Sovereign Debt Crisis and Peripheral Capitalisms

This article calls on the need for scholarly studies to compare and contrast the failure of neo-liberal policies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s in view of the sovereign debt crises in the periphery states of the EU today. It explores the way(s) in which "shock therapy" financial statecraft in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere did not alleviate the debt problem but, quite the opposite, augmented it. The international mechanism in operation in the past, as well as today, has not been and is not real development, modernisation and growth of the countries that suffer from the debt fetter, but rather much-needed depletion of their resources earmarked for the developed capitalist metropolises. This is even more pronounced today vis-a-vis the decline of the Euro-Atlantic socio-economic system and the rise of the "global East" (China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Indonesia, Turkey). The way to recovery for the periphery, as the case of a number of Eastern European and Latin American states shows, is stimulation of domestic demand via Keynesian instruments while moving away from financialisation and neo-liberal engineering.