The politics of Nation Branding

Abstract

Nation Branding is broadly conceived of as an apolitical marketing strategy that targets external markets to establish and communicate a specific image of national identity. However, in this article it is argued that Nation Branding displays characteristics that make it constructive to analyse in terms of an implicit cultural policy. The main point is that Nation Branding is essentially an inner-oriented, cultural-political measure that targets the citizens of the national state, characterized by conservative, transformative and transferring political agendas. On the background of an analysis of these characteristics, it will be argued that Nation Branding may work in a self-defeating manner and endanger democratic processes.

Keywords

Cultural policy economization David Harvey Nation Branding neoliberalism Charles Taylor Raymond Williams

Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul. (Margaret Thatcher)

Dem Wirtschafts- muss ein Mentalitätswunder folgen. (Olins, Branding Germany)

With the rise of modernity and the nation-state, cultural policies have become a characteristic part of those mechanisms that manage the relations between government and culture. The historical periods that were characterized by nation-building efforts (19^th century) or by laying down the fundaments of the national welfare states (20^th century) have both acted on cultural practices and the system of orientations ‘embodied’ in social practices broadly construed. While such relations are complex and multifaceted, Raymond Williams (1984) has suggested distinguishing between cultural policy as ‘display’ and cultural policy ‘proper’. Roughly, the main aim of cultural policy ‘proper’ is the governmental management of materialized artistic expressions and their circulation in civil society, which is achieved by measures of subsidizing and public patronage of the arts and administered by arts councils and ministries of culture that typically emerged in the second half of the 20^th century.

In addition to such explicit political measures in intervening in cultural practice – which has since become the key concern of cultural policy studies (McGuigan, 2004) – Williams has emphasized another group of less explicit cultural policy instruments that are often overlooked as political measures of public policy in the cultural arena. As he maintains, in numerous cases cultural policy measures in modern societies are not concerned with cultural policy ‘proper’, but rather with ‘display’, which aims at unifying the nation-state and upholding the symbolic legitimacy of ‘a particular social order’ (Williams, 1984: 3; see McGuigan, 2004: ch. 3).¹ Cultural policy in the sense of ‘display’ thus attempts to intervene on the interconnected system of values, understandings and attitudes that are embodied in social practices and that form the language-like framework for action and personal identity in a given society. Given the central status of individualism in western societies, it is a little surprising that cultural policy as display takes on the form of ‘identity politics’, which aims both to shape collective identities and to provide a range of exemplary models that are available for individuals to construct their personal identities.² In contemporary terminology, Williams’ second notion of cultural policy effortlessly connects to forms of politics that Michel Foucault refers to as ‘government’ – a useful analytic tool that allows us to grasp various political measures that operate in ways that cannot be captured in traditional disciplinary or juridical terms.

In this article, I want to address the recent phenomenon of Nation Branding as belonging to this latter group of cultural policy measures. This may seem somewhat surprising for at least two reasons. First, Nation Branding is broadly conceived as a marketing strategy that targets external markets to establish and communicate a specific image of national identity, to increase exports and to attract tourists, investments and skilled workforce. Second, the common view is that Nation Branding is merely the prolongation of public diplomacy and a supposedly apolitical, neutral or ‘post-political’ marketing strategy.³ However, as shall become clear in the course of this article, Nation Branding displays characteristics that make it constructive to analyse it in terms of an implicit cultural policy. In contrast to these widely held assumptions, it will be argued that Nation Branding is essentially an inner-oriented cultural-political measure that targets the citizens of the national state.

Given this overall motivation, the article will advance three propositions. The view will be defended that Nation Branding involves a politics that is marked by conservative, transformative and transferring agendas. First, the conservative aspect consists in bringing together neoliberal economic vocabulary and the symbolism of nationalist discourse, which helps to (re)legitimize the nation-state as an anchoring point for identity in a globalized world. Second, the transformative aspect consists in decoupling the nationalist vocabulary from history and cultural context, which ties in with a neoliberal paradigm and radically changes the very concept of national identity. Third, the transferring aspect consists in the fact that in processes of Nation Branding, bureaucrats and democratically elected government representatives transfer definitional power to advertising agencies that specialize in Nation Branding. This is problematic as far as the decision that governs how collective identity is to be represented is not the result of democratic or at least transparent processes. This may lead to consequences that are in diametrical opposition to the supposed status of Nation Branding as ‘public good’. To achieve this goal, I am going to draw on the work of Charles Taylor, David Harvey and Michel Foucault, but also on the work of a small group of critical voices in the Nation Branding debate (Jansen, 2008, 2011; Aronczyk, 2007, 2008; Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011; Kaneva and Popescu, 2011; Kaneva, 2011).

1 Nation Branding

With the fast growth of the advertising industry in the first half of the 20^th century, techniques were developed that did not simply aim at persuading customers to purchase a particular good over competing products. Rather, advertising techniques began systematically to produce complex signs. These signs or ‘brands’ came to represent an immaterial value that identifies a product or a particular organization and that marks it as possessing a differential advantage customarily attached to a symbol, design, or name. As leading practitioners note, the brand value that marketing adds to products and services is not tangible, but it represents capital in that it enables producers to maximize their financial gain for their products and services and maintain robust enduring relations with their customers (Anholt, 2003: 1–2; Arvidsson, 2006; Anholt, 2007).

