Simulation nations: Nation brands and Baudrillard’s theory of media

The map and the territory

On a beautiful summer’s day, a group of bright-eyed young people make and carry outsized, yellow puzzle pieces to an open field where they carefully assemble them. While some connect the puzzle pieces, others attach large inflatable clouds, tied to strings like balloons, to each piece. Once the puzzle is completed, its builders stand back and watch in amazement as the buoyant clouds lift up their creation and gently place it back down on the grass. As the perspective shifts to a bird’s-eye view, the completed puzzle is revealed to be a yellow outline of the territory of Kosovo, positioned on a green map of the European continent. ‘Kosovo. The young Europeans’, a male voice announces in English, as a colorful logo, displaying the same words, appears on screen against a white background.

This is a summary of a minute-long television commercial, which began airing on international news channels, including CNN, BBC and Euronews, in October 2009. It marked the launch of a comprehensive nation-branding campaign for Kosovo – a contested territorial entity that had only declared national independence in February 2008. The ‘Young Europeans’ campaign was commissioned by the Government of Kosovo and executed by advertising agency BBR Saatchi & Saatchi Tel Aviv, the Israeli branch of global advertising conglomerate Saatchi & Saatchi with offices in 70 countries. According to official reports, the campaign costs €5.7 million – a sizable investment of public funds for a country where 30 percent of the population was living in poverty in 2010 (Central Intelligence Agency, n.d.; Wählisch and Xharra, 2010). ¹

In addition to placements of the video spot on global news networks and local TV channels in Kosovo, the campaign’s multidimensional approach included ads in transnational magazines, such as The Economist and Newsweek, and in national newspapers in Spain, Romania, Greece, Cyprus and Slovakia (countries refusing to recognize Kosovo as a state). Other publicity efforts featured special events, a YouTube video contest, billboards and posters, social media outreach and music and film festivals. In addition, a desk version of the Kosovo map puzzle was delivered to each of the 250 members of the European Parliament in Brussels with the message, ‘Help us to complete the picture’.

In the magical media world of Brand Kosovo, a new nation had found its rightful place in the heart of Europe and its youth could rejoice. In the much less photogenic reality, not revealed by the campaign, Kosovo in 2009 was a territory whose status as an independent state was not recognized by most nations in the world, its youth were facing unemployment rates of 74 percent and its fields and mountains bore the scars of war from the 1990s. ² Many in Kosovo criticized the campaign, yet it was so ubiquitous that it could not be ignored even by those who opposed it. In fact, as critics created parody campaigns to mock it, they unwittingly adopted its commercialized and mediatized mode of address (see Wählisch and Xharra, 2010).

The ‘Young Europeans’ campaign continued for more than 2 years and was widely lauded by the advertising industry, garnering a prestigious international award for place branding in 2010. The faces of the young people from the original commercial were smiling from media screens around the world, as well as from posters and billboards plastered around Pristina. When Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton visited Kosovo in 2010, the brightly colored ‘Young Europeans’ logo provided a cheerful backdrop for their media appearances (Saatchi & Saatchi, 2010; U.S. Department of State, 2010). A Facebook group named ‘Kosovo – The Young Europeans’ describes itself as the ‘official FAN PAGE for the Kosovo Nation Branding Campaign’ and is still active today with close to 120,000 followers. For these followers and perhaps for many others who were reached by the messages of Brand Kosovo, the puzzle map assembled in the video was the territory. Its bright-yellow contours, which also shine against the blue background of Kosovo’s new national flag, were endlessly reproduced in various media and could not be denied. The images of a hopeful, youthful, forward-looking Kosovo became more real than reality. But how exactly did this happen?

Welcome to the hyperreal world of simulation. In ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, originally published in 1981, Jean Baudrillard (2001) diagnosed a contemporary social condition whereby simulation had replaced reality so that ‘… it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory’ (p. 166, emphasis in original). One could see in Baudrillard’s ideas a foreshadowing of the ‘reality effects’ (Barthes, 1989) of nation branding illustrated by Kosovo’s campaign. My claim is that these reality effects are not limited to the branding of new nations, such as Kosovo. Rather, nation branding can be understood as a new regime of (re)constructing the ‘reality’ of the nation – a regime that is inextricably tied to the operative modes of media technologies as they intersect with the logics of global capitalism. ³ I suggest that Baudrillard’s theoretical engagement with the ways in which media transform the nature of the real offers a productive starting point for an analysis of nation branding and media.

