The Social Identity Dynamics of the Europeanization of Bulgaria: Reconstructing Gramscian Hegemony in a Post-neocolonial Balkan Nation-state

Abstract

This analysis proposes that a significant source of the systemic sources of so-called grand corruption and strategic corruption in Bulgaria lies in its long-term history of imperial and colonial subordination. It raises the epistemological issues of the perceptual basis for the identification of corruption. Corruption is a weaponized political label favoring particular political topographic characteristics and trends that support a regional international political hierarchical order, in this case American hegemony. The Bulgarian national community’s complex component community identity profile is a product of generations of external domination which this analysis highlights. This legacy includes authority legitimation challenges that contradict establishment authority claims that their domination and control provide an invisible public good in terms of social order. Institutionalized habituated attitudinal predispositions among the public emphasize functionally the state authority as self-serving in its domestic control. The national state authority represents the control interests of an external hegemony. This domestic control ultimately serves the hegemonic interests of an external power, e.g., the Ottoman sultanate, the Soviet Union, or NATO/EU. Bulgarian constituency group and individual acquisition of greater social status via social creativity in relation to the state authority displays orientations towards serving the domestic national representative of the alien imperialist/colonialist hegemon.

Keywords: Bulgaria, Corruption, European Union, Hegemony, Imperialism, Social Identity Theory, Soviet Union, United States

JEL Classification: D73, F54, H11, H41, H56, H83, H87, M48, N44