Brands were already in the 18^th and 19^th centuries considered a crucial component of product differentiation strategies (Bently, 2011). Accordingly, in a basic definition given by the American Marketing Association, the practice of brand management refers to processes by which companies endeavour to differentiate their products from the competition. However, such definition is not complex enough adequately to capture the essence of branding today. To give an adequate picture, we need to add at least two points. First, while brands usually combine product characteristics and non-functional added values inextricably linked to the perception of the brand (Macrae, Parkinson and Sheerman, 1995), they have progressively gained lives of their own, becoming ever more independent from the goods they were supposed to market. In fact, many brands have themselves become commodities that are regarded as far more valuable than the actual products with which they are linked. Second, the massive investments that flow into branding strategies today are aimed at much more than product differentiation. The ultimate aim of contemporary branding practitioners is for their brands to become tools in the factory of the social world that people use to create meaning and to build social environments. In other words, the aim is to create brands that become ‘popular ideas that people live by’ and that anchor people to reality (Grant, 1999). It is in such context that Arvidsson (2006) sees the idea of the brand as a reaction to the existential uncertainty of postmodern societies.

Although branding is usually associated with corporations and their products and services, the techniques of branding are conceived to be applicable to all areas of communications (Olins, 1999, 2003; Anholt, 2003). Therefore, it is unsurprising that with the gradual expansion of markets these advertising techniques were deployed to a growing diversity of fields. This was no different in the case of the tourism industry that emerged in the second half of the 20^th century. Place Branding or ‘destination-branding’ techniques were developed to attract foreign (and domestic) tourists and visitors. The strategy of the branding of tourist destinations and places in general (cities, villages, regions) was to establish a stable link between these places and certain positive experiences (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Hanna and Rowley, 2008).

It is in the wake of Place Branding that branding experts became persuaded that nations could be viewed as branded products in an increasingly global competition. Nation Branding is a fairly recent phenomenon, but the last few decades have witnessed an exponential growth in the use of branding techniques by nations envisaging ‘the synthesis of brand management with public diplomacy and with trade, investment, tourism and export promotion’ (Anholt, 2007: 3). The nation brand is defined as ‘the unique, multi-dimensional blend of elements that provide the nation with culturally grounded differentiation and relevance for all of its target audiences’ (Dinnie, 2008: 15). Both traditional and emerging market economies devote considerable financial resources to branding processes that aim to establish and communicate a specific image of national identity with the ‘official’ goal to attract tourists, skilled students and workforce, investments, and to increase export. In addition to such rewards in the global market place, practitioners, theoreticians and politicians emphasize further rewards including increased international credibility and political influence. Furthermore, Nation Branding is even thought to ensure a fairer distribution of wealth in favour of third countries of the world (Anholt, 2002a: 59; Anholt, 2002b: 234; Gilmore, 2002b: 282) and to keep national communities together (Anholt, 2002a: 60). Overall, Nation Branding is presented as a crucial element in the economic, political and cultural flourishing of any state, and, consequently, the neglect of this possibility is thought to lead to significant negative consequences.

The obvious objection that nations are complex and abstract entities that communicate via a multitude of channels and therefore cannot be branded as products or companies is swept away in the literature on Nation Branding. The vast majority of leading figures apply a marketing perspective and they broadly agree that – at least in principle – nations behave like brands (Papadopoulos and Heslop, 2002: 294; Olins, 1999a, 1999b: 25, 29). The view is that Nation Branding requires a more complex organizational and conceptual approach, but works basically as Corporate Branding (Olins, 2003: 177; Brymer, 2003). As with Corporate Branding, the national brand is to capture the nation’s inner identity (Gilmore, 2002b: 285) and simultaneously transform this identity into a flexible, malleable offer to suit different ‘buyers’ (ibid.: 287; Olins, 2003: 178–9). Also, it is commonly accepted that countries are like products (Kotler and Gertner, 2002: 258; Van Ham, 2001: 2; Olins, 2003: 168) that are in permanent competition with each other. Nation Branding is thus seen as the necessary continuation of diplomacy (Van Ham, 2001: 3) and the prerequisite for successful participation in the global market (Martinovic, 2002: 317).

In a further attempt to deflect criticism, branding experts like Olins argue that nations have always been involved in branding processes (Olins, 1999a, 2002a, 2002b, 2003), like those after the French Revolution (Olins, 2002a: 243), after Atatürk’s reform of Turkey, or after Ceylon becoming Sri Lanka or South Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe (ibid.: 243–5; Van Ham, 2009: 143). While this is not crucial to our context, it should be mentioned that such a view held by Olins, Anholt and Van Ham is overly problematic. It overlooks the important fact that these cases are about political reforms, the establishment of new communities, and not about Nation Branding. Ceylon becoming Sri Lanka or South Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe are cases in which the end of the colonial period is signalled politically. In these cases, the goal cannot be said to consist in branding the country and thus providing some competitive collective identity in the global market place.

Given how widespread this phenomenon has become over the last decade, it is very astonishing that the topic has been largely neglected in critical academic literature (Jansen, 2008, 2011; Aronczyk, 2007, 2008; Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011; Kaneva and Popescu, 2011). This is curious, since Nation Branding is not only financed and supported by governments and governmental cultural and political institutions, but also – as Jansen (2008) notes – promoted by a range of supranational organizations such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations.

