Branding Post-Communist Nations

Marketizing National Identities in the "New" Europe

Nadia Kaneva, Nadia Kaneva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136657993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Marketing
• Index: Business

Nation branding--a set of ideas rooted in Western marketing--gained popularity in the post-communist world by promising a quick fix for the identity malaise of "transitional" societies. Since 1989, almost every country in Central and Eastern Europe has engaged in nation branding initiatives of varying scope and sophistication. For the first time, this volume collects in one place studies that examine the practices and discourses of the nation branding undertaken in these countries. In addition to documenting various rebranding initiatives, these studies raise important questions about their political and cultural implications.

Part I

Promises and Problems of Post-Communist Nation Branding

1 Nation Branding in Post-Communist Europe

Identities, Markets, and Democracy

Nadia Kaneva

Encounters with Nation Branding

During a recent trip to a European capital, I found myself in a hotel room, flipping through television channels. I landed on CNN’s weather report and paused to listen. As the forecast ended, a colorful logo popped up on screen and an off-camera announcer declared: “The weather, brought to you by Croatia.” This matter-of-fact promotional tag is but one example of a global phenomenon that has come to be known as nation branding. Yet, the seemingly trivial plug for Croatia on CNN would have been unthinkable only 20 years ago. To begin with, Croatia was not an independent nation-state then, but a member of the Yugoslav federation. At the time, CNN did not receive advertising revenues from Eastern Bloc countries, whose economies and media were largely closed off to the rest of the world. Most importantly, the very idea that a nation could be thought of as a brand—comparable to the commercial brands that typically underwrite television programs—had not entered popular discourse. A lot has changed in the past two decades.

Today, nation branding is widely recognized in many corners of the world and its advocates have succeeded in channeling significant funds from state budgets into various communication campaigns and, not coincidentally, into the revenue streams of media corporations and marketing consultancies. At any major international airport you are likely to come across a variety of billboards promoting countries through colorful logos and catchy slogans. Turn on CNN, Euronews, Eurosport, or any other commercial transnational television network and you will encounter slickly produced advertising spots for countries, some of which were not in existence as sovereign states 20 years ago. Leaf through the pages of international publications like The Economist, the Financial Times, or the International Herald Tribune, or open any major airline’s in-flight magazine and you’ll find yet more advertisements for nations—touting them as tourist destinations, investment havens, cultural treasures, or simply as “likeable.” You will read that Greece is “A Masterpiece You Can Afford,” Egypt is the place “Where It All Began,” and Malaysia is “Truly Asia.” The outward manifestations of nation branding also extend to major sporting events, like the World Cup or the Olympics, to branded national stands at international trade expos, and the list goes on.

It is easy to dismiss this as “just advertising,” an extension of marketing for the purposes of promoting national assets; but nation branding has greater aspirations. Its advocates argue that brand management must become “a component of national policy” and inform “the way a country is run,” rather than be “put into a silo of ‘communication’ or public affairs” (Anholt, 2008, p. 23, emphasis in original). A “brand-led approach to public affairs” is presented as “inherently democratic” because it, allegedly, ensures “a fair contest between the public and private bodies of the state and the domestic and foreign publics (with the media and other commentators helping out)” (Anholt, 2007, p. 40). Furthermore, it is argued that, in the contemporary world of global markets and global media, nation branding is a necessary response to the changing rules of international relations, which are increasingly shaped by “a shift in political paradigms, a move from the modern world of geopolitics and power to the postmodern world of images and influence” (van Ham, 2001, p. 4). Clearly, in its most expansive articulations, nation branding refers to much more than slogans, logos, and colorful advertisements. Rather, it seeks to reconstitute nationhood at the levels of both ideology and praxis, whereby the meaning and experiential reality of national belonging and national governance are transformed in unprecedented ways.

