History is a strange thing.
It has allegedly ended in certain parts of the Western world, but not in others.
It still accounts for some of the deepest cleavages among nations and peoples -- democratic nations, that is, which are said to have never been at war with each other.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum is situated close to the historical monuments that are always full of people in the capital of the nation that constantly refers itself back to its history -- however short and shallow it might seem from across the ocean.
People do cry in those dark and menacing halls.
But the powerful exhibition also refers to another part of the Western civilization where history has not ended.
Central Europe, though now part of the common values-based communities such as the European Union and NATO, is the place where historical wounds have not healed yet, and scores with the past have not yet been settled.
This is what sets it apart from the rest of Europe.
Central European leaders still bring up historical injustices as arguments in international negotiations (a taboo for Western European counterparts). Candidates win elections using what observers say are Luftwaffe eagle-like logos and Nazi torch-like lit rallies. The appeasement by most of the Western Europe when a major power invades its neighbor seems all too familiar here to not bring back memories of the haunted past.
The tragedy of the Holocaust also seems much more fresh here rather than in the Western Europe which is in the process of relegating it to the realm of painful history and moving on to the "ever closer union".
This is partly because the Central European countries are constantly criticized for failing to account to their past, and partly because Holocaust was only one of the great calamities that befell this part of Europe. Guilt felt elsewhere in Europe is often overshadowed here by the victimization of the past.
In a sense, while Western Europe moves to the post-modernism of the twenty-first century, not only America still professes the realpolitik of the centuries past, but also the Central Europe is not ready -- justifiably or not -- to move to the end of history.
The fact that the latter two now have to confront another power that seems stuck in the nineteenth century will probably make ties even stronger -- however much the goal of bringing Central Europe to the fold of post-modern politics of the Western Europe and building Europe "whole, free and at peace" seems desirable.
The alliance between the two therefore is probably much more than a political calculation of the day, and this is why, to the annoyance of the Western European leaders, countries from the US-described "new Europe" intentionally waste opportunities "to keep their mouth shut" about their ties to America.
The "new Europe" is, in fact, old, as is America. The "old Europe" is new.
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