ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on selected attempts ‘from within’ to introduce Bulgarian geopolitics into certain regularities concerning changing foreign policy priorities, the internal structuration of the imagined national space, and efforts to assess its homeland’s geostrategic significance.
Gradually, however, with the revival of statehood and progress in science and higher education, historians and geographers developed neat retrospective schemes for the spatial evolution of the Bulgarian ethnopolitical space from the long-term perspective. This is how historical spatial imaginations were formed, institutionalised, and reproduced in national political and academic circles.
One of this chapter’s main elements is the model, which synthesises how Bulgarian geopolitics changes over time in the context of the maturation of ideas about national space. The evolution of these ideas is considered to be a process which follows the six phases of the cognitive demarcation of this imagined national space.
