Making CEE a Place To Go To

If it bleeds, it leads. This cutthroat logic has been the guiding principle of newsrooms across the globe in the past century. Walk into any editorial meeting anywhere and propose to lead with a good-news story, and this will be frowned upon. Those are reserved for the last minutes of any news digest or for the middle pages of a newspaper.

So to break the pattern: here is some unorthodox news about the young people in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). According to the annual World Happiness Report, the region (bar Ukraine) saw a massive increase in levels of happiness in 2021–2023 compared to 2006–2010. The 2024 edition has four CEE countries in the top five improving ones. Of these, Serbia had the largest increase, followed by Bulgaria, Latvia, and Romania. “Central and Eastern Europe had the largest increases, of the same size for all age groups,” says the report.

It is largely the young who are driving this change. While in countries like Canada and the United States the 50–60-year-olds are much “happier” than those under 30, in CEE the reverse is true. For those over 60 the gap between the two halves of Europe is about half of what it was in 2006–2010 but happiness levels are now equal for those under 30.

This is remarkable news. It basically means that the “black hole” of depression between the West and Russia, which was the driving force of brain drain and overall sadness is no more.

Yet have you seen this in the news? No.

One reason is that once again a much darker story from the region dominates the narrative. And it has to do, like in previous times, with Russian tanks and people dying in the mud. Moscow’s effort to subjugate Ukraine is also an exercise in owning the narrative for the whole region, as it had done for 45 years during the Cold War—to decide what image those lands project to the outside world. And it is not a positive narrative, to put it mildly.

But there is another way to look at CEE’s future, without the usual bleakness. Take for example another story that did not make the news. After three decades of consecutive loss of population—the longest in recent history for any region without a major war—the tide is starting to turn for the CEE countries. This happened in Romania and Latvia in 2022, when they registered their first population growth since the fall of communism, and in Croatia in 2023. Bulgaria will follow this year and Poland seems to be on the same path. This shows that long-term processes in the region that perhaps had been overlooked are in a positive direction. Part of that growth comes, of course, from Ukrainian refugees, and on the face of it it may seem that one country’s loss is the gain of others. But delve deeper and you will find that something bigger is afoot.

It started long before the war—with Brexit, which left may CEE immigrants feeling unwelcome in Britain and choosing to go back to their home country. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which also drove waves of immigrants homeward. CEE countries are also becoming rather attractive places where wages are going up, the quality of life has gotten visibly better, and low-cost airlines and trains have made it very easy to connect. And these countries are hungry for talent and labor given a decades-long brain drain. The wave of Ukrainians might have pushed the needle into growth but it was already moving.

Look at Bulgaria as an example. It has been losing population since 1985 and the demographic debate there has been largely pessimistic. So it must have come as a surprise that last year the loss was less than 1 percent. On the current trend, it will register growth this year.

One reason is newcomers—Bulgarian and foreign. The growth in their number started in 2020, mostly due to Bulgarians driven by the pandemic, resulting in a net migration gain of 30,000 people. By 2023, things had shifted significantly. That year, foreign nationals made up over 70 percent, nearly one-fifth from European Union, in a net migration gain of over 41,000. Germans now rank fifth in among newly registered immigrants, behind those from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, and Syria. Another reason is the increase in the total fertility rate (the average number of children per woman of childbearing age), which is now 1.8, the highest in the EU.

Why Is That Important?

Overall dissatisfaction with life and depopulation has gone hand in hand for quite some time in Central and Eastern Europe. They were so ingrained in the psyche that they became national stereotypes. “The inability to overcome a tragedy, a crisis, a depression makes you her constant hostage”, wrote Georgi Gospodinov, the most famous modern Bulgarian author. Gospodinov, who won the Booker Prize in 2022 for Time Shelter, turned the melancholy and the ephemeral feeling of loss into a career.

Imagine what difference it would make if both were to be changed. If CEE, instead of being a place where people come from, turns into a place people go to. I study places that managed to turn around their destiny and the biggest change they managed to achieve was to transform their image.

Cluj-Napoca, the second-largest city in Romania, is a good example. It was a closed-off space in the 1990s and early 2000s. It had a violently nationalistic mayor, who even denied the existence of a Hungarian minority (which makes up more than 20 percent of the population) and no foreign investments whatsoever. That changed from 2004 when a new mayor was elected. In collaboration with the universities and the local business community, they rolled their sleeves to transform the image of the city. And they did. Cluj attracted big names and developed a local IT scene—and it keeps going. It underwent such a rapid and deep transformation that young Romanians and expats from other places in Europe started coming, attracted by the laid-back, university-style startup myth Cluj built.

The capital of Transylvania turned the page, going from a place losing talent to one retaining and attracting it. In the latest European Quality of Life Survey, Cluj was in the top ten cities for residents’ satisfaction with living in their city and in the top three that underwent a positive change in the quality of life.

If you walk the streets of Cluj now, you find them much cleaner, safer, and better than they used to be, but the city of 500,000 has not suddenly turned into Hong Kong or Singapore. It is still the same mid-sized provincial Central European city. The difference is the myth: Cluj now has a sense of purpose and newcomers have an idea what are they buying into.

Such new myths need a solid foundation of a growing economic well-being and improving quality of life. But money is never enough for a transformation without the will to use it better. What is most needed is a new vision, a reinvention of the city as a place and the poltical will to give it shape. It is these developments, signs of which are becoming increasingly apparent in CEE, that are crucial in making cities attractive places to live.

All of that is not to say that the troubles of a long-disturbed region are gone. Beyond the disastrous Ukraine war, there are many questions to be answered. How will places used to shrinking react when they start growing with new people? How will a region used to emigration react to immigration? Will everywhere benefit or just the most active and creative places? Is this sustainable or just a phase?

These questions are valid. Yet in an age in which people remain the most important and most precious resource, and determine the development opportunities of a place, having more of them is not a bad starting point for any discussion.

Ognyan Georgiev is a journalist. He was a Milena Jesenská fellow at the IWM in 2025.