2 The inner-oriented aspect

As this short introduction shows, Nation Branding is usually discussed as an exclusively ‘externally’ oriented strategy that aims to communicate a competitive image to attract international attention. What is often neglected is that its proponents also maintain that Nation Branding has a crucial ‘inner-oriented’ feature. On the one hand, the inner orientation is a necessary condition for success, since Nation Branding cannot be effective without the participation of citizens who are at the same time representatives, stakeholders and customers of the brand. While I shall analyse this aspect in depth later in this article, let us now focus on an ‘inner’ aspect, namely on the claim that a successful Nation Branding campaign is thought to enhance the cultural stability of a nation, to ameliorate social integration and cohesion by advancing national confidence, and to bring together local and national interests. In other words, the claim is that Nation Branding in many ways equals nation-building and hence represents some kind of ‘public good’ (Leonhard, 2002). For instance, in the case of Branding New Zealand, the relevant branding processes are also thought ‘to consolidate and formalize … national identity’ (Branding New Zealand, 2002).⁴ This idea that the national brand will ensure coherence and integrate society in an adequate manner in manifest in many of these campaigns. Just to name a few examples, this claim is clearly manifest in the cases of Albania (Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011: 604–5), Romania and Bulgaria (Kaneva and Popescu, 2011), Poland (Aronczyk, 2008) and Estonia (Jansen, 2011). For instance, in the case of Germany, authors of the Branding Germany project point out that:

In the best case, a new Brand Germany will be able to integrate the different interests and tendencies of our society from the inside out. (MfD, 2002: 7)

Further, if a well-functioning national brand is claimed to ensure the smooth integration of society, then we may expect its deterioration to have consequences. Indeed, this is emphasized:

The lack of binding force to the inside is always evidence of a weakening brand. (MfD, 2002: 11; author’s translation)

The trust in the integrative capacities of brands is also manifest in regional place-branding initiatives, like ‘Branding Richmond’:

Without a brand identity, we’re just generic … Furthermore, a brand identity also can help unify and galvanize our community. (Branding Richmond, 2002)

The underlying point is that the weakening of the brand is likely to be followed by deteriorating social cohesion, decreasing motivation to participate in political processes, which may lastly undermine the legitimacy of political institutions. The critical diagnosis is thus that citizens feel that ‘decisions are made over their heads. The answers to their questions about meaning (Sinn) and identity are increasingly becoming unsatisfactory’ (MfD, 2002: 6). To overcome what is seen as a threatening situation that would eventually undermine economic stability, social cohesion and the permanence of participatory democratic processes, the Branding Germany initiative is envisaged as a nation-building measure that revitalizes national identity.

Would the business leaders and decision makers in this country understand themselves as brand managers, as brand managers of the Brand Germany, it would be easier for them to provide new answers. (MfD, 2002: 6)

3 Nation-building or the opposite? Flexibilizing collective identity

In the previous section, we have begun to approach what we could call the conservative aspect of Nation Branding. We may call this aspect conservative because of the heavy reliance on the vocabulary of nationalist discourse, and because a major goal of such efforts is to maintain the sense of national community and to legitimize the nation-state as an anchoring point for identity in a globalized world. To grasp the parallels to nation-building efforts, it is helpful to draw from work on nationalism from the last three decades. Authors like Anderson (2002), Billig (1995), Gellner (1994), and Hobsbawm (1983) have insightfully shown how nations have slowly emerged as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 2002), uniting individuals that previously belonged to heterogeneous ethnicities and class-based groupings. The construction of national commonalities was achieved by means of what Hobsbawm (1983) has referred to as the ‘invention of tradition’: collections of symbolic ceremonies that were not so much recollected from the past but rather invented and materialized in events, national holidays, public ceremonies, and monuments. Such ‘ideological habits’ (Billig, 1995) began to structure self- and social relations and to function as crucial ingredients of the social imagery, making possible the expression of social cohesion and collective identity that was yet to be a reality.

The impact of these nation-building processes was further enhanced by both ‘proper’ and ‘display’ cultural policy measures. Such measures were important because the idea of a common cultural heritage is an important component of inventing traditions, creating some national homogeneity and consolidating rather heterogeneous territorial entities. Consequently, particular cultural expressions, architecture, monuments and artefacts belonging to both the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’ arts became valued as prominent expressions of a national ‘essence’. At the same time, they became instruments in the construction of a sense of national identity, or belonging, and some kind of continuity with particularly selected past events toward a shared destiny.

On the background of this picture that emphasizes a constructivist perspective on the emergence of nations, Nation Branding can be seen as the continuation of the above-noted cultural-political measures that aimed to shape social imagery and to structure social relations. In fact, using a term coined by Ulrich Beck (2003, 2004), it can be seen as a kind of ‘renationalization’. Beck is opposing predictions that envisage the final demise of the nation-state by emphasizing that the forces of globalization also lead to processes of ‘renationalization’ and other attempts to revive national identities. Nation Branding efforts can thus be seen as belonging to such processes of ‘renationalization’.⁵ While Beck is ambivalent on how such processes are to be assessed and whether they may lead to the reappearing of the hostilities and exclusion mechanisms that have accompanied the history of nationalism, political theorist Peter van Ham (2001: 2) argues for an optimistic view. He maintains that Nation Branding involves the creation of a ‘benign’ form of national identity that ‘lacks the deep-rooted and often antagonistic sense of national identity and uniqueness that can accompany nationalism’. Van Ham thus welcomes the ‘rise of the Brand State’, claiming that Nation Branding can channel national sentiments into collective national identities that are safe and adequate to the postmodern world of images. Van Ham thus assumes that Nation Branding represents a neutral form of nation-building, which at once creates a well-functioning public sphere, generates a sense of belonging, and legitimates the nation-state in globalized markets.

