This book is about the geographic space as an inseparable component of a nation’s historical memory, territorial awareness, geopolitical visions, and obsessions.
The empirical part of the book focuses on the critical analysis of first-hand sources containing representations of the imagined spaces and places of Bulgaria and Bulgarians from a long-term perspective. The research results are structured in accordance with the author’s model of an imagined national space. It contains three general domains: possessed national space, the ethnogeopolitical neighbourhood, and ancient and legendary spaces. The book also explores how Bulgarians’ historical and ethnic spaces are linked with specific geopolitics, such as passive internal geopolitics, soft revisionism, non-intervening geopolitical claims, blocking international integration as a disguised form of old territorial claims, and emerging historical geopolitics. It examines how the imagined national space is approached by statesmen, politicians, academics, and other creators of ‘high’ geopolitics. The book also pays attention to the role of spatial imaginations in growing ‘low’ (popular) geopolitics, which includes media, popular culture, and national mythology.
Written in an interdisciplinary manner, this timely book will attract the interest of scholars and students in geopolitics, human geography, international relations, nationalism studies, and ethnic history.
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: 1762–1870 A Balkan’s nation project for a greater state, as defined by external powers: 1870–1878 ‘We followed the principle “all or nothing”, but nothing remained for us’: 1878–1944 Freezing territorial aspirations and inconsistent internal geopolitics: 1944–1989 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
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.
