Power and privileges in political history (XXX century BC – XXI century AD). Volume One. Theoretical and methodological issues

Abstract

The problem of the formation and development of privileges in politics in Bulgaria is not significantly different from what is happening with their evolution in Europe and worldwide. In this case, the only more substantive difference is that the privileges of power in Bulgaria began „anew“ for the simple reason that the country was liberated from Ottoman tyranny, after which the third Bulgarian state was established. That is to say, the emergence and consolidation of privileges took place immediately after the Liberation, as they found a place as an opportunity for institutionalization and regulation already in the texts of the Tarnovo Constitution (1879). Since then, the privileges of power have become an inevitable companion of political elites, who, depending on the nature of society (authoritarian, totalitarian, democratic), constantly consume one or other state benefits and advantages, legitimised in various normative documents. In this sense, and on the basis of historical development, we can conditionally divide the application of power privileges in Bulgaria into three main stages: the first – from the Liberation (1878) to 1946, or the so-called „capitalist stage“ of the primary and earliest development of this phenomenon (privileges); the second stage includes the „socialist“ nomenklatura privileges (1947 – 1989), which developed enormously in absolutely all spheres of society; and the third is the democratic, or modern, stage of the application of privilege (from 1990 to the present), during which all the benefits of power for the country’s new democratic elites (along the lines of Western democratic models) unfolded with full „legitimate force“. Through the prism of this tentative periodization, saturated with many significant accents and peculiarities in the construction of the Bulgarian state, the new institutions and political parties, we will also examine the filigree „weaving“ into the pores of statehood of many of the emerging privileges of the elite (in each stage separately), in order to highlight more clearly their significance in Bulgarian politics.