Nationalism versus Patriotism, or the Floating Border? National Identification and Ethnic Exclusion in Post-communist Bulgaria

The paper deals with different aspects of national identification and their relation to ethnic exclusion. While the emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches that refer to nationalism as a social (collective) identity, discussion of nationalism as an ideology, political doctrine, and cultural or discoursive formation remains relatively scarce. A theoretical framework for the research question is developed and used as a source for drawing a conceptual model that is afterwords tested on empirical data for Bulgaria over time. Next, a simultaneous multi-group comparison between both samples is conducted, followed by extensive discussion of the empirical results.