Bulgarian Geopolitics in a Balkan Context

This book is about the geographic space as an inseparable component of a nation's historical memory, territorial awareness, geopolitical visions, and obsessions.

Autorentext

Valentin Mihaylov works in the Institute of Social and Economic Geography and Spatial Organisation at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He holds a PhD in Human Geography from the Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria and records previous institutional affiliation in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Department of Geography. His chief scientific interests are focused on national and territorial identities, urban studies, political geography and geopolitics, with particular attention to the Balkans and East-Central Europe. He has authored 70 scientific publications, including seven books. Dr. Mihaylov recently published the collective volumes Post-Utopian Spaces: Transforming and Re-Evaluating Urban Icons of Socialist Modernism (co-editor) and Spatial Conflicts and Divisions in Post-Socialist Cities as an editor.

Zusammenfassung
This book is about the geographic space as an inseparable component of a nation's historical memory, territorial awareness, geopolitical visions, and obsessions.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: geopolitical imaginations beyond greater state projects

2. Space, human territoriality, and nationalism in classical political geography and geopolitics: the physical space

Space and ethnonational communities

The incompatibility between ethnic, spatial, and political structures

Ethnic and historic territory

National(-istic) cartography

3. Critical political geography and geopolitics: the alternatives to the national(-istic) imaginations of space

National imaginations of space: between 'high' and 'low' geopolitics

How nations read and politicise the geographic space: an overview of the chief concepts of critical analysis

A conceptual model

4. The emergence and historic evolution of an imagined national space: the San-Stefano Bulgaria and its Balkan rivals

(Re)discovering historical and ethnic territory: 17621870

A Balkan's nation project for a greater state, as defined by external powers: 18701878

'We followed the principle all or nothing, but nothing remained for us': 18781944

Freezing territorial aspirations and inconsistent internal geopolitics: 19441989

5. The focusing of current geopolitics: the spatial layers of an imagined national space

Possessed national space: internal geopolitics

The ethnogeopolitical neighbourhood of a nation: multifaceted geopolitics

Disaggregating external spaces of special geopolitical concern: the geopolitics of soft revisionism

Ancient and legendary spaces: emerging historical geopolitics

6. Long-term modelling of the historic development of the nation's space

The imagined continuity of Bulgarian statehood

The changing geopolitical priorities of the Third Bulgarian State

The long-term cognitive appropriation of an imagined national space

7. Conclusion