To date, the critical literature on nation branding has devoted limited attention to the media piece of the nation-branding phenomenon. In a recent review of this literature, Bolin and Ståhlberg (2015) conclude that

[F]ew analyses investigate the specific role of the media in nation-branding processes. There are analyses of media material (texts) and of the production of campaigns, but largely, ‘the media’ have been described as passive tools in the orchestration of nation-branding campaigns, lacking agency of their own. (p. 3066)

In this article, I aim to outline a new perspective on ‘the role of the media’ in nation branding, drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s post-structuralist media theory. I argue that, following Baudrillard, we can see nation brands in a new light, namely, as simulacra which exist within a transnational media system for the creation, circulation and consumption of commodity-signs. As I will illustrate below, when nation brands are viewed as simulacra, they shed their representational burden of standing in for the nation and, instead, operate as self-referential signs. To understand this process and its various implications, critical scholars interested in nation branding need to move away from analyses of representation and examine the transnational political economy of mediated commodity-signs and its reality effects. In making my case, I rely on Andrew Wernick’s (1991) definition of the ‘commodity-sign’ as both ‘an object-to-be-sold and as the bearer of a promotional message’ (p. 16). This conceptualization is broader than other uses of the term which restrict its relevance to the realm of advertising (e.g. Goldman, 1992). Wernick’s approach allows us to extend Baudrillard’s theoretical work beyond the analysis of product consumption and highlights the large-scale commodification of cultural production in late capitalist, mediatized societies. This process includes the commercialized and media-centric (re)production of nationhood through nation branding which underlies the focus of my investigation.

Throughout this article, I use the example of Brand Kosovo to illustrate my theoretical points. I chose Kosovo as a paradigmatic case for several reasons. First, until 2008, Kosovo had never existed as an independent nation-state. This meant that it lacked a canonized and normalized narrative of national history or a well-developed repertoire of national symbols. Furthermore, the internationally sanctioned Ahtisaari Plan, which recommended statehood for Kosovo, precluded the use of symbols of ethnic affiliation (i.e. Albanian, Serbian or others) in Kosovo’s official national markers of identity, such as its flag, hymn, emblem and colors (Krasniqi, 2014). All of these established particular parameters for the makers of Kosovo’s national brand, as will be elaborated later.

Second, Kosovo declared independence in an environment when around-the-clock, global media networks routinely trained their cameras on international conflicts (Gow et al., 1996; Wolfsfeld, 1997, see also Gilboa, 2005). Although it was small and poor, Kosovo’s location on the European continent helped to keep the Kosovo War of the late 1990s in the media spotlight and eventually led to Western European and American military involvement. Indeed, some authors have argued that the military intervention in Kosovo was conducted in a manner that aimed to maximize the media’s spectacular effects and to improve NATO’s flagging reputation after the Cold War (Medvedev, 2002). Among other things, Western involvement guaranteed an international audience for news about Kosovo, which had become one of the West’s charity causes (Freedman, 2000; Ignatieff, 2000; Riegert, 2003). ⁴

Third and perhaps most importantly, Kosovo committed to nation branding from its very first day as a nation-state in order to build both international and domestic support and legitimacy (Ströhle, 2012). This demonstrates the high significance that branding was accorded by the country’s governing elites and the central role played by media ‘experts’ in ushering the new nation onto the international stage.

For all these reasons, Kosovo’s case allows a level of transparency into the workings of nation branding as it was deployed in the ‘making of’ a nation as a symbolic entity. This, in my view, presents a unique opportunity for critical analysis. In other cases, the reconstitution of nationhood through branding may be more difficult to observe because of layers of pre-existing nationalist discourses and practices. Nevertheless, while branding may have played a more prominent role in Kosovo than elsewhere, I believe that the theoretical claims I present hold beyond the Kosovo case.

The rest of this article is organized in three parts. First, I outline how nation branding purports to represent the nation and discuss the problems that such claims entail. Second, I engage with Baudrillard’s theory of simulation in order to dispense with the notion that nation brands are representations of the nation and relate this discussion to the role of media. In the final section, I sketch out some directions for a renewed materialist analysis of nation brands as part of a global media economy of commodity-signs.

The trap of representations

In the spirit of Baudrillard’s legacy, let me begin with a bold assertion: nation branding works by setting a trap of representations in which national imaginaries are caught. The trap of representations is a form of essentialist thinking which construes nation branding as a process of distilling the ‘essence’ of a nation in order to then re-present it in ways that render the nation intelligible and desirable in a global marketplace. According to this mode of thinking, nation branding is about helping nations to fare better in the age of global competition, but it is not about changing them. As Melissa Aronczyk (2008) documents, branding experts commonly assert that ‘nations are already de facto brands, regularly projecting their assets, attributes and liabilities to a public at large, whether intentionally or not’ (p. 49, emphasis in original). Branders argue that coming to grips with the realities of global competition is beneficial for communities both inside and outside the nation. Put differently, nation branding is presented as a reflexive process through which the nation grasps and articulates its uniqueness and is also a performative process through which this national uniqueness is conveyed, or made real, to others.

