Forgotten Abroad, Needed at Home

Following the collapse of communism and the integration of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states into the EU, citizens of these regions used their newfound freedoms to emigrate westwards. Their home countries were illprepared for the economic and cultural effects this outflow would have but made little effort to maintain connections with their diasporas. Now, faced with increasing demographic, strategic, and democratic vulnerabilities, they are engineering ways to mend this fracture. 

For decades, Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Baltic EU member states experienced sustained emigration, with millions of citizens moving abroad. Governments welcomed remittance inflows and tried to adjust to domestic labour shortages, but engagement with their diasporas remained limited. This approach was partly shaped by the historical context. Magdalena Ulceluse, an assistant professor in international migration at Sweden’s Malmö University, explains, “Eastern European countries have a complicated relationship with free movement. Coming from a communist context where mobility was forbidden, emigration became associated with hard-won freedom.”  

However, a combination of long-standing structural factors and more recent developments is prompting these governments to rethink their social contract and relationship with their diaspora. While demographic decline has been an enduring challenge, driven in part by sustained emigration and persistently low birth rates, new pressures, including the war in Ukraine and rising political polarisation, are accelerating this shift. As a result, states are increasingly viewing their diasporas not only as economic contributors but also as politically relevant constituencies and key actors in security and demographic arenas.  

Emigration has been significant. Of Romania’s roughly 19 million citizens, for example, nearly a quarter live abroad, mostly in Western Europe. They form the largest diaspora in the EU. Around two-thirds are economic migrants, filling jobs in, among others, construction, social care for elderly people, and seasonal agriculture that workers in host societies are no longer willing to take. In 2023 alone, they sent home 6.5 billion euros in remittances – nearly 3 per cent of Romania’s GDP. Poland had around 1.5 million citizens living elsewhere in the EU at the end of 2023, with remittances accounting for 1.1 per cent of GDP. Latvia, with a population of just 1.86 million, has seen between 280,000 and 300,000 nationals or former nationals – more than 15 per cent of its population – settle in EU or OECD countries.  

Eastern European countries have a complicated relationship with free movement.

These emigration flows largely occurred after these countries’ EU accession (Poland and Latvia joined in 2004, Romania in 2007). Migrants were enticed by higher wages and more stable labour markets in countries such as Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Italy. “In the home countries, the costs of emigration were visible from the beginning,” Ulceluse notes, “but diaspora policies did not substantially change until the political dimension arrived through polarisation and the rise of far-right parties.”  

Neglected and seduced   

For Romania, the political consequences of two decades of inertia have become impossible to ignore. In 2024, the country’s constitutional court cancelled elections due to alleged foreign interference and illegal campaign funding; during the re-run last year, pro-European candidate Nicușor Dan beat far-right candidate George Simion but not without some shock results: among diaspora communities in Germany, Italy, and Spain – countries with large Romanian communities – Simion received approximately 70 per cent of the vote. 

Ulceluse argues that the scale of Simion’s diaspora support reflects a shift in who has been leaving Romania. “The early waves included many highly skilled migrants, middle-class professionals moving into skilled jobs abroad. But, in recent years, recruitment agencies have spread across the country, into villages, offering to take people from their doorstep to accommodation in the Netherlands or Belgium. That infrastructure opened the door to a much more diverse group of migrants.”  

For many of them, particularly those in agricultural work, the experience abroad has been one of profound isolation. “They live apart, don’t speak the language, and carry a deep sense of mistrust, even toward fellow Romanians,” says Ulceluse. “They feel invisible: no opportunities at home, and no recognition abroad.”  

The Covid-19 pandemic deepened their grievances: workers in precarious or seasonal employment were frequently excluded from social protection, healthcare, and financial aid in host countries. Meanwhile, the Romanian authorities, including the president at the time, discouraged them from returning home for the holidays for fear of bringing the virus into the country. Continuously rising inflation and the cost-of-living crisis further strained their finances, with remittances falling sharply in 2024. 

