“Playing catch up”. The notion of needing to accelerate a country’s progress towards a civilised paradise – the Bulgarian version (a proposed entry for a dictionary of peregrinating ideas)
This paper outlines the main stages in the process through which the notion of “needing to catch up” (a belief that the country was in need of accelerated development) became incorporated into the idea of Bulgarian national identity. Since the mid-19th century, Bulgarians have tended to rely on the notion of “needing to catch up” as a way of conceptualising their place among “the civilised nations,” a concept they regard with varying degrees of desirability. I use the concept of “needing to catch up” in the sense of a culturally and politically functional standard or template, which nonetheless cannot function as an independent concept since it belongs to different systems of ideas with their various economic, geopolitical, religious, psychological and cultural aspects. Inseparably wedded to the idea of “needing to catch up” is the idea of “retardation”, which was floated in discussions on the Bulgarian condition even before the Bulgarian state emerged as a political reality. As the national movement grew in strength, these inferiority complexes morphed into their mirror image: a belief that Bulgarians were capable of catching up with Europe in terms of cultural advancement. From the early fascination with the cultural achievements of the “enlightened nation” felt by the so-called “Orthodox Enlightenment” thinkers, through a replication of the Russian discourse, this line of reasoning culminated in Marxist ideology (including propaganda between 1945 and 1989) and the post-1989 politics of persuasion. The bell may be tolling for the time-bound idea of “needing to catch up”, a notion which has exhausted its potential to excite intellectual conflict or struggle, and has very possibly resulted is a self-poisoning of the cultures which indulged in it, only to become doomed to dull, infantile repetition.
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