This double-barreled approach was deployed in Kosovo’s branding campaign as well. In a press release issued by the Government of Kosovo, the dual goal of the campaign was clearly stated: it aimed ‘to place Kosovo firmly within the family of nations, within Europe and beyond’ and, at the same time, it was ‘a national effort’ for and of the people of Kosovo (quoted in Wählisch and Xharra, 2010: 12). As the press release explained, ‘When the people of Kosovo see the campaign they will also have an opportunity to share the values and the excitement in it and spread their enthusiasm to their friends and family in other countries’ (Wählisch and Xharra, 2010).

The trap of representations is set, in the first instance, by branders – be they Western image consultants, homegrown advertising tricksters or market-minded government functionaries. Branders engage in a ritualized and standardized process which has been carefully detailed by Aronczyk (2008, 2013). She identifies four stages of the process of distilling a national essence for the purpose of encoding it into a national brand:

[R]esearch/evaluation, during which ‘strengths’ and ‘weaknesses’ of the national culture are diagnosed according to national and international perceptions; training/education, in which the notion of the brand as an identity strategy is conveyed and made meaningful to national citizens; identification: the development of a ‘core idea’, or value-based concept, which distills the political, economic and cultural interests of the country into a single but mutable proposition; and implementation/communication, where the core idea is advanced as a defining and differentiating characteristic of national identity via multiple channels. (p. 114, emphasis in original)

Kosovo’s brand initiative followed the same process. The team of BBR Saatchi & Saatchi began by conducting surveys on the image of Kosovo abroad and used the research findings, combined with other information about the country’s population, to generate a core idea for the campaign. In this case, the essence of Kosovo was ‘discovered’ to be its youth. With an average population age of just under 26 years, as opposed to 40 years for the rest of Europe, Kosovo was the youngest nation on the continent both literally and metaphorically. This insight provided the creative foundation for the entire campaign. As Saatchi’s Head of Strategy, David Kosmin, put it: ‘“Young” is a demographic, but it is also a way of feeling. This insight got us to a very special set of brand values, i.e. optimism, positivity, hope and togetherness’ (quoted in Wählisch and Xharra, 2010: 13). At the same time, Kosmin was careful to reaffirm the representational nature of the brand, adding that, ‘It is our wish that the people of Kosovo will feel a sense of pride in this campaign, because at its heart they were its inspiration’ (p. 14).

This emphasis on facilitating the discovery – as opposed to the invention or construction – of a national essence is crucial for the trap of representations to work. Depicting their work in such ‘archeological’ terms allows consultants to secure buy-in from local partners who pay for their services. National political and business elites, who act as the clients for nation branding while expending public funds, also benefit from this pseudo-scientific approach. It allows them to secure legitimacy for their actions by portraying brand campaigns as the latest, cutting-edge tools for the expression and renewal of national pride (Kaneva, 2011).

Importantly, in order for the trap of representations to work, the nation must recognize itself in its national brand at the same time as it seeks recognition by others. Katja Valaskivi (2016) documents that such recognition depends on a carefully manufactured authenticity, presumably rooted in national values and characteristics (Ch. 4). Furthermore, Aronczyk (2013) points out that this ‘fantasy of recognition’ is ‘limited to the field of reference of market imperatives’ (p. 169). Nevertheless, staging the discovery of a national essence is instrumental in nation branding because it allows it to pose as a process of mirroring that merely reflects – albeit in a stylized, media-savvy and market-friendly way – the hidden ‘inner truths’ about the nation. One Kosovo official, interviewed by Wählisch and Xharra (2010), summarized this sentiment well: ‘This [campaign] was to tell the world that Kosovo is here and who we really are’ (p. 12, emphasis added).

An important advantage of adhering to a standardized nation-branding process is that it allows brand consultants to remain above the fray of national politics and maintain their status as neutral, technocratic experts – a move that grants greater legitimacy to their work, no matter what the outcome of a campaign may be. In her extensive interviews with brand consultants, Aronczyk (2013) finds that they prefer to describe themselves as ‘calculators, conduits, facilitators, guides, intermediaries, managers, middlemen, promoters, strategists, or shepherds – in short, as anything but responsible for the political impact of their work’ (p. 40).