Branding practitioners like Olins (2003) and Anholt (2007) agree with scholars and political scientists like Van Ham, and add that the brand of a nation is functionally equivalent to what we usually refer to as national identity, since the latter always already entails an image and a projection of attributes to a national and international public of ‘consumers’. Thus, the assumption is that the difference between the way nation-states have historically attempted to maintain and project a national identity to further national interests and create sense of belonging, and the way Nation Branding works is merely a difference of more refined techniques.

However, in contrast to these assumptions, I shall argue that Nation Branding qualitatively differs from traditional nation-building techniques and cultural policies. In fact, my claim is that Nation Branding may even work in the direction opposite to nation-building and effectively hinder the creation of a robust public sphere. This aspect will be referred to as the transformative aspect of Nation Branding, which – as it will be argued – consists in a radical alteration of the very concept of national identity, its decoupling from history and cultural context and its reiteration in the framework of neoliberal thought.

3.1 Branding Germany: towards neoliberal nationalism

As noted above, Olins and colleagues hold that the current weakness of German national identity has been through a process of ‘erosion’ (MfD, 2002: 7), which has negative consequences including economic decline and democratic deficit. The new Brand Germany that is supposed to help solve this problem is condensed in the core idea:

We are Playmakers. [Wir sind Spielmacher] (MFD, 2002: 47)

The brand is supposed to denote vitality and natural authority, and to present Germany as the motor of European integration. Importantly, the brand is conceived as an active frame of action that can be applied both on individual and on collective levels. According to the organizers, not only the state but German corporations, institutions, political parties, churches, etc., and citizens must understand themselves as ‘playmakers’. In addition, for the brand to unfold its full potential, this change should be signalled by what may seem like quite essential changes. Let me mention the two most important ones. First, instead of ‘Germany one nation’ [Deutschland Einig Vaterland] the authors suggest ‘Germany One Brand’ [Deutschland Einig Markenland] (MFD, 2002: 28). Second, they envisage the changing of Germany’s black-red-gold flag, which has also been proposed in an earlier collaboration between Olins and the national TV channel ZDF (see Olins, 1999b). The authors use a picture of the Reichstag (ibid.: 85) to illustrate the visual changes: the gold stripe should be replaced with yellow and the black stripe with blue, to articulate the country’s movement towards the EU and to highlight a new and more flexible, youthful and feminine identity. Such radical changes may be observed in other Nation Branding projects. For instance, Aronczyk (2008) shows that marketing professionals hired by the Polish government have suggested a similar change in the Polish flag. The idea was to abolish not only the military connotations but also the nationalist and political ones, and to transform the flag into a kite, with its evocation of youth, sports and leisure.

At this point, we may begin to question the widespread assumptions that maintain continuity between Nation Branding and those historical nation-building processes that resulted in the emergence of national states. As we have seen, the view is that the only difference between nation-building and Nation Branding is that while nation-states made use of flags and slogans, contemporary nations may additionally use the knowledge and resources of marketing experts to establish symbolic sovereignty. However, quite strikingly, in opposition to those historical strategies that aimed at inventing traditions and creating historical narratives, Nation Branding works in a diametrically opposite direction. In short, Nation Branding de-historicizes the very concept of nation, reducing its inherited complexity to the attributes of a ‘playmaker’, which is exactly characterized by its unboundedness and flexibility. The proposed new slogan and the change in the colors of the flag are symptomatic of this. Recall that the three colours suggested are blue, red, and yellow - the three primary colours that can create all the other hues of the colour wheel. Thus understood, the choice of colours additionally underlines the flexible nature of the identity suggested. One can say that the only consistent feature of this national identity is its flexibility and readiness for permanent self-transformation. But then we may ask: Is it legitimate to refer to such a de-historicized notion as a national identity? It seems rather that Nation Branding does the opposite of inventing traditions and creating historical narratives: it empties out national identity and replaces it with a flexible and capitalizable entity that clearly reproduces a particular cultural logic of the present time. It imagines a community that is gathered around a set of neoliberal values.

It is not difficult, then, to see that the reiteration and re-vitalization within the framework of neoliberal thought do not leave the concept and content of national identity neutral. Making this point was important to refute the common-sense understanding of Nation Branding as a supposedly neutral technology and to emphasize its transformative aspect.

While this transformative aspect has many aspects that would deserve further elucidation, in our context we may suffice with pointing out that it partly consists in a radical de-historicization, flexibilization and redefinition of national identity as a capitalizable entity that mirrors neoliberal logic. David Harvey (2007) has recently explored the curious relationship between state and nation as a result of neoliberal reforms during the 1990s. He argues that since states began to act as competitive entities in the world market, they increasingly face the problem of finding alternative ways to secure citizen loyalty. Anderson’s (2002: 53) earlier remark that ‘in themselves, market-zones, “natural”-geographic or politico-administrative, do not create attachments’ supports Harvey’s analysis. To solve this motivational problem, Harvey (2007: 84) argues that ‘nationalism is an obvious answer’ but notes at the same time a difficulty that arises because nationalism ‘is profoundly antagonistic to the neoliberal agenda’.

