Abstract
I keep an ongoing list of books that have or have not been written yet, and which I simply cannot wait to immerse myself in; Melissa Aronczyk’s new book had been one of the books on this list. Branding the Nation is a crucial and critical contribution to scholarship on communications. It insightfully outlines and problematises the phenomenon of nation branding. Aronczyk gives compelling definitions for this phenomenon: ‘a transformation of business in the articulation of national identity’ (p.4) and ‘the creation and communication of national identity using tools, techniques and expertise from the world of corporate brand management’ (p.15). Nation branding is both ‘a worldwide phenomenon and a professional transnational practice’, which is seen as ‘a solution to perceived problems affecting the space of the nation state’ (p.3). This frame encapsulates her argument about the significance of nation branding as an important locus for the identification of the discursive processes which formulate and harness the nation, and which impact upon understandings and imaginations of the nation and national citizenship.
Analytically, this work features a thorough methodological approach through an extensive number of interviews with a variety of experts, and engagement with the literature, policy documents, and promotional material. Conceptually, the author outlines the collaboration of the commercial and public sectors as an attempt to increase international competitiveness and foster international diplomacy. Aronczyk begins her exploration by situating nation branding within a lineage of soft power and public diplomacy. She uncovers the conceptual intricacies in discussing the nation, nationality, and nationalism in a global world and underscores the ‘puppetry of propaganda’ (p.28) that is nationalism. It is through this prism that Aronczyk goes on to analyse how nationalism has been broadened and metamorphosed by nation branding. In its interrelation with the economic realm, the nation assumes its value as a brand through the celebration of difference through patterns of consumption, thus anchoring the exercise and the discursive construction of the nation in a neoliberal context.
This is where nation branding can be exposed as a non-representative project. As the author argues, it cannot fulfil the function of total representation of a nation, because it cannot ‘account for the plurality of voices, legacies, and competing visions of the nation state’ (p.81). She posits that the formulaic mechanisms of ‘nation branding’ are paradoxical as ‘in order for these nations to imagine themselves as unique, different, and globally competitive, they had first to be reimagined as if they were all the same’ (p.33). When nation branding seeks to appropriate multiculturalism as a feature of the brand in a problematic manner, it seeks to homogenise difference. This is a strategy which Aronczyk carefully unravels in her case study of Canada. She thus critically frames the phenomenon of nation branding in terms of the capitulation of the nation through its economic appropriation into a brand, as well as the role of communication strategies in determining readings of what constitutes contemporary nations. This is what I consider the core contribution of this work where the value of studying nation branding is explained: by exploring attempts to brand the nation, we can expose ‘deep-seated tensions over phenomena that are at issue in these sites specifically, such as multicultural policy or social democracy or the conditions of citizenship’ (pp.10–11).
The author offers a careful and articulate exploration of economic rationality and the strange bedfellows that form the Transnational Promotional Class (TPC). The TPC is an adaptation of Leslie Sklair’s (2001) Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), where the first is more akin to mobilising the cultural dimensions of the nation (implicitly for fiscal advantages) and the second is concerned with the concentration and control of capital beyond the nation (explicitly for fiscal advantages). In a global age, economic dynamics have been seeking to determine the relationships between nations. As Aronczyk states, ‘when globalization is presented as an economic problem, it seems to warrant the adoption of an economic solution’ (p.22). For this purpose, strategies intended to increase competitiveness through attraction of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) are vested in the promotional communication of the nation globally. Yet, following the economic crisis of 2008, nation branders express less willingness and enthusiasm to delve in this economic project, ironically not because of their lack of belief in it, but because of their perceived lack of belief by others. Nation branding is not a sustainable project. In this not so brave economic world, Aronczyk predicts a lessening of nation branding efforts, and a simultaneous shift of the TPC to more lucrative enterprises.
It is precisely from this point that the rethinking of national identity through the rhetoric of the TPC – which essentially drips down to the rhetoric of the TCC – deems further exploration and problematisation. What is of particular relevance to Aronczyk’s excellent scholarship is the articulation of nation branding as an economically-driven discursive construction of the nation. Although the field of nation branding is considered to be ephemeral, it has created a culture of public–private collaboration in communicating the nation. This is infused in economic rationality and is bound to echo across the spectrum of international public diplomacy. Relevant questions that can attract an engaging body of literature would further this framework by inquiring on the ways in which processes of rearticulating the nation impact on citizens’ understandings of nationality vis-a-vis nationalism, as well as the processes of national adaptation of corporate communications which reconstruct in themselves the concept of the nation. How these processes are then read and interpreted by citizens would further illuminate the changing communication of the nation in a global age.
In Branding the Nation, Aronczyk contributes a thorough body of work in the broader and burgeoning field of global communication. She maps out and articulates attempts to merge branding with the nation in a competitive global environment. This book presents, in many ways, an epitome of the latest and noteworthy research developments around the phenomenon (cf. Iordanova, 2007; Kaneva, 2011; Valaskivi, 2013; Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011). It presents a significant opening up of the field, which inserts a critical assessment to scholarship on globalisation, brands, and branding professionals, as well as nations and their constructed imagination. Yet, the book can and should be read within the particular scholarship on nation branding, branding, or promotional cultures, as well as beyond it by anyone who is studying topics relevant to globalisation. It offers a thorough analysis of case studies from across the world, as well as a cautious and critical perspective on how global communication of the nation has become skewed towards wholesome, homogenous, and tampered conceptual imagery, which is constructed by a global elite who seek to create a here-and-now product out of nations of a people with history.