Indeed, consultants are quick to settle the score regarding the issue of who is responsible for the success or failure of national brands. The responsibility remains squarely with the locals – including both governing elites and populations at large – who are invited to ‘live the brand’ in various ways (Aronczyk, 2008; Christensen, 2013; Valaskivi, 2016). National governments, in particular, are exhorted by consultants to get used to their new role of ‘brand managers’, in charge of managing their nations’ reputations. As Simon Anholt (2013), godfather of nation branding, unequivocally writes,

[A]ll responsible governments, on behalf of their people, their institutions, and their companies, need to measure and monitor the world’s perception of their nation and to develop a strategy for managing it. It is a key part of their job to try to earn a reputation that is fair; true; powerful; attractive; genuinely useful to their economic, political, and social aims; and honestly reflective of the spirit, the genius, and the will of the people. (p. 9, emphasis added)

Anholt’s claim reveals another legitimizing strategy of the ‘transnational promotional class’ (Aronczyk, 2013) of consultants, namely, that brand management assumes an ethos of objectivity and of scientific detachment. Nation branding is nothing more than a tool or a technology, which can be used by ‘responsible governments’ to ensure ‘fair, true, powerful, attractive, genuinely useful’ representations of their nations.

This technocratic ethos is exemplified by Anholt’s Nation Brand Hexagon – a widely used heuristic device, which lends a veneer of scientific veracity to nation branding. According to this diamond-shaped visualization, a nation’s brand is composed of international perceptions along six dimensions: culture and heritage, people, governance, investment and immigration, tourism and exports (see Aronczyk, 2013: 69–72). In other words, the Hexagon poses as a mirror of the nation and the goal of branders is to get the mirror image of international perception to reflect the nation’s ‘true self’ as closely as possible.

Where does this mode of thinking come from? Is it simply the cynical, self-serving invention of profit-driven marketers in tandem with power-hungry politicians adapting to the media age? The answer, I believe, is more complex. Many consultants and government officials whom I have met and interviewed in the course of my research appear to believe genuinely that nation branding can be a force for good and a tool for progress (Kaneva, 2011). Some of the consultants interviewed in Aronczyk’s (2013) study shared similar sentiments. While the claims of branders may be arrogant, superficial or poorly substantiated, it would be hard to argue that they are malicious. What then is underlying the essentialist mode of thinking I have dubbed ‘the trap of representations’? In my view, it is rooted in two enduring Western discourses about the nature of social reality. These discourses date back to the Enlightenment and have been subjected to various critiques at least since the 1960s when post-structuralism precipitated a cultural turn in social theory. Nevertheless, they survive in the rhetoric and practices of nation branding and limit the possibilities for its immanent critique.

One of these discourses concerns the origins and meanings of the nation. It goes back to Herder’s claim that nations are cultural communities with an enduring essence or soul. This idea is the bread and butter of modern nationalisms and continues to serve as a basis of inclusion and exclusion, despite (or because of) globalization. I will not rehash here the evolution of theories and typologies of nationalism (for an overview, see Smith, 2000). Rather, the point I want to make is that even constructivist theorizations of nationhood, such as Anderson’s (1983) famous conception of nations as ‘imagined communities’, retain the idea of distinct national characteristics – if not primordial then ‘invented’ (Hobsbawm, 1983). This implicit presumption of national distinction provides the conditions of possibility for branders and governments to launch fishing expeditions in search of essential national qualities that could form the core of a national brand. In that sense, Aronczyk (2013) is right that while nation branding subjugates national imaginaries to market logics, it simultaneously perpetuates the idea of the nation.

The second discourse concerns an understanding of communication as a process of representation. In his classic text ‘The Work of Representation’, Stuart Hall (1997) documents the evolution of theories of representation: from a reflective to an intentional to a constructionist approach (pp. 24–26). According to the reflective view, signs stand in for objects that exist independently of communicative practice. The intentional approach holds that signs are imbued with meaning by their creators, or authors, and can be deployed strategically to produce desired effects on message recipients. This view continues to inform much of Western mass communication research and underlies any form of persuasive communication. Finally, the constructionist view proposes that meaning is socially constructed rather than inherent in either objects or messages and that signification occurs through socially accepted systems or codes.

Hall and the Birmingham School used the constructionist approach as the basis for developing critical analyses of media culture, rejecting the ideas that media representations were mere reflections of culture and society or that media consumers were passive dupes. The cultural studies tradition has remained committed to analyzing processes of meaning making and, hence, to excavating the politics of representation. However, I would suggest that this emphasis on representation is also a source of limitations when nation branding is analyzed through the lens of cultural studies.