Mainstream politicians from the liberal and social-democratic parties only remembered them during campaigns, offering slogans and asking for their vote. Simion’s far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians party (AUR), by contrast, has made a consistent effort to engage the diaspora. The party has actively sought to meet diaspora communities where they are, engaging a wide range of social groups, from truck drivers in parking lots to participants in diaspora nonprofit events. At the last elections, these efforts paid off, even if they were not sufficient for Simion to win.  

Estonia’s right-wing nationalist Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) is able to tell a similar story. In the 2019 parliamentary elections, it won 43.7 per cent of the diaspora postal vote – albeit from a relatively small segment of the overall Estonian electorate abroad (mainly by expats in Finland and Sweden). Vassilis Petsinis, an associate professor of politics at Corvinus University of Budapest, attributes part of this support to EKRE’s emphasis on return policies. “EKRE has advocated for facilitating the return of Estonian emigrants and developing infrastructure to support reintegration,” he says, noting that such policies may have especially appealed to certain groups, like blue-collar workers. 

An obligation to serve?   

Across cases such as Romania and Estonia, diaspora voting patterns suggest that alienation and disenfranchisement abroad, if sustained for long enough, can harden into extreme political choices.  

Alienation and disenfranchisement abroad, if sustained for long enough, can harden into extreme political choices.

But voting patterns are only part of the picture. Governments’ relations with their diasporas are increasingly being reshaped by security considerations. The return of large-scale military conflict to Europe has raised an immediate, practical question: What can states legitimately ask of their citizens living abroad, including when it comes to defending their homeland?  

While Romania has not reintroduced mandatory military service, it approved a draft law in 2025 establishing voluntary four-month military training for citizens aged 18 to 35, whether residing in Romania or abroad. The legislation was framed as a mechanism for building reserve capacity, but the Romanian government has begun to build the legal and institutional framework through which citizens abroad could be incorporated into national defence if the security environment deteriorates. When asked about drafting the diaspora in the event of war, Romania’s chief of staff, General Vlad Gheorghiță, stated that military service “remains a constitutional duty for all and a legal obligation”.  

Estonia is amending its compulsory military service, whereby citizens must serve for between eight and 11 months, to 12 months starting in 2027, including for the diaspora, though a certain portion of it is excluded. Citizens who have resided abroad continuously for at least seven years prior to entering the national defence obligation register, or who were born abroad and lived there immediately before registration, may be released from service obligations if they do not request to serve within five years. Those falling outside these exemptions remain within the conscription pool.  

Latvia is also reintroducing mandatory military service, with seemingly fewer exemptions than Estonia. Until 2027, Latvian citizens permanently residing abroad and registered with the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs are exempt from draft lists. After that transition period ends, diaspora Latvians may be called up by the National Defence Service. According to Māris Andžāns, director of the Center for Geopolitical Studies in Riga, conscripting the diaspora will likely cut both ways. He argues that it “could incentivise some dual citizens to renounce Latvian citizenship”, but spending 11 months in Latvia, as the service requires, could equally “strengthen the bond with the country”. A passport, as he puts it, comes “not only with opportunities, but also obligations".  

What remains harder to predict is how different generations of Latvians abroad will react. Andžāns is careful not to assume that recent emigrants are more attached to their home country than those whose families left decades ago. “Some non-Latvian-speaking Americans of Latvian descent might be more willing to serve than those who left recently,” he believes. More recent emigrants, he suggests, often departed because they felt they could not build a life in Latvia, and they may feel little pull to return.  

The Latvian government is already running workshops at embassies and diaspora camps abroad to explain the policy and manage expectations. But, as Andžāns acknowledges, the next five years will be the real test of which direction the diaspora moves in. More broadly, Andžāns stresses that the return of conscription is not just a Latvian or Baltic phenomenon but part of a wider European shift driven by security concerns and demographic pressures. 

