Rudy Weissenbacher puts the present outward looking strategies into a much broader historical context. He gives an overview on the various historical phases of Eastern Europe’s peripherization going back to the middle ages. After the demise of the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires, the new nation states of the region already had to contend with problems of severe external imbalances and foreign debt in the interwar years. The integration into the state socialist camp and the Soviet sphere of influence meant a disengagement from the capitalist international markets during the post-war decades, with the exception of Yugoslavia which adopted a special model of state socialism and stayed outside of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance. However, many states of the regions stepped up their trade with the West and financed the import of consumer goods and the partial modernization of industry through external debt in the 1970s. This process has some parallels with Latin America. The same can be said about the ensuing debt crises which hit some of the countries of the region particularly hard – esp. Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary and Romania. These debts crises contributed to the erosion of state socialism, in a particularly visible way in Poland. Some states entered the transformation to capitalism under the vigilant eyes of international financial institutions, whereas other states had more external space for maneuver. Some societies had already learned lessons on debt crises during the last years of state socialism, whilst financial crisis was a rather remote experience for other East European societies. Thus, questions of financial instability had different degrees of acuteness in the early transformation period and were perceived differently depending on recent historical experience.