEE) states with weak institutional frameworks and little experience in managing immigration. Throughout the 1990s, most CEE countries were characterized by high emigration, low levels of immigration, and limited administrative capacity to govern cross-border mobility (King & Okólski, 2019). Nonetheless, the situation began to shift significantly following accession to the European Union, which required the adoption of the EU’s common rules on migration and asylum. This process triggered substantial reforms in domestic legal and institutional frameworks across the region. This article examines how EU enlargement shaped these changes and considers their broader implications for the development of migration governance in Central and Eastern Europe.

The weakness of migration governance in Eastern Europe has deep historical roots. During the early Soviet years (1917–1927), the regime established laws that treated emigration as a betrayal of the state, criminalizing movement and introducing strict controls like exit visas and surveillance (Felshtinsky, 1983). These measures became part of a broader authoritarian logic that viewed mobility as a threat to national security. Instead of being dismantled after Stalin, this model was spread across the Soviet sphere, including the Baltic states through systems like propiska (residency registration) and party-based loyalty checks. As a result, states like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia inherited not just outdated border policies, but a legal culture that had never dealt with migration or asylum in democratic terms. This legacy helps explain the scale of reform needed in the period prior to EU accession, when most CEE countries were emigration states with ethnically homogeneous populations and minimal immigration from abroad (Górny & Kaczmarczyk, 2019).

The 2004 and 2007 EU enlargements marked a turning point. As part of the accession process, CEE states were required to adopt the EU’s entire legal body in areas such as asylum, border control, and visa policy. Viewed through the lens of Europeanization, enlargement shaped migration governance through mechanisms of conditionality, institutional adaptation, and normative alignment (Grabbe, 2003).

Looking at the examples of Poland and Hungary, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the early years of transition, migration was an important issue in both countries. Hars (2009) identifies three phases of migration governance in Hungary, characterized first by unexpected immigration, followed by a regulation that would become the foundation of the country’s legal and institutional migration framework. For instance, a 1989 constitutional amendment introduced the right to asylum for the first time in Hungarian history. This was followed by a period of consolidation and stabilization of migration governance that finally ended with full legal and institutional harmonization with EU law (Hars, 2009). During the EU accession period, Hungary established the Immigration and Naturalization Office under the Interior Ministry to harmonize national law with the EU acquis (Ceccorulli et al., 2017). In Poland, there were three phases after 1989: institutionalization (1989–2001), Europeanization (2001–2004), and stabilization (2004–2010) (Szulecka, Pachocka & Sobczak-Szelc, 2018). In 1997, the Polish Constitution enshrined the right to international protection. An amendment to the Alien Act established, for the first time in Poland’s history, an Office for Repatriation and Aliens responsible for migration governance (Giljević & Goranka Lalić Novak, 2020).

Turning to the Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—these former Soviet republics had to ask whether their asylum and migration systems were compatible with the EU acquis, what legal changes would be required, and whether those changes would challenge national constitutions (Elson, 1997). Estonia and Latvia, having experienced demographic shifts under Soviet rule, had adopted exclusionary citizenship policies rooted in ethnic nationalism, whereas Lithuania’s comparatively stable demographic structure allowed for more inclusive frameworks after the dissolution.

Despite these differences, all three Baltic states initially lacked functional asylum systems. Lithuania’s was the most advanced but was unenforceable due to economic constraints. Latvia had no operative refugee policy, and border insecurity (especially at the eastern border) combined with uncoordinated transit migration exposed severe institutional weaknesses (Elson, 1997).

According to the European Commission’s 2003 progress reports, Estonia amended its Aliens and Refugees Acts, aligned its visa regime with EU lists, and began developing EURODAC and Dublinet infrastructure. Latvia adopted the 1997 Asylum Law and amended it to comply with the Dublin Regulation, established a national visa register, and enhanced inter-agency coordination. Lithuania applied EU asylum directives into its Law on the Legal Status of Foreigners, concluded readmission agreements, and built new reception and surveillance systems. All three began technical preparations for the Schengen Information System (SIS II) and initiated cooperation with Europol.

Building on these concrete reforms, Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005) argue that the intrusiveness of the rules attached to membership and the desire of most CEE countries to join allowed the EU an unprecedented influence in restructuring domestic institutions. They developed a foundational framework for understanding how the EU exerted influence over post-communist states through what they call the “external incentives model” of Europeanization. At its core is the logic of conditionality: the EU promised membership benefits conditional upon the adoption and implementation of the EU acquis communautaire. According to them, Europeanization in Central and Eastern Europe was not driven by social learning or shared normative commitments, but by strategic adaptation to external rewards. The candidate countries adopted EU rules primarily to satisfy accession conditions, especially in areas like justice and home affairs, where domestic consensus or institutional capacity was often weak. This framework underscores how the power asymmetry between the EU and candidate countries shaped their transformation.

Finally, the lesson from the transformation that occurred in CEE countries in the area of immigration and asylum should not be seen as simply a result of top-down EU pressure but as a dynamic interaction between domestic adjustment and external incentive. Even though accession induced the creation of more liberal, rights-based frameworks—especially in contrast to the Soviet legacy and early transition period weaknesses—this progress reflected strategic compliance more than internalization of values and deep-rooted consensus. Still, the EU’s influence enabled a rapid institutional strengthening that many of these states could not have achieved alone. However, the 2015 migration crisis showed that legal reforms alone are fragile without political ownership and public support. For future candidates, the lesson should be that Europeanization must go beyond legal alignment to require an internal commitment to the values that are foundational to the EU acquis.

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