A number of scholars have used cultural studies approaches to analyze nation-branding projects (e.g. Graan, 2013; Jordan, 2014; Kaneva and Popescu, 2011; Volcic, 2008). Many of them explore the politics of representation embedded in particular campaigns and the specific articulations of national identity that these campaigns produce. While such studies have made important contributions in challenging the claims of brand consultants and unpacking the ideologies embedded in branded national narratives, their critical impulses are limited by a recurrent focus on meaning making. These analyses repeatedly find in each nation-branding case study the subordination of public interests to market principles and the commercialized reproduction of dominant identities within branded narratives at the expense of marginalized groups. In other words, they focus primarily on the symbolic or ideational dimensions of national identities. In doing so, the cultural studies approach implicitly treats national identities as equivalent, if not identical, to nation brands. As I have suggested above, it is precisely through this implied equivalence that branders seek to legitimize nation branding in the first place. In that sense, many cultural studies analyses of nation branding run the risk of falling into the trap of representations because they privilege narrative constructions of national identity and thus remain beholden to analyses of representation.

I propose that Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and simulacra offers a way out of the trap of representations for critiques of nation branding and can shed new light on the relationships among global commercial media, nations and brands. It should be noted that Baudrillard’s oeuvre has not remained unnoticed by critical scholars of consumer and promotional cultures (e.g. Featherstone, 1991; Goldman and Papson, 1996; Wernick, 1991). At the same time, his ideas have not been nearly as influential within cultural studies as those of his compatriots Bourdieu and Foucault. Critics of Baudrillard’s work, many of whom hail from the cultural studies camp, paint him as a postmodernist whose project dooms us to paralyzing relativism (e.g. Callinicos, 1989; Kellner, 1989; Norris, 1992). In contrast, I will argue that, by dispensing with the notion of representation as the basis of cultural production and critique, Baudrillard’s theory may help to clear the way for a renewed, materialist analysis of nation brands and global media.

Simulation nations

At the start, let me be clear that I do not offer a systematic or comprehensive reading of Baudrillard’s prolific and multifaceted body of work. ⁵ Rather, I undertake a brief and highly circumscribed detour through the theme park of his theoretical ideas, focusing on a few key concepts. I agree with Wesling (1998) that, in the case of Baudrillard, ‘we need not accept the complete package, including the wholesale anti-realism’ (p. 10). Indeed, his critics and interpreters have pointed out that Baudrillard’s oeuvre is highly contradictory and intentionally provocative. He rejects a style of writing that is based in empiricism and facticity. For him ‘theory is a process of invention and inversion, a conceptual weapon against the process of the real’ and a ‘symbolic challenge’ whose aim is ‘not simply a descriptive statement of the real but its critique and transformation’ (Merrin, 2005: 158). In short, Baudrillard’s theory is anti-representational but, in my view, therein lies its radical potential. At the same time, this anti-representational stance makes his ideas difficult to work with and ‘apply’ in concrete terms. Nevertheless, they offer a productive provocation that destabilizes the familiar patterns of critique rooted in neo-Marxist media and cultural studies.

One aspect of Baudrillard’s theory, which is of particular relevance to this discussion, is his juxtaposition of ‘representation’ with ‘simulation’ as processes for the creation of the social world. Baudrillard (2001) explains the difference between the two as follows:

Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if the equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. (p. 170, emphasis in original)

The notion that any equivalence between signs and reality is contingent has been well absorbed within cultural studies via constructionist and post-structuralist influences (see Hall, 1997). Indeed, the relational nature of meaning within systems of signification and the power dynamics embedded in meaning construction form the basis for ideological critiques of media texts and of communication more broadly. In his early work, Baudrillard builds on these ideas and extends them in his analysis of consumption as ‘a contemporary phenomenon in its semiotic organization and governance by a code of signification’ (Merrin, 2005: 16). Working within a Marxist paradigm, he writes in The System of Objects that consumption is ‘an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs’ (Baudrillard, 1996 [1968]: 40). However, in later work, he moves beyond the analysis of signification codes and meaning construction to focus on the process of simulation, which he explicitly relates to the operations of mass media in consumer societies. This shift is captured in the quote above, stating his rejection of representation as a basis for social analysis.

In ‘Requiem for the Media’, he explains that a ‘simulation model of communication’ is one that specifically ‘excludes, from its inception, the reciprocity and antagonism of interlocutors, and the ambivalence of their exchange’ (Baudrillard, 2003: 285, emphasis in original). This implies a new form of social control that simulation enforces through the onslaught of media communication. For Baudrillard (2001), American popular culture, whose apotheosis he sees in Disneyland, provides an example of a social world dominated by simulation. Importantly, he argues that once the simulation model of communication has become the main mode of signification in society, we are no longer faced with ‘a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle’ (p. 172). In other words, Marxist ideological critique loses its purpose under a regime of simulation.