New strategies   

These security concerns are unfolding against a deeper structural backdrop: demographic decline. Population projections for the region are worrisome. Romania’s population is expected to decline from approximately 19 million today to 14 million by 2100 without accounting for immigration; Poland’s from 38 million to 24 million. 

Lower fertility rates are a key driver, but sustained emigration has compounded the pressure considerably. In Romania, some analysts expect long-term structural effects. Remus Gabriel Anghel, professor at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration and a researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, says that “a significant part of the Romanian rural population will probably disappear”, with population increasingly concentrated in urban centres of different sizes. Immigration, he argues, is unlikely to fill the gap. In public institutions and companies, “in the future, you will need people with at least an acceptable level of Romanian to write, read, and prepare documents”, a requirement that limits how much of the shortfall can be offset by outside arrivals. In principle, Moldovans, whose official language is also Romanian, could help fill some of these gaps. But rather than settling in their neighbouring country, many prefer to migrate to Western and Southern European countries, such as Italy, or head east to Russia in search of better economic prospects.  

Even with low-skilled labour, Anghel foresees that scaling up immigration would not be easy. Despite the current modest scale of foreign labour in Romania, populist and anti-immigration rhetoric is already gaining ground, suggesting that the political ceiling for any managed immigration programme may be lower than the demographic need would warrant. The implication is that diaspora return, or at least the maintenance of strong diaspora ties that may eventually facilitate return, is among the more tractable policy levers available.  

In response to these challenges, governments in the CEE and Baltic regions have spent the past few years trying to reshape their diaspora policy. According to a report published in 2025 by the EU Global Diaspora Facility, 13 EU member states, including Romania, Latvia and Poland, now have a dedicated diaspora law, strategy, or policy. The report also identified 97 public institutions across the EU involved in diaspora-related policy.  

Poland has embarked on one of the most comprehensive attempts at reform. In the last few years, the country has been adapting its policies to the reality that the diaspora now includes “the next generations of the Polish community, people who were not born in Poland, and émigrés”. 

In late 2025, Poland’s deputy prime minister stressed the need to “intensify and modernise methods of teaching Polish, including as a foreign language, in Polish community schools and in the education systems of the countries where members of the Polish community live”. This came not long after the Polish Council of Ministers adopted the Government Strategy for Cooperation with the Polish Diaspora and Poles Abroad for 2025–2030. Opportunities for younger members of the diaspora are a key focus of this strategy. As part of it, in 2026, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched programmes targeting young people of Polish origin, including study visits to Poland and business internship programmes intended to make relocation and settlement feel like a realistic option.  

Bastian Sendhardt, a research associate at the German Institute of Polish Affairs (DPI), says that these recent measures signal “a shift toward a more strategic and state-driven approach to managing transnational national ties”.Yet Sendhardt notes their reach is uneven.

Despite policy gaps and failures, some diaspora members are nevertheless returning.

They tend to work best “for those who already have some connection to Poland”, as they offer support at key moments such as education or early career mobility. As a result, the policies remain “structurally limited”, primarily engaging individuals who are already mobile and culturally connected, rather than more assimilated later generations. In this sense, they “are better understood as reinforcing existing connections than as reversing longer-term processes of detachment”.  

Romania is also in a process of overhauling its diaspora policy, with an added push following last year’s elections. Over the years, the country has expanded its consular network, funded programmes aimed at preserving Romanian identity abroad, and introduced initiatives to encourage return migration, including financial support for returning entrepreneurs.  

Researchers question these policies’ effectiveness. “In Romania, there is a lot of rhetoric about engaging the diaspora, but no effective diaspora policy,” stresses Anghel. “The only consistent programme, Start-Up Diaspora, has mostly helped those who were already planning to return.” The EU Global Diaspora Facility report’s author, Maria Regina Tongson, agrees. She states that,“countries can adopt policies on paper without necessarily allocating resources to implement them, especially if the goal is simply to give symbolic visibility to their diaspora.”  