The explosion of nation branding practices since the mid-1990s has coincided with an explosion of publications—churned out by academics and branding practitioners alike—which attempt to theorize, codify, and legitimize these practices. The majority of scholarly work on nation branding to date has been produced within the field of marketing and tends to focus on instrumentalist concerns, related to advancing branding applications.¹ Nation branding has also attracted the attention of public relations scholars (Dinnie, 2008) and is further discussed in reference to international relations (Gilboa, 2008; van Ham, 2002) and public diplomacy (Szondi, 2008; Wang, 2006, 2008).

More recently, critical scholars from a number of disciplines—including media studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology—have begun to focus on nation branding as well. The main distinction between critical and marketing-driven approaches is that critical studies focus on the ideological underpinnings of nation branding. A number of critical studies look specifically at Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where nation branding has proliferated particularly fast, and examine the challenges of national re-definition through branding in the post-communist context (Aronczyk, 2007; Baker, 2008; Dzenovska, 2005; Jansen, 2008; Kaneva, 2007; Volčič, 2008; Widler, 2007).²

Despite the expanding literature on the topic, the very meaning of the term “nation branding” remains hotly contested within and across disciplinary boundaries (see Fan, 2005; Szondi, 2008). This should give us occasion to recognize that nation branding is, in an important sense, an ideological construction of its practitioners and scholars. This, in turn, carries methodological implications for studies that draw on critical social theories—as do the ones included in this volume—because the uncritical and facile use of concepts like nation branding as neutral descriptors of events and processes, rather than as constitutive discursive devices, works to reproduce particular ideological structures. In the case of marketing and branding, academics are no less implicated in the advancement and perpetuation of marketing ideology than marketers themselves (O’Reilly, 2006).

Although most of the chapters in this volume propose working definitions of nation branding, they do not attempt a “general theory of branding.” At the same time, they share a broad view of nation branding (in its local and global manifestations) as a set of discourses and practices located at the intersection of the economy, culture, and politics. Furthermore, the perspectives presented in this volume are concerned with nation branding’s aspirations to exercise symbolic power in defining the meaning of nationhood. This collection is not interested in addressing instrumentalist questions about the “effectiveness” of nation branding in terms of strategic or tactical marketing outcomes. Nor does it intend to make recommendations for more “efficient” branding applications. Rather, the following chapters seek to uncover the ways in which nation branding operates as a new site upon which national identities and globalization come into contact and are reconfigured in the post-communist environment. By examining these reconfigurations, the chapters reveal particular interests, both locally and globally, that nation branding serves, and the ways in which it does so. In sum, this collection continues the tradition of critical inquiry into nation branding with a particular focus on the specificities of its encounters with post-communist Europe.

The focus on the post-communist experience is motivated by a broader goal of contributing to the study of changes in the structures and relations of power, identification, and mediation that were enabled by the end of communism. A widely acknowledged characteristic of the post-communist condition was the rapid and often dramatic “reawakening” of nationalisms in the region (Rupnik, 1996). Jacques Rupnik outlines three primary causes for the return of nationalism to post-communist Europe, which include “the end of the Cold War and the transformation of the international system; the ideological vacuum after communism; the economy, caught between globalism and the decomposition/recomposition of systems” (1996, p. 44). Because nation branding implicates ideas about nationhood, marketization, and globalization within a common promotional framework, its critical analysis can render insights into the ways countries in the CEE region have contended with these challenges. At the same time, a fuller understanding of the historical processes shaping the region before, during, and after the communist period is needed to better explain the appeal of nation branding in post-communist Europe, as well as the problems it encounters there.

