Сравнителната история и историографията в България
Comparative History and Historiography in Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: This paper recommends comparative history as an alternative to national history that is useful to overcome the impact of nationalism on the historiographical reconstruction of the past. The author outlines the evolution, the problems, the functions and the perspectives of the comparative historical studies. Furthermore, he makes some observations about the place of comparative history in modern Bulgarian historiography. Statistical study of the content of the three main historical periodicals at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Istoricheski pregled, Bulgarian Historical Review and Études balkaniques) in the years from 2005 to 2010 shows that the number of publications on comparative history is not high (average 4.1% of all articles). Both comparative models – the reference one and the integral one are illustrated through examples from the historiography in Bulgaria since 1989. On one hand, Bulgaria’s openness to the world after the end of the communist regime is a political prerequisite for the need of more comparative studies. The scientific preconditions for this evolution are the changes in the historical science towards new themes and interdisciplinary approaches. On the other hand, the traditional interpretations of national history will be fueled by the needs of the nation state to mobilize national identity, the crisis experienced by the European Union as the largest attempts to create supranational organization or the professional training of historians that reproduces the piety to the national history and the positivist understanding of historiographical process.

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