Abstract
The fate of nation-states and national identities in a globalizing world has occupied the attention of scholars across the social sciences and humanities for some time. The two books reviewed here represent a media-focused discussion of this topic and argue convincingly that the interactions between nationhood and globalization cannot be fully explained without situating them in relation to processes of mediation and communication. Both books also assert that these interactions unfold across a multiplicity of spatial and temporal dimensions and take shape at the intersections of economy, politics and culture.
Despite their similar concerns, the two volumes approach the subject of mediating nationhood quite differently. In her monograph, Sabina Mihelj sets out to develop a synthetic ‘general argument about the relationship between nationalism and mass communication’ (p. 2). By contrast, editors Anna Roosvall and Inka Salovaara-Moring offer a collection of 12 empirical studies which represent a strand of media research that, by the editors’ account, ‘takes the nation seriously’ (p. 10). This results in different types of contributions from each book. Mihelj’s project combines insights from various literatures and attempts to construct a cross-disciplinary theoretical model that could inform future comparative research on nationalism and mass communication. By comparison, many of the studies in Roosvall and Salovaara-Moring’s volume analyse particular national experiences with globalization, although international comparisons are also discussed in some chapters (e.g. Rantanen, Bolin and Ståhlberg, Riegert, Roosvall). In addition, Communicating the Nation has a primarily European focus, with the exception of the chapters by Toby Miller and Andrew Calabrese that look at the US.
Sabina Mihelj’s study is organized in eight chapters, with chapters 1 through 4 developing her theoretical argument, and chapters 5 through 8 illustrating its possible uses for understanding mediated nationhood in relation to several thematic clusters. These themes include: the articulation of nationhood during violent conflicts (chapter 5), the gendering of nationhood (chapter 6), the temporal dimensions and rituals of nationhood (chapter 7), and the negotiations of cultural diversity in relation to nationhood and globalization (chapter 8). Throughout the book Mihelj engages in summarizing and synthesizing often contradictory bodies of literature. Indeed, one of her stated goals is to bring into conversation ‘two rather distinct and wide-ranging fields of scholarly inquiry – nationalism studies on the one hand and media and communication studies on the other’ (p. 7).
In chapter 1, Mihelj begins this interdisciplinary exercise by interrogating political historian Benedict Anderson’s well-worn coinage of nations as ‘imagined communities’. She focuses on the particular legacy that Anderson’s term has in the field of media studies and argues that it has been employed to justify a greater focus on the significations of nationhood, as well as to discuss imagined collectivities beyond the nation. This effort, Mihelj claims, allowed media scholars to counteract earlier formulations of nationalism that were seen as being ‘overly determinist and materialist’ (p. 15). However, she argues that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, producing a strand of culturalist research that examines nationalist discourses in the media without paying much attention to socio-historical contexts. Mihelj’s chief indictment is that, by over-privileging text-based analyses, the field of media studies today knows ‘relatively little about how nationalism as a particular form of discourse and of cultural imagination is tied to the institutional structures of modern media and to broader economic, political and social realities’ (p. 15).
Her diagnosis thus far is reminiscent of the long-standing debate in media studies between cultural studies and political economy. However, Mihelj does not pledge allegiance to either camp, calling instead for a theorization of mediated nationhood that connects both types of inquiry within a holistic framework. To arrive at such a framework, she draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s relational theory of social space and social power, and suggests a redefinition of nationalism as ‘a principle of legitimation’ (p. 19). This is a promising conceptualization, although its centrality to her argument fades somewhat as Mihelj goes on, in chapters 3 and 4, to construct a tri-partite, ideal-typical model that overlays principles of social organization (i.e. bureaucracy, market exchange, community) with political ideologies (e.g. communism, liberalism, fascism), and argues that each produces a particular media system and a particular form of ‘national imagination’.
