ABSTRACT
Despite their evolution, most of the spatial doctrines and visions of both large and small nations were formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period in which classical geopolitical theories developed. Contemporary authors and schools engaged in a critical reading of space agree that these classical theories were not completely neutral or independent of human intentionality and subjectivism. Thus, the main argument of this chapter is that what was promoted by political and academic elites as ‘objective truths’ about political borders, ethnic structures, and historical areas were, in reality, just a product of ethnocentred geopolitical doctrines. This knowledge was produced following primordial, casuistic, normative, and dogmatic approaches. Thus, national doctrines, the political territoriality of nations, and the painful process of drawing political borders in the Balkans took place in the classical period of geopolitics. In the Bulgarian case, these academic fields were, along with history, geography, and ethnography, closely tied to the national(-istic) interpretations of the ethnic and historical space produced in geopolitical research.
This chapter also offers an insight into the discrepancies between spatial, ethnic, and political structures. These discrepancies remain the primary source for the emergence and perpetuation of the conflicting national(-istic) codifications of space – a phenomenon especially relevant in those regions which have an ethnic-civilisational and geopolitical composition.
