THE END OF WORLD WAR II AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATIVE IN CRAMPTON’S HANDBOOK

Abstract

Like any other type of text, it is subject to historiographical deconstruction, especially since it has been noticed that it often tends to resemble bureaucratic fiction. Handbooks are closest to fiction due to the high degree of generalization. The greater the distance from the concrete document, the closer the text approaches impersonal forms of expression. The subject and the object disappear, and if there are any, their places seem to have been switched. As a result, the cause-and-effect relationship from the text disappears, and the reader loses the idea of the meaning of knowing the past: whose responsibility it is and who or what governs his life, that is, who or what governed the life of an ordinary man in the past. By reading a handbook like Crampton’s, it is not possible to understand the history of the Balkans and its trends, causes and consequences, nor is it possible to see that the centers from which the destiny of the Balkan peoples was shaped were located in the distant capitals of the emerging great powers. Apart from that, the reader must get the impression that the Balkans and their political and military elites determined their destiny, that they had the power to act independently, and that all the responsibility for everything bad that happened to the Balkans rests with them. In this way, Crampton’s handbook not only fits into the narrative of balkanization as a dark and savage alter ego of the civilized Western world, but also confirms and strengthens it, simultaneously removing part of the responsibility for balkanization from the center of power to which he, as a historian, belongs.