[ionyun]

The authors viewpoint seem to be very much influenced by being somewhat well-off and therefor being able to chooses which changes to participate in. Now they increasingly find themselves being like everyone else and conclude that things have changed, while this was what was happening all along.

So it is more a personal frontier than anything else. A frontier is usually where little exists and by building something from the ground up you have more to say about things. While most people may not have had much of a say in the first place what happened in Eastern Europe and also more slowly in the rest of Europe was still mostly the opposite. It has been more of a frontier for others, like the French bank mentioned, than the local population.