Bulgarism: The Self-Colonisation of a Nation and the Financialisation of Sovereignty
Maria Todorova's concept of **Balkanism** fundamentally transformed the study of the Balkans by demonstrating that the region is not merely a geographical space but a discursive invention of Western Europe. The Balkans became Europe's "internal Other"—a place imagined as perpetually incomplete, semi-European, irrational and historically condemned to instability. Bulgaria occupies a particularly revealing position within this discourse. It is simultaneously inside Europe and outside its imagined civilisation, forever measured against a Western standard that it can never completely attain. Balkanism therefore explains how the West produces an image of the Balkans through a language of deficiency, backwardness and permanent transition. Yet if Todorova explains how Bulgaria is imagined from the outside, Alexander Kyosev explains how Bulgaria gradually begins to imagine itself. His influential concept of **Self-Colonizing Cultures**, formulated in 1995, describes one of...