In principle, neoliberal theory does not look with favour on the nation even as it supports the idea of a strong state. The umbilical cord that tied together state and nation under embedded liberalism had to be cut if neoliberalism was to flourish. (Harvey, 2007: 84)

A couple pages later, Harvey (2007: 85–7) notes that in spite of some discord, in its effort to succeed as a competitive agent in the world, the neoliberal state needs some sort of nationalism to survive – one that motivates citizens without hindering the unfolding of the market. Harvey argues that such forms of nationalism evolve around sports competitions. While this is surely right, it is important to add to Harvey’s analysis that Nation Branding represents par excellence the kind of altered nationalism that is sufficiently empty, de-historicized, and no longer in opposition to the neoliberal agenda. Ironically, Nation Branding manages to invoke nationalist sentiments in support of a neoliberal venture that is fundamentally in opposition to the historicity of nations and the structures of solidarity that have evolved with it.

3.2 Troubles in brandland

Of course, the fact that Nation Branding is transformative does not warrant any inference about whether it is beneficial or detrimental for a society. However, switching from descriptive to evaluative lenses, in the following I shall argue that due to its internal logic it is both (a) self-defeating and (b) harmful for a democratic society in several ways.

(a) While one of the main transformative aspects of Nation Branding lies in its de-historicization of national identity, it is also this characteristic that renders it self-defeating by destroying the conditions for its own realization. To see this, recall that both ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ understandings of national identity are intrinsically connected to the idea of intrinsic, non-voluntary value. On the one hand, on the ‘ethnic’ understanding, it is the fixed historical-linguistic root of a nation and its historical boundedness that is traditionally assumed to constitute the genuine source of its ability to unite previously separated individuals and groups.⁶ It is thus due to such non-voluntary historical and linguistic determinations of a common origin that people regarded the particular and historically contingent version of their national identity, language, and customs as valuable in themselves. On the other hand, on the ‘civic’ understanding of national identity, the sense of group membership arises from the collective commitment to a set of laws and principles like in the case of ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Habermas, 1989, 1996, 1998, 2001). Also in this case, national identity is said to hold value because it is seen as an articulation of non-voluntary values like those embedded in constitutions.

With Nation Branding this picture changes completely. Here the claim is that national identity holds no intrinsic value and that the historical boundedness of German national identity is actually threatening the economic and political stability of the country. Rather, what ascribes value to national identity is its new shape and content provided by the Nation Branding process. But then the new identity must also be conceived as coming without intrinsic value, which leads us to the core of the problem. If it is the process of branding that confers value to a particular understanding of national identity, and if this value thus depends on branding strategies being executed at will, then Nation Branding becomes self-defeating, because this simply prevents individuals from being able to regard this collective identity as valuable independently of the actions of a relatively small group. For a collective identity to have a motivational impact, the individual must be able to regard this as holding some intrinsic value. This is how such a strategy becomes self-defeating since it undermines exactly the kind of self-esteem of a group that it claims to want to create.

(b) The de-historicization that is largely responsible for the self-defeating nature of Nation Branding is also the root of an additional problem. What I want to argue in the following is that Nation Branding may undermine the possibility of a well-functioning public sphere – an arena of open debate and disputation on issues of social and political significance that are of interest to citizens. Both Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor have influentially argued that a functioning public sphere is necessary for democratic processes, since it enables the creation of consensus without the mediation of the political sphere. As Taylor argues:

The conditions for a genuine democratic decision can’t be defined in abstraction from self-understanding. They include (a) that the people concerned understand themselves as belonging to a community that shares some common purposes and recognizes its members as sharing its purposes; (b) that the various groups, types, and classes of citizens have been given a genuine hearing and were able to have an impact on the debate; and (c) that the decision emerging from this is really the majority preference. (Taylor, 1985: 276)

What Taylor describes here is how a functioning public sphere may enable democratic decision-making that respects differences in opinion. Taylor’s description is of direct interest for our purposes, because everything he says here is also valid for the negotiation of collective identities. While Taylor describes belonging to a community as a precondition for a public sphere, we can also say that the processes of collective self-understanding are fundamentally dialogical and are at best themselves unfolded within the communicative structures that characterize the public sphere. Collective identities are essentially negotiated in ongoing processes of communication that in optimal and non-coercive circumstances are characterized by a certain degree of polyphony. The question of who we really are is a site of ongoing contestations and differing interpretations of the past, that leads to a diversity of identities, which to a certain extent all are parts of the cultural outlook of a nation (Owen-Vandersluis, 2003: ch. 5).

It is not difficult to see that such a view is particularly beneficial in the case of Germany. For instance, in a 1986 debate that later became known as the ‘Historikerstreit’, Jürgen Habermas criticized conservative politicians and historians for attempting to create a new national identity by means of a “normalization” of Germany’s past. As Baldwin (1990: 262) has noted, this was not primarily an academic debate about how Nazi history should be incorporated in the overall history of the nation, but rather one about national identity and about ways of establishing novel continuities in German history. Such debates about German identity and the way Germany’s past is to be remembered have followed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and have found clear expression in the public debates about the German unification and about the work of the historian Goldhagen (1996). Far from being restricted to these examples, the issue frequently surfaces in political debates in contemporary Germany. The goal with these examples is to show how national identity and the collective interpretation of history are contested issues that are negotiated in a functioning public sphere, an arena of open debate and disputation. This also means that the outcome of these negotiations is open-ended, that the process is permanent, and that it is characterized by a polyphony of voices and reasonable disagreement.

On this background, we may return to Nation Branding and begin to assess whether it contributes to or hinders the public sphere. In the following, I shall distinguish between three ways in which publicly financed and extensively media-exposed Nation Branding campaigns actually divert attention from inclusive public sphere debates about national identity and destabilize open and democratic processes of collective self-interpretations.

