Central Europe: Predatory Finance and the Financialization of the New European Periphery

Abstract

The breakdown of the Communist Bloc in the late 1980s is perhaps the quintessential example of a crisis, followed by an expansion of Western economic norms and interests. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism, the former Communist states were plunged into a crisis, which in economic terms, rivaled the great depression of the 1930s (see Milanovic 1998 for an in-depth analysis of the crisis). More importantly however, this was a systemic crisis; a crisis of the system and all of its components. The ideological and institutional vacuum left in the wake of the delegitimization of actually existing socialism was quickly seized upon by Western public and private agents alike (de Boer 2000).