Socio-economic factors breed
narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage.
Return
The Crescent and the Cross
Introduction
"There are two maxims for historians which so harmonise with what I
know of history that I would like to claim them as my own, though
they really belong to nineteenth-century historiography: first, that
governments try to press upon the historian the key to all the
drawers but one, and are anxious to spread the belief that this
single one contains no secret of importance; secondly, that if the
historian can only find the thing which the government does not want
him to know, he will lay his hand upon something that is likely to
be significant."
Herbert Butterfield, "History and Human Relations", London, 1951, p.
186
The Balkans as a region is a relatively novel way of looking at the
discrete nation-states that emerged from the carcasses of the
Ottoman and Habsburg Empires and fought over their spoils.
This sempiternal fight is a determinant of Balkan identity. The
nations of the Balkan are defined more by ornery opposition than by
cohesive identities. They derive sustenance and political-historical
coherence from conflict. It is their afflatus. The more complex the
axes of self-definition, the more multifaceted and intractable the
conflicts.
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