EUROPEAN banks have to raise enough capital to reach a 9% core Tier-1 ratio by June 30th. But they are also under pressure to keep providing credit. That puts west European banks with units in central Europe in a quandary: whether to pull back on lending there to concentrate on home markets. A withdrawal of this sort would hit the region hard. Credit growth in central Europe depends largely on three Austrian banks - Raiffeisen Bank International, Erste Bank and Bank Austria, owned by Italy's UniCredit - and a handful of other west European banks (see chart). A bevy of multilateral bigwigs descended on Vienna on January 16th to urge against "excessive and disorderly" deleveraging by lenders to the region. This week's meeting was dubbed "Vienna 2.0" after the Vienna Initiative of 2009, which helped maintain foreign banks" exposures to central Europe. Yet the landscape has changed since then. The model of the diversified banking conglomerate makes less sense in a world where national regulators are trying to prevent outflows of capital and liquidity. UniCredit, perhaps the most diversified bank in Europe, is less able to move resources between Italy, Germany (where it owns HVB) and Austria. Volksbank, an Austrian mutual which spread itself too thin over nine central European countries, is selling its subsidiaries (except for its Romanian operation) to Sberbank of Russia. The euro-zone crisis makes a difference, too. Austrian banks" exposure to this volatile region was one of the factors behind the downgrade of Austria's AAA rating by Standard & Poor's on January 13th. The banks are bracing themselves for a similar downgrade in the next few weeks. The price of being neighbourly is higher than it was.