DEVELOPMENT
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County. From the viewpoint of the settlement system, the<br />
immigration resulted in the rapid growth of the urban<br />
population, despite modest intra-Estonian rural-to-urban<br />
migration. In the period of state socialism, the ruralto-urban<br />
migration was relatively small in most other<br />
Eastern European countries as well. This reflected the<br />
shortage of housing in urban areas, and the inefficient<br />
agricultural sector that required a lot of manpower. As<br />
a result, a system-specific phenomenon – under-urbanisation<br />
– occurred in the settlement system of Eastern<br />
European countries (Szelenyi 1996). The legacy of this<br />
phenomenon can also be discerned in contemporary<br />
international comparisons (Table 1.2.2).<br />
In the 1970s and 1980s, the changes in the ethnic<br />
composition of the urban population, the shortage of<br />
dwellings and apartment queues, the elitism of higher<br />
education and the increased importance of the agricultural<br />
sector, which was caused by problems with food<br />
supplies in the Soviet Union, attached the Estonians<br />
living in the countryside to their habitat, and attracted<br />
Estonians living in the cities to move to rural areas<br />
(Marksoo 2005). This resulted in a turnaround in<br />
rural-to-urban migration, and the first manifestations<br />
of suburbanisation, which got their start in the early<br />
1970s in migration flows between Tallinn and Harju<br />
County (several wealthy agricultural enterprises were<br />
located around the capital). In the early 1980s, the<br />
turnaround in rural-to-urban migration expanded and<br />
became characteristic of Estonia as a whole. A similar<br />
shift in internal migration had also taken place in<br />
Western Europe in the 1970s, but within a different<br />
social setting (Champion 1989). In Eastern Europe, the<br />
turnaround in rural-to-urban migration never became<br />
widespread, besides Estonia it was also observed in<br />
Hungary (Brown, Schafft 2002). The described shift<br />
in migration flows resulted in the relatively dispersed<br />
settlement of Estonians across the country, on the one<br />
hand, and the strong spatial concentration of the immigrants<br />
into the urban areas in Northern Estonia, on the<br />
other hand.<br />
The restoration of Estonia’s independence was<br />
accompanied by yet more extensive changes in migration<br />
processes. Since the 1990s, the internal migration<br />
has mostly been in two directions: the long-distance<br />
migration into the larger cities for education and work,<br />
and suburbanisation caused by families in urban areas<br />
seeking a better living environment (Tammaru et al.<br />
2009). The growth in education migration was stimulated,<br />
to a significant degree, by the replacement of<br />
elitist higher education by mass higher education. Education<br />
is the main reason why young people move to<br />
cities today. The concentration of the population in the<br />
cities and their suburbs was also promoted by the rapid<br />
growth of efficiency in agricultural production, and the<br />
disappearance of Soviet-era agricultural employment in<br />
collective farms, together with the increase in the service<br />
economy. In general, the changes that have taken<br />
place in internal migration in Estonia and elsewhere in<br />
Eastern Europe can be treated as lagged urbanisation,<br />
which is making up for the previous under-urbanisation,<br />
and bringing the settlement systems in the entire region<br />
closer to the Western countries.<br />
In international migration, the restoration of Estonia’s<br />
independence resulted in an extensive wave of return<br />
migration, primarily to Russia, in the early 1990s. The<br />
application of the balance method, reveals that the<br />
size of the population belonging to ethnic minorities<br />
decreased by more than 140,000, between 1989 and<br />
2000, while the negative net migration of Estonians<br />
did not exceed 10,000. In relative terms, the return<br />
migration of other nationalities from Estonia (24% of<br />
the respective groups in 1989) was 50% less than the<br />
decline in ethnic minority populations projected for<br />
the former Soviet Republics in the early 1990s (Cole,<br />
Filatotchev 1992). Between the 2000 and 2011 censuses,<br />
the decrease in the size of the population belonging<br />
to ethnic minorities due to the negative net migration<br />
(more than 28,000) was significantly smaller than in the<br />
1990s, and that of the Estonians was somewhat larger<br />
(more than 16,000). Considering the fact that Estonians<br />
comprise 70% of the total population, this means that<br />
the emigration of the ethnic minorities was more than<br />
three times as intensive as that of the Estonians.<br />
If we leave aside the return migration of Russians<br />
and other ethnic minority groups to their countries of<br />
origin, departures to other European countries have<br />
dominated the out-migration. In the last two decades,<br />
two major waves can be distinguished in the outmigration<br />
from Estonia. The first wave occurred in<br />
the early 1990s, and formed a part of the east-to-west<br />
ethnic migration in Europe that followed the fall of the<br />
Iron Curtain. During this period, extensive migration<br />
from Estonia to Finland took place for the first time in<br />
history (in 1991, there were very few Estonians living<br />
in Finland). Many of those who departed in the early<br />
1990s were Ingrian Finns, who were treated by Finland<br />
as ethnic return migrants. The second and larger wave<br />
of migration began when Estonia joined the European<br />
Union, and accelerated during the economic crisis that<br />
broke out in 2008 (Anniste at al. 2012).<br />
The current scale of emigration from Estonia reflects<br />
the combined effect of several factors. Firstly, in the<br />
2000s, the relatively large generations born in the 1980s<br />
reached the prime age of migration. The large generations<br />
born in the 1980s are characteristic not only of Estonia,<br />
but Eastern Europe in general; these generations carry<br />
a significant migration potential in the countries of this<br />
region which drives the east-west migration in today’s<br />
Europe. Secondly, in addition to the noticeable gap in<br />
the standard of living, which was a legacy of the Soviet<br />
era, a new factor was added in the late 2000s. This was<br />
the impact of the economic crisis, which struck Estonia<br />
considerably harder than it did Finland or the other<br />
countries in Northern and Western Europe. Emigration<br />
was also fostered by the opening up of the labour markets<br />
of the old EU Member Countries (the last countries<br />
opened up their labour markets to Estonia in 2011),<br />
which gave Estonian residents the right to work freely<br />
in the EU countries. As a result of these developments,<br />
in the 2000s, Finland became the most important destination<br />
for out-migration from Estonia; almost every other<br />
migrant in this decade has left for Finland. What’s more,<br />
in a relatively short time, Finland has replaced Russia as<br />
the foreign country with the largest Estonian community.<br />
22<br />
Estonian Human Development Report 2012/2013