I would argue that the ‘reality principle’ to which Baudrillard points is precisely what brand consultants and national elites are defending when they insist on the discovery of a national essence through a formalized branding process. The manufactured authenticity of the nation – as real and, moreover, as true to itself – grants legitimacy to those who hold the power to articulate its realness. At the same time, their very efforts to discover and represent the national essence guarantee its realness. It is a circular, self-referential process – a ‘strategy of the real’ in Baudrillard’s (2001) terms – whose only purpose is to ‘convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production’ (p. 179). It is, in other words, a process that is very much tied to the operations of capital which, in this case, are made ‘real’ through the simulation of a national brand essence.

When proponents or opponents of nation branding accept its claims as operating at a representational level, they perpetuate its reality effects. By contrast, rejecting the representational appeal of those claims reveals that the products of nation branding campaigns are, in fact, simulation nations. Put simply, simulation nations are media nations: they exist in, through and by the operations of media. ⁶ In line with Baudrillard’s theory, media are understood in the broadest sense of the word. Any mediated signification of the nation – regardless of form, genre or content – contributes to the simulation nation. This also means that branding is not the only process through which simulation nations are brought to life, although it may be the most self-conscious and ambitious one at present. Other mediated commodity-signs of the nation, be they journalistic or artistic, also provide material for the simulation nation as they circulate through commercial media networks. That is why simulation nations are contradictory compendiums of signs, flashing through global media circuits, trying to seduce various audiences. To give one example, it is in this universe of simulation and seduction that Borat’s misogynist, anti-Semitic ‘glorious nation of Kazakhstan’ (filmed on location in Romania) appears as ‘real’ as a corrupt, oligarchical Kazakhstan from the news pages of The Wall Street Journal and a business-friendly, oil-rich Kazakhstan from an advertisement in The Economist. ⁷ All of these made-for-media commodity-signs are part of the simulation nation called Kazakhstan.

Another key concept from Baudrillard’s lexicon – the simulacrum – helps to elaborate further the idea of the simulation nation. Although Baudrillard made the simulacrum famous, the term has a long and complicated history going back to Plato (Merrin, 2005: 29). ⁸ In all of its iterations, however, the concept of the simulacrum is used to theorize relationships between reality and its significations. In Baudrillard’s (2001) work, the simulacrum is understood as a sign without a referent, a copy without an original, which ‘bears no relation to any reality whatever’ (p. 170). A rare example of applying these ideas to the mediation of the nation is found in Catherine Baker’s (2008) study of Ukraine’s presentation at the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest. Baker shows how Ukrainian singer Ruslana created a media spectacle, intended to appeal to Western audiences, using simulacra of ethnicity, ‘mystic rituals’ and tribal ‘authenticity’ (p. 176). Notably, Ruslana’s act at Eurovision was orchestrated and promoted by CFC Consulting, an agency that was also involved in branding Ukraine at the time (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015).

Baudrillard never wrote explicitly about ‘the nation’ as a conceptual entity or an object of analysis (although see Wesling, 1998). Unlike him, many theorists have explicitly posited a constitutive relationship between media and nationhood. Within media studies, Benedict Anderson (1983) is perhaps the best known among them, but he is certainly not alone (e.g. Bhabha, 1990; Billig, 1995; Deutsch, 1966 [1953]; Eisenstein, 1979; Mihelj, 2011). While the various perspectives that connect modern nationalisms to media and communication cannot be reviewed here, they share one thing in common, namely, they all suggest that media contribute to the formation and/or maintenance of national communities of shared linguistic, cultural or political characteristics over space and in time.

By contrast, following Baudrillard, we can pose a different relationship between media and the simulation nation; one that has little to do with the making of enduring communities, contrary to the claims of branders. Rather, the simulation nation is plugged into the operations of media through the production of media audiences who need to be continually seduced by media signs. In other words, the simulation nation is also ‘imagined’, but it is imagined primarily for the benefit of media audiences who are, by and large, located outside the nation. In addition, it is imagined by makers of commodity-signs whose main credentials are in media and promotion. Under a regime of simulation, expertise in the manipulation of signs is highly valued because it assists in the maneuvers of audience seduction, more so than familiarity with historical or cultural legacies.

The concept of seduction is another element in Baudrillard’s media theory (Baudrillard, 1988). As Paul Hegarty (2004) explains, ‘seduction stands for play, the play of appearances which has always prevented the existence of a transparent reality, which would be free from the traps of illusion, while allowing simulations of truth to operate’ (p. 69, emphasis in original). The play of appearances is precisely what branding experts promise to harness and control, but this control is a mirage given the multiplicity of media commodity-signs of or about nations that circulate through global networked media. Only a closed and centralized media system, of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, could create the conditions for such control. Such media systems are difficult to enforce today due to advances in computer networking and digital technologies (Castells, 1996). Yet, these same technologies are also the lifeblood of the world of simulacra and seduction, described by Baudrillard, enabling new systems of media control (Baudrillard, 1988, 1994, 2003).

