The gold rush in Eastern Europe is now over. The global virus is bringing half the continent to its knees and suddenly it is becoming clear to western leaders that big trouble lies ahead: for those who put their money into the sure-fire emerging markets portfolios, and those who believed that the eurozone was an oasis of stability.

So what should we do as political unrest – riots, the tumbling of governments, the revival of radical nationalism takes hold in central and eastern Europe?

Prepare for more bail-outs of ailing states? But with Latvia, Hungary and Ukraine on its hands, the International Monetary Fund is coming under strain. European Union leaders proposed ten days ago to double its resources but it was a largely symbolic act.

Everyone in power in the EU knows that the sense of prosperity in the east is built on unsustainable levels of debt. But leaders turned a blind eye because EU enlargement in 2004 and 2007 could only be made to work if the citizens in the new member states began to feel rich. Membership had to bring quick results, a sense of reward.

That was the political agenda and it cast a fog over the economic realities.

Until now, the East Europeans have been the poster children of capitalism. After decades of numbskulled polit-bureaucracy, secret police snitches and the dead hand of state planning, the post-communist societies emerged from the chrysalis to become an entrepreneurial paradise.

Small business flourished, the plug was pulled on inefficient factories and the region started to record some of the highest growth rates in the western hemisphere. Foreign investors marvelled, fortunes were made – and millions of workers were laid off.

The downside of the East European boom was obvious to the locals but not the myopic westerners: two-tier medicine, chronic unemployment in regions away from capital cities or financial hubs, a terrifying gulf between rich and poor and everywhere wild borrowing to catch up with new middle class measures of success, the Toyota in the driveway.

Western Europe did not pay attention. It rarely does. Britain started to show curiosity in developments only when more than 700,000 Poles came to its shores to work in restaurants, hotels, to unblock British sinks and push British wheelchairs. Why did so many young Poles come west?

Not, as the right wing tabloids had it, to sponge off the welfare system, but to make enough to pay for the deposit on flats at home. It was the only way that they could break into a housing market that was already beginning to bubble. If we had talked to our plumber, instead of handing him the spanner, we would have grasped that something was going wrong.

Today the alarm bells are beginning to sound in Austria, Italy and the Nordic countries – all have banks that are heavily exposed in eastern Europe.

Currencies are in meltdown – the Polish zloty is now almost five to the euro, compared to 3.5 in the autumn – and lives are on hold. Migration is not a serious option at the moment, not at a time when western labour markets are contracting so quickly.

Initially, the problems have to be sorted out at home by a new stay-at-home generation in the East. For the most part the discontent stems from what American sociologist Ted Gurr calls Relative Deprivation – protesters are angry with leaders who failed to warn them that the rush to prosperity, the rising expectations, would be scuttled as soon as credit became tight.

For the time being they are burning cars – in Sofia, in Riga – outside national parliaments. Let's hope they don't start burning the blue European flag.

EU leaders can do their bit towards preventing this by co-ordinating the various European financial institutions to produce a plausible emergency fund for the east. That means getting the European Central Bank heavily involved, not just the IMF. Collapsing banks in the east, even a national bankruptcy, would place the euro in serious peril.

But the first thing we can do, is to start paying attention. The Polish border is only 50 kilometres from Berlin, Bratislava a short drive from Vienna. Their geography is our geography, their problems our problems.

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