INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL FLOW, BANKS AND INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES IN CEE IN THE INTERWAR YEARS

FINANCE AND ECONOMY IN CEE, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , ,

Former Länderbank (Vienna), founded 1880, architect Otto Wagner (built 1882-1884)

Central and South-Eastern Europe became one of the most important world markets for capital exports after the First World War. Foreign investors not only invested in the defeated countries, such as Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria, but also in Poland and Czechoslovakia. From 1919 till 1923 international capital from Britain, France, the USA, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland acquired substantial shares in the main Viennese banks. The Länderbank and the Anglo-Austrian Bank were turned into totally foreign-owned banks, based in Paris and London. A similar development of Western European capital participation took place in all the joint-stock banks of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the exception of the Zivnobanka in Prague. This bank increased its investment in South-Eastern Europe, often together with Western European financial groups. As the governments of the successor states were in urgent need of foreign investment, they promoted the internationalisation of the banking systems there. So the governments paved the way for the access of international capital to industrial enterprises via the participation in the equity of the big commercial banks. This followed the traditional investment pattern of the region and through the internationalisation of the banks the whole area moved closer to international markets.…

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CENTRAL EUROPEAN INTERCULTURAL RELATIONSHIPS: “K & K KAKANIEN”

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , ,

Central European architecture: Prague, Czech Republic

A question to be asked is whether the historical and cultural entity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Danube basin and special cultural relationships of the past in any way promoted the expansion of Austrian banks, insurances and other businesses in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe after 1989.
Robert Musil sarcastically describes in his famous novel “The Man Without Qualities“ the disintegration of Austrian hierarchical society and liberal-rational culture: “Kakania”. “Kakania was the first country at the present stage of development, from which God had withdrawn all credit, all love of life, all belief in itself and the capacity of all cultural nations to spread the useful imagination that they had a task to fullfill.” This Kakania is at the same time a model of an intellectual concept of Central Europe – more imaginary than a real geographically and historically defined area – today. Again Robert Musil: “…after having taken stock of the bulk of Central European ideas, he found out, not only to his regret, that it consisted only of contradictions, but to his astonishment he also realised that these contradictions are melting into each other when you look at them carefully.” “People who were not born then,” wrote Musil about the Austrian fin-de-siècle , “ will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving faster than a cavalry camel…. But in those days, no one knew what it was moving towards; nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backward.”…

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THE DANUBE BASIN: CULTURAL CROSSROADS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , ,

The Danube, Budapest

“When someone went up the Danube to Vienna, it was said that he went to Europe”, Elias Canetti (the name is derived from the Spanish city of “Canete”, from where the family seemed to have been expulsed) wrote in the first part of his autobiography “The Rescued Tongue” in 1977. Canetti was born in Rustschuk / Ruse, Bulgaria, at the Danube and his native town became the symbolic start of the journey of the later winner of the Noble prize for literature. His Jewish forefathers were expelled from Spain after the Christian Reconquista and settled in Rustschuk as merchants. This “second diaspora” made Canetti a “Sephardic Jew”, who chose German as the “mother tongue” of his literature. Canetti’s path of life was a European one and it started in Vienna after he had crossed an invisible frontier when going up the Danube. …

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