Care Outsourcing From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe

The transnational care market in Europe is commonly understood as the migration of (mostly) female care workers from East to West. Less attention has been paid to a reverse mobility: older persons relocating from West to East in search of more affordable care. This article presents research on care homes in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary that cater both to local, relatively wealthy seniors and to clients from Germany who move there for care at roughly one‐third of German prices. Although the numbers of such relocated seniors remain low and do not provide a structural solution to Germany’s care crisis, this trend is emblematic of the intensified marketisation of care in Germany and in the receiving countries. It constitutes a distinct formation of exclusive marketisation (available only for those who can afford it) within the evolving European transnational care market. We argue that grasping the multifaceted nature of care outsourcing requires analysing how it is entangled with other forms of mobility and entrepreneurial projects, for example in tourism or construction. By shifting the analysis from Western Europe to the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, we seek to avoid reproducing power geometries that cast CEE primarily as a reservoir of cheap care labour or as a socio‐economically “deprived” dumping ground for Western problems. Our research underscores the importance of actors beyond family and state in transnational care arrangements and shows how ambiguous German–CEE histories call for a regional, historically attuned perspective on care in an unequal Europe.