“Transition” Revisited

Nation branding’s ability to intertwine nationalism with globalization resonated in the post-communist social and political space because of a set of challenges often designated by the metaphor of “transition.” In its most simplistic articulations, the transition was understood as a period during which CEE countries were supposed to undergo a linear transformation from state command economies to free market ones, and from authoritarian one-party systems to liberal democracies. The transition designation has been contested on various grounds by scholars across disciplines. However, despite its many problematic implications, it continues to have significance in popular and academic discourse by providing a set of frames that inflect the processes of social change in post-communist Europe with particular meanings. Burawoy and Verdery (1999) identify two such frames in (Western) theorizations of transition, which they see as connected to two opposing views of the project of modernity:

At one extreme we find partisans of modernity who claim that the disintegration of communism is the final victory of modernity’s great achievements, market economy and liberal democracy … At the other extreme are those who view the end of communism as the twilight of modernity. The collapse of the administered society marks the exhaustion of the enlightenment project to direct and regulate the world we inhabit. (p. 1)

Burawoy and Verdery recognize that there are more nuanced perspectives between these two poles but argue that, overall, much of the theorization of transition has suffered from the ideological effects of these two “grand narratives.” From this vantage point, any study of the post-communist transition(s) is, by necessity, a study of the struggle of ideologies for the power to describe the meaning of the past and determine the direction of the future.

In more immediate terms, this struggle has to be played out within the particular historical contexts of specific national experiences of post-communism. Scholars from the region focus on the experiential and political realities of transition and point out that the term has come to signify a period of indeterminacy between the communist past and the post-communist future. Its meaning is particularly unstable because neither the meaning of the “communist past” nor that of the “post-communist future” is agreed upon within the local contexts, opening up multiple sites for social contestation. Znepolski (1997) argues that the transition is experienced as “a state of inadequacy,” which manifests itself “on a psychological plane or on the plane of political decisions” (p. 9). This inadequacy is the result of destabilization of social structures after the collapse of the totalitarian order and a pervasive sense of social and individual uncertainty. Thus, the idea of transition is linked to post-communist identity politics, rather than being a neutral descriptor of a historical period. In short, transition is an ideological construct.

This has given the idea of transition the power of “an incantation” that serves as a “fundamental legitimizing resource for political elites” (Ditchev, 2000, pp. 92–93) in the region as they promise to take their nations through this intermediary period and into a better future. This is also how the ideology of transition relates to the ideological project of post-communist national identity construction, which could be summarized as “the transition between a shameful and a desired identity” (Ditchev, 2000, p. 93). All of this is experienced as an acute “crisis of representations” (Spassov, 2000, p. 37), which is also connected to larger processes of a postmodern decentering of identities.

The accession of 10 former communist countries to the European Union (EU) has been hailed by some commentators as the end of the post-communist transition. However, nation branding arrived to CEE in the thick of transition and is, therefore, inevitably intertwined with post-communist identity struggles. What kinds of identities were marked as “shameful” or as “desired” became a central area of contestation in nation branding initiatives. Indeed, one of the promises of nation branding was to resolve the crisis of representations by offering a different “discursive technology” (to paraphrase Norman Fairclough) for the construction of identity narratives. In that regard, nation branding throughout the region is marked by ontological aspirations, related to re-inventing national identities, which go beyond commercial motives.

The East/West Hermeneutic

The crisis of representations in CEE is also related to broader discursive and ideological oppositions; specifically, the opposition of East and West dates back to the beginning of modern nationalisms in the region after the decline of the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Many scholars have written about the role of the “Western gaze” in “inventing” the East in a variety of forms: as Eastern Europe (Wolff, 1994), as Balkans (Bjelić & Savić, 2002; Todorova, 1997), or more broadly as Orient (Said, 1978). Some have suggested that the opposition between East and West holds a generative status in East European discourses of national identity.³ The processes through which Eastern European nations internalize and reproduce the East/West binary as legitimate have been theorized as “self-colonization” (Kiossev, 2002) or “self-exoticization” (Volčič, 2005). Such trends are seen as particularly relevant to the national identity narratives of Balkan nations, but can be detected throughout the entire CEE region, which has a complicated history of imperial colonization.

In many ways the competition between the Soviet Bloc and the West during the Cold War reproduced the East/West hermeneutic, at the same ...