THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF BULGARIA’S IMAGE IN MARGARET THATCHER’S PUBLIC STATEMENTS.

This paper examines how Margaret Thatcher’s public discourse between 1981 and 1991 constructs Bulgaria’s image within the shifting geopolitical landscape of late Cold War and post-communist Europe. Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), complemented by the approaches of Wodak, van Dijk, and Chilton and Schäffner, the study investigates lexical, syntactic, and ideological patterns across Thatcher’s speeches, press conferences, and parliamentary statements. The analysis reveals a consistent discursive hierarchy in which Poland and Hungary are individualized as exemplary reformers, while Bulgaria is positioned as a conditional and derivative actor on the international arena. Through recurrent formulations, Thatcher links democratization to neoliberal reform, embedding Western political and economic values within the language of transition. Modal structures encode distance and conditionality, situating Britain and the European Community as arbiters of legitimacy. The findings expose how Thatcher’s discourse performs ideological work beyond description: it reaffirms Western dominance by defining the criteria of democratic belonging. Bulgaria’s identity emerges as that of a deferred European – acknowledged as part of the tide of liberty, yet linguistically and symbolically relegated to Europe’s periphery. The study concludes that Thatcher’s rhetoric shows how post-1989 political discourse simultaneously celebrated freedom and reproduced hierarchies, shaping not only perceptions of Eastern Europe but also the language of European integration itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]