The proliferation of simulacra in media-saturated societies, according to Baudrillard, results in a state of hyperreality where it is no longer possible to distinguish between the real and the simulation. This has several implications for the analysis of nation branding. To start, in conditions of hyperreality, a well-produced video which shows Kosovo as a distinct territorial entity on the map of Europe is sufficient proof of the ‘realness’ of the Kosovo nation. Hyperreality makes it possible for BBR Saatchi & Saatchi to claim, as it did, that the ‘Young Europeans’ campaign was responsible for Kosovo’s recognition by 13 countries and even for a favorable ruling by the International Court of Justice on the legitimacy of Kosovo’s claim for independence (see Gordon, 2012). The loss of boundaries between reality and simulation could also account for the push by Kosovo’s government to convince social media giant Facebook to grant it the status of ‘nation’ on its platform. When these efforts succeeded in 2013, one journalist wrote in The New York Times:

It is not as if Kosovo has joined NATO. But in an era when accumulating ‘likes’ may top a seat in the General Assembly, at least for many young opinion leaders online, Kosovo’s leadership is hailing a change on a social media site as a diplomatic coup worthy of Talleyrand. (Bilefsky, 2013: Dec. 12)

When hyperreality prevails, the claims of branders that perception is reality appear to gain greater credence. Indeed, one of the main ways in which nation brands are ‘made real’ is through perception indexes, such as the Anholt-GfK Nation Branding Index, which ranks country brands based on the results of perception surveys (Aronczyk, 2013: 69–72). Another common way to prove the ‘real’ effects of branding campaigns is through the use of post-campaign surveys that track short-term changes in attitudes and opinions among media audiences who have been exposed to brand messages.

At the same time, although hyperreality opens up seemingly unlimited possibilities for sign manipulators, the loss of distinction between the real and the simulated also creates a crisis for power. Power needs the real as its guarantor in order to maintain control, for if nothing is real then power is not real either. Baudrillard (2001) suggests that this is why, in the age of simulacra, we see ‘a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity’ (p. 171). This observation is reminiscent of the strategies of legitimation used by brand consultants and their government clients which I outlined earlier. Under a regime of simulation, maintaining the illusion of the real becomes an ongoing project of power where nation branding also plays a part.

The invention of a national ‘myth of origin’ was particularly important in the case of Kosovo, as a guarantee for the ‘realness’ of the new nation and its right to self-determination. However, as noted earlier, Kosovo’s status was highly contested and negotiated over a long period of time among a number of foreign actors (Ernst, 2011). This also meant that, to be allowed to become a nation-state, Kosovo was prohibited from using ethnic symbols in its official self-presentation (Krasniqi, 2014). In this context, global media provided a repertoire of recognizable simulacra that Kosovo could draw on. The ‘core idea’ that ultimately spawned its ‘myth of origin’, even before the ‘Young Europeans’ campaign, was the powerful simulacrum of youth. It entered the media limelight on the night of Kosovo’s declaration of independence, February 17, 2008, with the unveiling of a bright-yellow, typographic sculpture, spelling the word ‘NEWBORN’ (in English), on the main square of Pristina (Ströhle, 2012). The associations with innocence, vulnerability and a new life, captured in this word, were the exact opposite of previous media depictions of Kosovo as the site of ancient ethnic hatreds and bloodshed. The NEWBORN simulacrum was irresistibly seductive to a global media culture obsessed with youth and devoid of memory.

The monument, created by advertising agency Ogilvy Karrota, appeared in major news media around the world overnight, instantly becoming the media face of Kosovo. ⁹ At that moment, although the status of Kosovo as a nation-state was still widely disputed, its reality as a nation brand was indisputable. When the Israeli team of BBR Saatchi & Saatchi launched its ‘Young Europeans’ campaign in 2009, it only had to expand upon the original myth invented by NEWBORN, using it as its simulacral model and reinforcing its reality effects.

Recovering media materiality

I have argued that Baudrillard’s assault on the real, as he theorizes media-saturated consumer societies, contains a radical potential for the analysis of nation brands. His notion of hyperreality points to the erasure of distinctions between the nation and its simulations. As the signs of nation brands circulate through media networks, they encounter other media signs, all of which intertwine in the play of appearances and seek to seduce media audiences. At the same time, what differentiates promotional simulacra, including nation brands, from other media signs is the overtly programmatic, strategic nature of promotional messages which, by definition, aim to alter perceptions. In that sense, nation brands have become integral to what Baudrillard calls ‘strategies of the real’ in contemporary media cultures. This is the Janus-faced nature of nation brands as simulacra – they claim to simultaneously reflect and alter the reality of the nation. Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality offers one way to explain how this seemingly impossible feat is made to look real.

