The prospects of breaking loose from the periphery during the post-Stalinist order appeared promising. High accumulation, a rapid rate of growth, and the industrial breakthrough together with the decision to liberalize dictatorship and develop all-embracing welfare institutions and even in some instances modest consumer societies created a cohesive sense of security among the inhabitants (though certain countries complemented or replaced it with a policy of small-power nationalism). Would regimes that for the first time in the region's history had begun to close the gap with the West in terms of economic growth, social welfare, and consumption – would such regimes gain legitimacy?

A radical transformation in the world economy and its dramatic structural crisis soon put an end to the gap-closing process. In the new circumstances the genuine weakness of the import-substituting industrialization model and its insensitivity to international competition led to the erosion of previous economic and social achievements. State socialism proved incapable of adapting to the new technological and structural demands, and the region sank into a long economic – and political – crisis. Internal opposition increased, and the ruling elites lost their faith in the possibility of controlling the situation. When Soviet control ceased to be a factor, the dictatorship of modernization, identified largely with the huge demands it had placed upon the population, collapsed almost without resistance.

The separate path, the withdrawal from Europe that once promised an escape from the periphery, proved to be a dead end. The experimental flight that took off from the peripheries of Europe now landed back in the peripheries of Europe.