PARIS — At a time when Europe's future seems so murkily ill-defined, when people fret about paychecks and their abrupt disappearance, a jittery currency and suffocating debt, the past might seem the last place to look for salvation.
Yet, in recent days, history has tugged at national debates from Istanbul to Edinburgh like some gravitational force, and with it has come a question: what risks do politicians court by evoking the chimera of the past to score points in the present?
That question intruded most brazenly, perhaps, in the acrimonious exchanges over a vote in the French Senate to outlaw denial of genocide in the mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey a century ago.
The vote was portrayed by many analysts here as an act of expediency to win support among hundreds of thousands of French citizens of Armenian descent ahead of the presidential elections this spring.
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