First, proponents and practitioners of Nation Branding buy in to the questionable assumption that individuals inhabiting a territory can be expected to subscribe to the same interpretations of national identity (and a very narrow one) that may be expressed in a monolithic slogan. The form of slogan-oriented communication in Nation Branding cannot but conceal the open-endedness and dialogical nature of collective negotiations in public spheres, ultimately favouring one particular and less-than-complex position. A brand identity is unavoidably asymmetrical and one-sided and can therefore not represent the multitude of voices that all belong to a nation – an aspect that sheds doubt on the claim that communities can be held together by brands. In addition, such one-sidedness comes at the price of repressing the multitude of critical and conflicting positions. Thus there is no place for questioning whether the re-articulation of national identity in neoliberal market terms is something that we should agree to in the first place. As is often noted in Nation Branding literature, sceptics who disagree with either the content of the brand or the whole idea of Nation Branding itself must be convinced: ‘sceptics with their absence of pride in and commitment to the country and their active doubting of its potential will damage and undermine the country’s brand’ (Gilmore, 2002b: 291). Not much space for disagreement here.

Second, there is also a problematic transposition of political power involved in Nation Branding campaigns. Instead of being a matter of open-ended discussion within the framework of the public sphere involving the participation of individuals representing diverse social groupings, the monopoly to articulate national identity is transferred to a relatively small group of Nation Branding consultants that all work for a handful of companies. At the same time, neither the transfer of defining power nor the fact that state funds are being channelled into advancing a particular political (neoliberal) agenda are publicly discussed.

All in all, Nation Branding can be said to be problematic in several regards. It may be that on the surface Nation Branding aims to bear a resemblance to processes of public and open deliberation. However, its logic and its dependence upon a plain monolithic slogan that is taken to represent the population are necessarily in striking contradiction to the open-endedness of collective negotiations in public spheres. Having pointed out these problematic aspects that are attached to the articulation of national identity within the neoliberal logic, I should add that the analysis provided here does not imply any kind of nostalgia about historical forms of national identities.

4 Living the brand

The previous sections contained reflection on some of the effects of the de-historicization of national identity that we found characteristic in Nation Branding strategies. In the following, the focus will be shifted to another transformative characteristic, namely the de-politicization of political measures. Recall that the aim of Nation Branding is not exhausted in merely attaining visibility by way of creating and circulating logos and slogans. Rather, the ultimate goal is to create brands that become integrated into the collective social imagination and function as ‘popular ideas that people live by’. This is because, as branding authors are keenly aware, Nation Branding cannot be effective without the active participation of citizens who understand themselves as the representatives, stakeholders, and customers of the national brand. Citizens are called upon to ‘live the brand’ and hence to act and think in ways that are well suited to the general contours of the national brand. They are called upon to take the role of a ‘brand ambassador’, which consists in always carrying the ‘microbes’ of the brand identity and spreading it by ‘infecting’ those with whom they come into contact (Aronczyk, 2008). Thus, Nation Branding primarily intends to stimulate citizens to ‘live the brand’ and to become ‘playmakers’ that then will eventually create a matching form of society. The National Brand is really seen as something that will automatically emerge out of the strategic interactions of ‘playmakers’.⁷

Now there is something peculiar about this strategy that is worth examining. This is something that can best be described as a striking incoherence between the level on which Nation Branding strategists and their politician supporters detect the problem and the level on which they attempt to solve it. The problem that they detect is one that has often been emphasized by liberal and neoliberal thinkers: ‘big government’ and the welfare state have significantly compromised the vitality of the national brand and the inherent motivation of citizens. Contemporary passive citizens are claimed to lack the ‘courage and desire for a new start’ [‘Mut und Lust zum Aufbruch’] (MfD, 2002: 15), which is seen as the result of the operating principles of the welfare state.

Immense need for security and high safety standards are described as typically German, but also increasingly as obstacles: a big government, strong regulation, less freedom – and connectingly the habit and the expectation that everything should come ‘from above’. (MfD, 2002: 22)

Thus a specific form of political organization of a territory is simply accused of having created passive individuals (MFD, 2002: 15, 22), with a security-seeking mentality [Vollkaskomentalität] (ibid.: 15), which effectively hampers socio-economic development. Striking slogans like ‘Social market economy is a hammock. We need a trampoline’ (ibid.: 24) lend additional support to my thesis, and they clearly show that in the view of their writers the problem that needs to be fixed is located on a social-political macro-level.

Nonetheless, and this is the point that I want to advance here, the intervention that Nation Branding proponents envisage targets the micro-level. Nation Branding aims to turn citizens into the embodiments of the message of the brand and this focus on individuals as brand ambassadors reveals something fundamental about the manner in which the branding measures are thought to provide a solution to social, economic and individual problems. When I say that the solution is de-politicized I mean that the solution that Nation Branding provides consists not in the restructuring of political, social, or economic conditions, but in the correction of inadequate self-management of the citizens. The correction of collective identity and the supposed damages that the welfare state has caused are conceived as being solvable by the apolitical correction of individual self-relations. Instead of attempting to strengthen the sense of social cohesion and belonging by, for instance, securing participation in democratic processes, Nation Branding is mainly focused on the creation of ‘playmaker’ individuals.