Furthermore, Baudrillard (2001) describes a ‘precession of simulacra’, whereby non-referential models are used to manufacture simulations that stand in for the real. Based on this argument, the ‘core idea’ of a nation-branding campaign – derived through an obligatory distillation process (Aronczyk, 2013) – serves as the model that precedes the simulation nation that is conjured up through media. This process was clearly at play in Kosovo’s branding, in Ruslana’s Eurovision act and in numerous other nation-branding exercises. Among other things, this means that the simulation nation is not bound by historical fact, although simulacra of history and antiquity abound in its media manifestations. Rather, the simulation nation is created de novo each time it appears in the flickering lights of media screens only to disappear once again as the lights go out.

But if there is no way to tell apart the real from the simulated, what can be the basis of critical inquiry into the workings of nation brands and media? How can research peer through the play of appearances and what could be its task? In my view, Baudrillard’s theoretical excursions are of limited help as we tackle these questions because they have little to say about the material aspects of media industries or institutions. Although his critical project starts as a revision of Marx’s critique of political economy, his later work abandons a focus on materiality and focuses instead on ‘the image form’ that emanates from the media, that is, the simulacrum (Merrin, 2005: 155). However, more than simulacra machines, the media exist as material networks of circulation, as technological systems, as profit-driven industries and as professional and cultural institutions, governed by economic, political and technological logics. That is where critical inquiry can continue to intervene and for that we need to look beyond Baudrillard.

One source of inspiration can come from Marxist critiques of commercial brands as technologies for the creation of capital (e.g. Arvidsson, 2005). Drawing on Baudrillard, global media brands such as Apple, Google and Facebook can be seen as pure simulacra. Yet, beyond their hyperreal properties, these brands have also generated tremendous amounts of capital, expropriating human desires for sociality. What, if anything, is different about nation brands in comparison to commercial brands? What kinds of profits do they generate, in what ways and to whom do these profits accrue?

Andrew Wernick’s conceptualization of the commodity-sign as an object with a dual purpose can be particularly helpful as we seek to move beyond Baudrillard but to retain the value of his critique. Following Wernick, nation brands are revealed to be more than clusters of promotional signs but also ‘objects-to-be-sold’, that is, they are units of media content that are created to generate profit within a system of market exchange. Although they are typically produced with public funds, nation brands as commodity-signs generate profits primarily for private media companies and for promotional outfits (Kaneva, 2015). The justifications for and consequences of this transference of wealth need further analysis.

Furthermore, the logic of commodity-signs is not limited to promotional messages but applies to other media content as well. This is illustrated by the fact that some transnational media corporations today have special sales and production teams who approach national governments with ‘package’ offers that include country-specific news content paired with promotional videos, both of which are created by the media organization (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015). Media practices that blur the lines between editorial and promotional content have been examined in relation to consumer brands (e.g. Einstein, 2016). However, the impact of such trends on politics and governance needs further exploration. One example of possible implications can be seen in the recent proliferation of ‘fake news’ – fabricated content, the whose main goal of which is to generate maximum attention and, therefore, maximum profit. Despite its ‘unreality’, such content has been linked to shifts in political opinions and decisions, but the scope of this influence is still poorly understood.

A related line of research would entail mapping the ways in which commodity-signs enter and move through the circulatory streams of global media networks. Some interesting work on this topic already exists (e.g. Valaskivi and Sumiala, 2014), but much remains to be done. A focus on circulation needs to acknowledge that promotion transcends the boundaries of ‘campaigns’ and infiltrates all forms of media that are not identifiable as ‘advertising’ (e.g. Aronczyk and Powers, 2010; Wernick, 1991). Exposing the industrial and technological protocols of media corporations would shed new light on the ways in which capital is enmeshed in the processes of assembling or dispersing national and transnational publics. These processes have important consequences for political mobilization, for the symbolic production of nationhood and for the construction of shared social realities more broadly.

The lines of inquiry I have outlined above are far from exhaustive and are limited by their particular focus on media. The materiality of nationhood – how it is experienced by individuals on a daily basis, how it is enacted in institutional and policy contexts and how it intersects with simulations of the nation – is worthy of its own exploration, but that is a task for another study. At the conclusion of this theoretical exploration, we should be wary of making totalizing claims about the triumph of hyperreality. Nevertheless, we should retain at least one insight from Baudrillard, namely, that simulation functions ‘not only as a mode of communication but also as a mode of social control’ (Merrin, 2005: 24). Despite his self-professed nihilism, Baudrillard never abandoned the goals of social critique and transformation and therein lies the main value of his work.