The Determinants of the Emergence and Development of the Bulgarian National Geopolitical Conscience

The article analyzes cultural and historical determinants of the formation of the Bulgarian national geopolitical conscience; these include Turkish, Russian and Macedonian complexes, with the European one to have recently been added. The author argues that external perception of Bulgaria has had a significant impact on the development of the Bulgarian national geopolitical conscience, notably if to take into consideration involvement of intellectual elites and general public of major foreign powers into the Bulgarian national liberation movement. In this respect, attention has been drawn to foreign ethnographic maps, which in the view of Bulgarians are an important argument for providing a rationale for the national geopolitical ideal of “Great Bulgaria”.