A quick look at the characteristics of ‘playmakers’ reveals decisive parallels to the virtues of the ideal neoliberal subject that Foucault has referred to as the ‘entrepreneur of himself’. The ‘playmaker’ assumes extended responsibility over his or her life (MfD, 2002: 44). In addition, the playmaker’s actions are characterized by a constant forward-looking, courage, willingness to take risks and goal orientation (ibid.):

Responsibility requires courage and risk taking. The new Brand Germany understands courage as a cardinal virtue in the private, public and professional appearance. (MfD, 2002: 41)

The playmaker is characterized by being flexible (MfD, 2002: 44) and by being able to capitalize and constantly rework and optimize her or his identity and human capital: ‘We work full ambition to develop our game and our technique’ (ibid.: 43). A playmaker-subject’s attributes are self-responsibility, courage, risk-taking, flexibility and willingness to work on the self, which this subject shares with the ideal figure of neoliberalism.

What we see here is a simultaneous redefinition of both the manner and the field of potential political intervention. As to the first, we see an emerging political rationale that consists in transforming questions that used to belong to the realm of the political, social, or economic, to questions that are best understood and dealt with as pertaining to the self-management of citizens. As to the second, we see a shift in the way that the field of legitimate political intervention is redefined to encompass the individual ethos of citizens. But in that case, the problems with such measures are somewhat reminiscent of the ones noted earlier. They obscure their genuinely political character and involve problematic transposition of political power and reductive assumptions about citizens being able to express their personal identities within the frame of a monolithic slogan. The simultaneous de-politicization of political measures and the redefinition of both the manner and the field of potential political intervention are very likely to come at the price of repressing alternative self-interpretations.

5 Neoliberal economization

Drawing on a productive distinction by Williams, I started out by saying that Nation Branding will be understood as a form of cultural policy (as ‘display’) that means to unify the nation-state and uphold the symbolic legitimacy of a particular social order. In our case, such cultural policy attempts to intervene on the interconnected system of understandings that are embodied in social practices by stimulating the emergence of particular kinds of individuals. In the following, drawing on the late work of Michel Foucault, I want to argue that such policy is not an exception but rather a paradigmatic example of contemporary forms of government, and it is best analysed as an instance of neoliberal ‘governmentality’. The term refers both to how the state exercises control through traditional means, but also to how power can be dispersed to include the self-government of individuals which then become embodiments of power. Foucault’s interest in neoliberal governmentality is partly grounded in his belief that this characteristic reaches its peak in a neoliberal setting.

In the context of this article, I cannot provide a systematic reconstruction of neoliberal thought - how such a relatively narrow economic doctrine became thought of as a wholly accepted approach to understanding and regulating the social. Therefore, I shall be content with emphasizing a few central characteristics relevant to our context. Roughly put, neoliberalism differs from classic liberalism in that market processes and entrepreneurial actions in liberalism are conceptualized as fundamentally embedded in a regulating environment, that is made up of a network that entails cultural, social and political dimensions. neoliberalism not only aims at de-regulating and liberating economic processes from socio-cultural-political constraints, but it simply turns the liberal model upside down. As Polanyi (1944: 170) noted long ago about the basic ideas of neoliberalism, ‘instead of the economic system being embedded in social relations, these relationships were now embedded in the economic system’. While Polanyi’s vision is today more actual than it has ever been, the work of contemporary authors like Harvey (2007) and Bourdieu (1998, 1999) completes the overall picture. Some of their main points are that the neoliberal project ‘disembeds’ market processes and entrepreneurial actions from constraints that impede flexibility and competition (Harvey, 2007) and that such disembedment weakens collective structures and solidarities that may obstruct market logic (Bourdieu, 1998).

Mapping the mechanisms and means by which such disembedment proceeds is a complex task, and here I shall restrict myself to calling attention to a central feature that I refer to as ‘twofold economization’. Call this (a) the economization of the social and (b) the economization of government. In the following I shall explain what these processes mean and how Nation Branding can be viewed as one of their vehicles.

(a) One meaning of the term ‘economization’ lies in a particular reinvention of the social realm. Foucault’s studies of emerging neoliberal thought have unearthed a fundamental redefinition of the relation between the social sphere, government and economy in the work of American and German economists. The distinction between these realms is collapsed in neoliberal thought, in a way that expands the logic of economic enterprise to the entire social realm. In such a setting, the economization of government refers to exercising ‘power in the form, and according to the model, of the economy’ (Foucault, 2008: 134). The social appears now as ‘a form of the economic’ (Gordon, 1991: 43) and the economic becomes the organizing principle of government and society (Lemke, 1997: 240). Therefore, it becomes legitimate to use cost–benefit calculations and rational-economic principles in private as well as political actions. Fredric Jameson has noted that such economization is additionally fuelled by an underlying anthropology, which posits that ‘the market is in human nature’ (emphasis added.) Consequently, in this view the construction of markets is really a way of providing guidance for individuals to act in accordance with what is seen as the ontology of society and human nature. As Dean (1999: 160) observes:

If the market teaches the manner in which we should guide our own conduct, then the way in which we gain access to guidance regarding our conduct will be through the construction of markets.

On this background, it seems natural that the main goals of political regulation are altered. Many regulations no longer strive to realize what was traditionally understood as a particular programme, but rather aim to construct market-shaped systems of action for individuals, groups and institutions and to universalize competition within these systems (Burchell, 1993: 274; Foucault, 2008).

