ABSTRACT
A rational explanation and critical interpretation of the long-term reasons for the Bulgarians’ contemporary geopolitical imagination and their state’s behaviour in regional geopolitics would be impossible without reference to the key historical events from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For this reason, this chapter delves into the genesis and development of Bulgarian ideas of space in reference to the broader Balkan context, primarily in relation to nations such as the Serbs, Greeks, and Romanians.
The analysis is based on various types of sources, such as geography textbooks, cartographic works, ideas for political liberation and nation-state projects, products of nationalistic cartography, foreign policy doctrines, works of influential academicians, etc.
This chapter traces the changes in the imagined Bulgarian space across four periods: (re)discovering historical and ethnic territory, from 1762 to 1870; the years of formalising the range of the Bulgarian ethnic space and plans for its revival – a short period, but rich in significant geopolitical events (1870–1878); the attempts to achieve the vision of Greater Bulgaria, which lasted from national liberation in 1878 to the end of the Second World War; and the historical period, overlapping with the Cold War, which was characterised by freezing the classic territorial aspirations and inconsistent internal geopolitics of the state. In particular, the changing nature of internal geopolitics towards certain ethnic groups was particularly visible in the artificially created Macedonian issue and the policies of the Bulgarianisation of the Turkish population.
