"One of the decisive features of the post-Cold War era is growing international migration. The growth of cross-border transfers in terms of goods, money, information as well as ideas and people is constitutive for a globalised world. This increasing transnationalism was viewed with much optimism in the first years after the end of communism. The period labelled as transition or trans-formation signified a new paradigm of power that referred to the apparently inevitable adaptation of the former socialist societies to market forces and liberal democracies. But the initial euphoria was soon darkened by the out-break of civil war in Yugoslavia as well as by the turbulent changes which occurred in the 'transition' countries that created widespread economic uncertainty and social fear."