The economization of the social through the construction of markets reaches from direct political intervention to the kind of more implicit cultural-political measures that Williams discussed. Political interventions include, for instance, the privatization of health care and communications, the individualization of labour contracts, or the use of contractors in prisons and wars, which of course disembed market processes and entrepreneurial actions from constraints. However, there is also a cultural-political field of interventions where the aim is the construction of what we could call symbolic markets, which turn market logic into a ‘cognitive category’ (Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb, 2002) of understanding through which individuals apprehend the world. The case of Nation Branding is a good example of such measures, in that it involves the construction of a global symbolic market of national identities. Thus, both political and cultural-political measures aim towards the economization of the social by constructing markets; the results are the same in their respective fields of intervention. The construction of markets weakens and questions the legitimacy of all traditional forms of social solidarity that impede flexibility and competition. In the case of political interventions of market construction, the result is the individualization of salaries as a function of individual competences, which reduces the solidarity that is the base of collective defence of the rights of workers through unions and associations (Bourdieu, 1998; Harvey, 2007). In the case of the cultural-political construction of symbolic markets in Nation Branding, the result is the undermining of the solidarity that has traditionally been connected to the nation-state.

(b) The disembedding of market processes is further accelerated by the economization of government. Importantly, in this context, economization is understood in a Foucaultian manner, and thus as referring not to a means of governing the economy, but simply to the progressively efficient usage of political resources (Lemke, 2002b, 2002c; Miller and Rose, 1990). This economization takes on two main forms. First, economization proceeds by a shift from government to governance, which involves some transmission of power to alliances constituted by state and private actors. Crucially, such transmission does not in each instance mean the reduction of state sovereignty and intervening capacities as Harvey (2007) thinks, but a dislocation of techniques of government to governance formations (also supranational levels) and to cultural-political measures that operate below traditional politics. Nation Branding can be seen as an economization of government, since, as demonstrated above, there is a detectable transmission of definitional power.

Second, economization also proceeds by means of a shift in the way political power is exercised. As Foucault, Bourdieu (1998), and Harvey (2007) have emphasized, neoliberal political power is exercised not by restricting liberties and options available to individuals, but by ‘responsibilization’, which entails delegating tasks and responsibilities to individuals and inciting them to make autonomous choices in a relatively pre-defined field of action (see also Lemke, 1997, 2002a, 2002b). This is how neoliberal economization of government is not primarily about the political government of a territorial entity, but rather about the government of individual ways of living. As Graham Burchell (1993) has put it, neoliberal logic aims at the ‘integration of the self-conduct of the governed into the practices of their government and the promotion of correspondingly appropriate forms of techniques of the self’. (See also Lemke, 2001).

In a previous section, I have pointed out the simultaneous redefinition of both the field and the manner of potential political intervention. Put together with the point made in this section, it is warranted to maintain that Nation Branding constitutes a good that exemplifies both forms of the economization of government, in that it promotes technologies of the self, making each individual into what Foucault (2008: 226) has referred to as ‘an entrepreneur of himself’.

Conclusion

This article attempted to provide a novel understanding of Nation Branding – a recent but widespread phenomenon that is taken to be the continuation of public diplomacy. One important view defended in this article was that Nation Branding belongs to a particular and often overlooked group of cultural policy measures, which Williams (1984) has referred to as ‘display’, that aim to unify the nation-state and to uphold the symbolic legitimacy of a social order. Such policy intervenes on the collective understandings that are embodied in social practices and that form frameworks for action and personal identity. Williams’ notion is in many ways of contemporary relevance, since it completes the range of political measures that Michel Foucault famously referred to as ‘government’. Along with a range of key arguments, I have suggested a specific methodological take that consists of combining Williams’ definition with Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal government. This take helped to provide a novel understanding of Nation Branding as a cultural-political measure that operates on a sub-political level, by shaping collective identity and determining the range of exemplary models that are available for individuals to construct their identities. Far from confirming its often diagnosed external orientation, its neutrality and its being a sign of the ‘weakening of the state’, Nation Branding was deciphered as an essentially inner-oriented cultural-political measure that targets the citizens of the national state and that has conservative, transformative and transferring agendas.

In the course of the article I have continuously called attention to problematic aspects that are likely to arise from what I take to be a volatile mixture of neoliberal economic vocabulary and nationalist discourse. These issues include the construction of symbolic markets, the decoupling of the nationalist vocabulary from history and cultural context, the undermining of traditional forms of solidarity and the non-democratic transfer of definitional power and public funds. One important result of the inquiry was that Nation Branding hinders democratic or at least transparent public processes in which collective representations can be negotiated. It goes without saying that this result is diametrically opposed to the widely held view that Nation Branding is a ‘public good’.

Nonetheless, one could argue that the critique presented in this article is somewhat off the target in that neoliberal cultural-political strategies may be seen as less restrictive, more flexible and open forms of power-relations than other and more disciplinary logics of government, because they operate on the freedoms, interests and aspirations of individuals, and act on the background conditions of their actions. However, even if this view may be true to some extent, it should not make us blind to the downsides of such strategies. The multifarious aspects of the economization of the social that have been described in this article also mean that the different and competing logics of action that were embodied in being a employee, a member of a nation, or a citizen, collapse. When all social spheres become governed by the same logic, and when economic activity becomes the matrix of intelligibility of all self- and other-relations, then the possibilities for subjects to contest the application of this logic (by referring to competing logics) decrease. Political citizenship is reduced together with the public sphere of contestations. The further penetration of the social and political realms by economization and de-politicization is additionally backed by the elimination of all kinds of collective solidarities.

Footnotes

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