The chief limitation of this conceptual model is that many contemporary nations would fall somewhere between the three categories – a point that Mihelj concedes. Thus, the model’s usefulness for conducting systematic empirical research remains to be tested, although she offers several brief case studies as illustrations in chapters 5 through 8. Oddly, despite much attention to terminological issues in the development of her theoretical argument, Mihelj does not provide a direct explication of the ‘media nations’ construct. At times, the phrase appears to refer merely to representations of nationhood in the media – a formulation that would go against the grain of her critique of culturalism. Nevertheless, Media Nations provides a thoughtful and comprehensive overview of studies of modern nationalism as it intersects with mass communication, and advances a cross-disciplinary perspective for conducting further comparative research on this topic.
The three most important themes that emerged in my reading of Mihelj’s analysis are also echoed in the edited volume by Roosvall and Salovaara-Moring. The first involves an assessment of epistemological and methodological concerns about conducting research on mediated nationhood. The other two concern substantive areas, including the utility of nationalism as a discourse of identification in a globalizing world, and the general shift towards market-oriented articulations of nationhood in many parts of the world. In the remainder of this review, I will discuss how these themes are picked up in particular chapters of Communicating the Nation, and in the general argument put forth in Media Nations.
To begin with, both books argue against the persistence of ‘methodological nationalism’ – a form of inquiry, which takes the nation as a convenient unit of analysis and does not question the theoretical and political implications of this choice. Like Mihelj, Roosvall and Salovaara-Moring suggest that communication scholars need to ‘(re-)politicize the role of the nation in media studies, while explicating it theoretically as well as empirically’ (p. 10). Several chapters in their volume take up the task of thinking beyond methodological nationalism. Most notably, Rantanen critiques the assumptions behind studies of transnational media flows; Ashuri examines multinational co-production of media programmes; and Riegert considers the national televisual appropriations of international news.
In addition, both volumes contain a critique of culturalist, text-based analyses of mediated nationhood, although Communicating the Nation includes a good number of chapters that draw primarily on textual data for their claims (e.g. the chapters by Timm Knudsen, Chouliaraki, Roosvall and Kantola). In my view, the most engaging example in this volume of a study that moves beyond textualism to consider the political and economic context of mediating nationalism is Toby Miller’s chapter, ‘Holy Trinity: Nation, Pentagon, Screen’. Tracing funding sources and ideological influences, Miller discusses the collusion between the militaristic nationalist agenda of the US state and the commercial imperatives of the American screen industries, including cinema, television and games, while also showing its political implications.
The second broad theme that connects the two books is the question of whether any credence should be given to arguments that globalization signals the impending demise of nationhood. Mihelj’s answer to this is a resounding no, and she argues that ‘far from being an obstacle to globalization, nationhood constitutes one of its fundamental premises’ (p. 29). The chapters in Communicating the Nation offer a more divergent set of answers to the question, with some authors suggesting that ‘hot’ nationalism is on the wane (e.g. Timm Knudsen, Bolin and Ståhlberg), while others document its continued importance (e.g. Chouliaraki, Miller, Calabrese).
Finally, both volumes find repeated confirmation that – regardless of how one may judge the enduring power of nationhood in a globalizing world – a general trend towards increasing articulations of nationalism with market liberalism and, by extension, consumerism is undeniable. Furthermore, both volumes argue that commercial media play an important part in this process. Mihelj sums up this trend when she writes: ‘Cultural and political markers of national identification are being recoded to suit the language of market exchange and consumerist lifestyles, attuned to the exigencies of commercial media and transnational corporations’ (p. 165). She cautions, however, that while the marketization of mediated nationhood may allow for cultural diversity, it also reinforces new forms of social exclusion organized around divisions between the wealthy and the poor at national, regional and global levels. In sum, despite some limitations, both of these volumes advance a broader programme of critical inquiry into the mediation of collective identities and the politics of belonging and exclusion – a problematic that, in many ways, defines the global condition and merits continued attention.