Romania’s political leadership has also acknowledged these shortcomings. Shortly after his election, President Dan admitted, “Romania does not have a real strategy for the Romanians in the diaspora, doesn’t have an exhaustive survey on the needs of these people.” He added that the foreign affairs ministry and the presidency will need to develop a strategy with “objectives, budgets, and deadlines”.6 

Belonging can be cultivated through language, culture, and sustained engagement rather than symbolic gestures. 

For a state that spent two decades receiving remittances while offering little in return, the admission was telling. When finally forced to act, Romania’s response was to promise the kind of basic policy infrastructure that might have been expected to be in place earlier. At the time of writing, no such strategy had been formally published.  

Despite policy gaps and failures, some diaspora members are nevertheless returning. In 2022, around 190,000 Romanian citizens who were living abroad moved home. In 2023, that figure rose to approximately 218,000. In Poland, 19,500 people returned permanently in 2024, nearly 30 per cent more than in 2023. Up to 300,000 Poles are estimated to have moved back to the country since 2017.  

Anghel is careful not to attribute this to the government’s diaspora strategy. What is drawing people back, he argues, is a convergence of more prosaic forces: family, culture, exhaustion, and the situation of Western European labour markets, where salaries have stagnated and rents have risen sharply since the peak emigration years. “Going to Western Europe brings much fewer comparative returns than it did 15 years ago,” he says.  

What a passport means  

Since entering the EU, CEE and Baltic states have benefitted from their citizens’ labour abroad, from receiving remittances to exporting unemployment, and have offered little in return. Now, facing increasing vulnerabilities – demographic, strategic, democratic – they are starting to ask for more from their citizens: a vote cast in their direction, a military obligation honoured, a cultural loyalty maintained.  

At its core, what many European governments are facing, particularly in the CEE and Baltic regions, is a question about the social contract: specifically, what it means when that contract is broken by one party. For first-generation emigrants, the calculation is immediate and personal: what they gave, what they received, and whether a meaningful bond still exists. For second- and third-generation emigrants, no such reference point exists.“They often feel more German, Italian than Romanian, even though both parents are Romanian,” says Anghel, “because they grew up there and developed their references there.”  

They did not leave. Many of them were never there. The social contract was not broken; it was never made. A passport becomes, for many, a matter of paperwork rather than identity, a connection sustained, if at all, through fragments: a grandparent’s language, a paid-for visit, an inherited name.  

Sendhardt agrees that,“there is a clear structural pull toward the country of residence, where individuals are embedded in education systems, labour markets, and everyday social life.” He adds that attachment to the home country persists but “more as a symbolic or familial reference point than as a primary site of political or social loyalty". Yet identity is not fixed, and belonging can be cultivated through language, culture, and sustained engagement rather than symbolic gestures.  

Poland’s outreach to younger diaspora communities suggests that some countries are beginning to recognise this. For Sendhardt, the most effective policies are those that create sustained, practical engagement such as language education, youth exchanges, study programmes, internships, and professional opportunities linked to Poland. This is because “they embed Poland in people’s lived experiences rather than appealing only to abstract notions of identity.” However, he cautions that, “their impact depends heavily on accessibility and continuity: one-off programmes tend to have limited long-term effects.”  

These tensions also unfold within a broader European project that remains, in important respects, unfinished. The EU’s post-national promise, embodied in free movement and deep economic integration, has enabled a “cross-contamination” of identities and life trajectories across borders. Yet key dimensions of belonging and obligations remain national, from emotional attachments and political narratives to more concrete elements such as military service. The result is a layered and sometimes contradictory landscape in which individuals live transnational lives, while states continue to make claims rooted in national frameworks.  

For CEE and Baltic states, this contradiction is particularly significant: they were among the greatest contributors to the EU’s experiment in free movement and among the least prepared for what it would cost them. The defining question that they now face is whether they can still close a gap they allowed to widen for decades, especially across generations. How they answer may determine not only the future of their diasporas but also their resilience as states.