Homage to three wise men
Over at the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash has written a eulogy on the passing this year of Ralf Dahrendorf, Leszek Kolakowski, Bronislaw Geremek, three European thinkers whose political engagement in the critical years of 1956’s Hungarian uprising, the 1968 Prague Spring and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, helped make European history. “With them,” he writes, “passes the last cohort of Europeans who were formed by the horrors of the second world war”.
Both Kolakowski and Geremek grew up in wartime Poland, the latter “witnessing life and death in the Warsaw ghetto.” While Germany’s Ralf Dahrendorf, as a 15 year-old, was involved in a schoolboys' anti-Nazi resistance movement. Drawing from such experience each of them, argues Garton-Ash, contributed to the free Europe we live in today. Since “we children of luckier times” must sustain Europe without the “elemental drive that comes from personal experience,” we need, he concludes, “more and better history”. “History brought home with individual human stories.”
In a time of crisis with high unemployment, young Lithuanians are following in the footsteps of their emigrant ancestors. Tens of thousands have left the country in search of a better life, mainly in the British Isles and Scandinavia. The weekly Veidas reports: 
The new Eurogroup meeting on February 9 is not enough to banish the spectre of a Greek bankruptcy. While Athens may largely be responsible for the crisis, the EU and its partners are not blameless themselves. La Stampa argues that their confused messages and the absence of any strategy have transformed a resolvable problem into an explosive chaos. 
Two camps, two theories, and two visions of France: 18 years after the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis, the precise role played by Paris is still the subject of heated debate, fueled by the findings of successive criminal investigations.