Sissejuhatus. Introduction

Introduction to a special issue

From peripheral region to escalator region in Europe: young Baltic graduates in London

This paper examines recent migration from three little-studied European Union (EU) countries, the Baltic states, focusing on early-career graduates who move to London. It looks at how these young migrants explain the reasons for their move, their work and living experiences in London, and their plans for the future, based on 78 interviews with individual migrants. A key objective of this paper is to rejuvenate the core–periphery structural framework through the theoretical lens of London as an ‘escalator’ region for career development. We add a necessary nuance on how the time dimension is crucial in understanding how an escalator region functions – both in terms of macro-events such as EU enlargement or economic crisis, and for life-course events such as career advancement or family formation. Our findings indicate that these educated young adults from the EU’s north-eastern periphery migrate for a combination of economic, career, lifestyle and personal-development reasons. They are ambivalent about their futures and when, and whether, they will return-migrate

Sociability

How are individuals able to establish peaceful and enduring societies? Although the problem of sociability has been a recurrent concern for moral and political philosophers since antiquity, the early modern period marks an important shift in the conceptualization of human sociability. Moral skepticism, numerous ferocious wars, and the rise of sovereign states prompted the novel needed to study the normative and psychological underpinnings of social order. From the sixteenth century onward, sociability began to function as a bridge concept that was applied to theories of morality and moral psychology, political philosophy, history, international relations, and political economy (see, e.g., Piirimäe and Schmidt 2015; Sagar 2018; Ahnert and Manning 2011; Fiorillo and Grunert 2009; Vollhardt 2001). This entry introduces the early modern conceptions of sociability by focusing on the debate concerning the question how are men turned into social and political animals. Is sociability natural for human beings, or is it merely an artificial device that restrains and motivates the actions of naturally unsociable individuals? During the course of the early modern period, the notion of sociability as an innate inclination that could provide sufficient foundations for mutual sociability in large societies was questioned. As a result, the view of man as a naturally social and political being was gradually replaced by the idea of sociability as an artificial product of historically situated societies.Peer reviewe