Feb.25.─ Where would they be without their past, the ex-captive nations? (Or "ex-communist countries", "former Soviet satellite states", "the old Eastern block": so much history even in the category). The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea is so shaped by history that at first sight the question seems absurd. Trianon, Yalta, Molotov-Ribbentrop, Munich—the gloomy echoes of past betrayals and atrocities are inescapable.

For the past 20 years, the countries of this region have been involved in what might be called "therapeutic historiography": tearing up old communist propaganda versions of history, and writing new ones. That has been an exhilarating, messy and sometimes disconcerting process. For Estonians and Latvians, for example, it meant the chance to honour those (heroes or victims, but not villains) who fought against the impending Soviet occupation in 1944-45. Yet many outsiders see these men as no more than Nazi collaborators: they wore uniforms of the SS, the epitome of wartime evil, and served alongside some war criminals. Context and comparison (far more Russians than Balts fought on Hitler's side) become irrelevant.

Slovaks and Croats want to de-demonise their wartime republics (Nazi puppet states from one viewpoint, a snatched breath of national regeneration from another). Germans and Jews, once seemingly vanished from the region, have emerged from the shadows (and from abroad), with their own unhappy memories that undermine the self-righteousness of both Communist and ethno-nationalist versions of history.

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Feb.16.─ Can the euro fall after all? Until recently, the scenario seemed unthinkable, but now that the European monetary union is coming apart at the seams, it suddenly seems realistic. Only 11 years after it was introduced to the financial markets, the currency has become the plaything of currency traders.

The Greek debt crisis has led traders to gamble on the euro, and economists to speculate with them.

“What’s happening now is exactly what we have been warning for years,” says Alfred Kleinknecht, a professor of economics at Delft University. Self-proclaimed eurosceptic Arjo Klamer, a professor of cultural economy at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University agrees. “Unless the rules of the game are changed, the euro will be quickly done for,” he says.

European Cassandras

The two were part of a group of 70 Dutch economists who published an open letter in 1997 opposing the Economic and Monetary Union, the predecessor of the eurozone. Comentarios 56 hits