In this era of commerce and trade, it often happens that countries that might once have gone to war play out their antagonisms through other means. The immigration debate plays this role in Mexican American relations. For a time, the trade dispute over soft wood lumber (yes, really) fulfilled this function in Canadian American relations: At stake were different attitudes toward the role of government in industry, Canada's sensitivity to American economic power and many other issues, though you wouldn't know it if you weren't paying attention.
In Central Europe, the outstanding example of this phenomenon is the discussion of the Katyn massacre, the memory of which continues to shape the relationship between Poland and Russia. At issue is an event that took place 70 years ago: the Soviet Union's murder of some 20,000 Polish officers in the spring of 1940. The officers had been captured by the Red Army, which invaded eastern Poland in 1939 just after Nazi Germany invaded from the West. Soviet secret police murdered them on the direct order of Joseph Stalin. Later, Stalin switched sides, joining the Allies against Hitler, and he blamed the Germans for the officers' murder. That lie remained part of official Soviet and Polish communist history until communism collapsed and the Soviet Union fell apart. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet communist leader, took responsibility for the murders. In 1991, the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, published the archival documentation.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503550.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
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