Nation Branding in Modern History

Carolin Viktorin, Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Annika Estner, Marcel K. Will, Carolin Viktorin, Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Annika Estner, Marcel K. Will, Carolin Viktorin, Marcel K. Will, Annika Estner, Jessica Gienow-Hecht

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781789207934, 9781785339233
• eBook ISBN: 9781785339240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: International Marketing
• Index: History

A recent coinage within international relations, "nation branding" designates the process of highlighting a country's positive characteristics for promotional purposes, using techniques similar to those employed in marketing and public relations. Nation Branding in Modern History takes an innovative approach to illuminating this contested concept, drawing on fascinating case studies in the United States, China, Poland, Suriname, and many other countries, from the nineteenth century to the present. It supplements these empirical contributions with a series of historiographical essays and analyses of key primary documents, making for a rich and multivalent investigation into the nexus of cultural marketing, self-representation, and political power.

Part I

BRANDING THE NATION AND SELLING THE STATE

CASE STUDIES

Chapter 1

NATION BRANDING AMID CIVIL WAR

Publishing US Foreign Policy Documents to Define and Defend the Republic, 1861–66

William B. McAllister

To “brand” democracy, for example, and thus create widespread “purchase” of the democratic “product” in undemocratic countries, would surely be the least harmful, most cost-effective and most benign instrument of foreign policy that human ingenuity could devise.

—Simon Anholt, Places: Identity, Image, and Reputation

[M]ake no admissions of weakness in our Constitution, or of apprehension on the part of the government. You will rather prove, as you easily can, by comparing the history of our country with that of other states, that its Constitution and government are really the strongest and surest which have ever been erected for the safety of any people.

—US Secretary of State William Seward, 1861

Nation Branding in Historical Context

The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes, first produced by the federal government during the US Civil War, demonstrate that mid-nineteenth-century US officials apprehended the principles and employed many of the methods espoused by modern nation branding advocates.¹ Simon Anholt’s “Competitive Identity” thesis stresses that managing a nation’s internal self-image and external reputation requires a “clear, credible, appealing, distinctive and thoroughly planned vision, identity and strategy.”² Anholt emphasizes that good policy requires good governance practices, which include voice opportunities and accountability; the government must employ mechanisms to receive citizen input, to account for foreign perceptions, and to report what it has done in the people’s name.³ Nadia Kaneva characterizes “the most ambitious architects of nation-branding” in the twenty-first century as promoting a receptor-sensitive creation/implementation/reconsideration cycle as an integral element of policy formulation and governance because that approach holds the potential to (re)constitute nations “at the levels of ideology, and of praxis,”⁴ and Fiona Gilmore states that the goal of nation branding is to “amplify the existing values of the national culture.”⁵ For Keith Dinnie, the term denotes a polity that possesses a “sustainable differential advantage” derived from a “unique, multidimensional blend of elements that provide the nation with a culturally grounded . . . relevance for all of its target audiences.”⁶ These modern definitions echo the understanding of Secretary of State William Seward and his US government colleagues who promoted what one could label today the “Union brand” in its nineteenth century context during the Civil War era.⁷

Federal officials recognized that the validity of the “Union brand” depended on how the diplomatic policies they pursued, as well as their demonstration of accountability to the public concerning those policies, embodied US political values. Union leaders promoted the constitutional-republican system to domestic and foreign audiences as a unique and superior form of government. FRUS volumes exemplified how popular sovereignty suffused the process of governance, embodying the principal elements of Anholt’s “Competitive Identity” nexus: brand identity (creating shared meaning among citizens and external audiences), brand image (developing a consistent, positive reputation acknowledged at home and abroad), brand equity (recognizing the asset value of reputation), and brand purpose (leveraging the power of goals held in common across domestic and international constituencies).⁸ The Lincoln administration, particularly in the iconic figure of Secretary of State William Seward, presented US constitutional government praxis as credible, legitimate, powerful, and replicable; the volumes’ producers took it as axiomatic that the Union drew its strength from an informed, engaged electorate and that the extension of representative government to other countries would mutually benefit all the world’s inhabitants.

Comparisons with twenty-first-century concepts and practices must necessarily account for the small size and circumscribed mandate of nineteenth-century governments. In 1860, the domestic staff of the Department of State totaled a mere forty-two persons; diplomatic and consular officials abroad totaled only 282 souls.⁹ The US archival record contains little of the information necessary to provide a detailed assessment of precisely which role(s) nineteenth-century actors played that could be directly compared to their twenty-first-century counterparts formally tasked with nation branding. Government bureaucracies were so small that officials rarely created records of internal discussions. Although in a few instances a modicum of personal material survives that sheds some indirect light on the inner workings of government, we know little about their daily activities. The scope of government activity also remained limited: officials promoted trade and economic development, but no sophisticated transnational corporate entities or marketing techniques necessary to forge modern public-private partnerships existed. Nor did international tourism comprise a significant phenomenon. The use of iconographic shortcuts to convey meaning was less prevalent—government messaging relied much more on documents—and the format of FRUS volumes (text-heavy by modern standards) constituted a standard communications medium of the period.

Conversely, nineteenth-century practitioners faced problems and deployed strategies similar to those of modern nation branders.¹⁰ Civil War-era leaders operated in a “mediatized” environment: the combination of increasingly ubiquitous periodical publications, ever-longer-distance telegraphy, and progressively faster steam transportation facilitated an unprecedented volume and speed of communication. Indeed, the government created a regularly scheduled documentary publication precisely to influence the intercontinental exchange of what contemporaries often labeled “intelligence.” Lincoln, Seward, and their colleagues fully understood the need for horizontal alliance building and coordinating vertical integration; near-contemporaneous dissemination of official foreign policy documents to myriad educational, religious, business, media, civic, and diplomatic communities secured support from below and facilitated multilevel policy making, policy implementation, and messaging. FRUS operated as an instrumental mechanism that highlighted the agency of the nineteenth-century equivalent of “brand managers” (the foremost example being Seward). Those framers recognized the interactive element that underpinned their efforts: citizens (in modern parlance, a category of “stakeholders”) completed the input cycle by voting, paying taxes, and sacrificing their lives for the constitutional-republican order. The Civil War-era FRUS branded not only policies, but also governance processes, government organizations, and government officials. The constitutional-republic system lauded in its pages suffused the essence of a nineteenth-century version of the “Union brand.” The Department of State, the Office of the President, and the executive and legislative branches featured prominently in both the production and the content of the volumes. Seward’s predominant role as chief architect and principal author of documents in the series left an indelible impression on contemporaries.

Consequently, the case presented here primarily extrapolates “inward” from the information, perspectives, and context provided by published official correspondence. US diplomats and politicians contributed to a corporate branding effort—each believed themselves responsible for presenting, representing, embodying, and contributing to both the identity-(re)definition as well as the practice of republican values.¹¹ This chapter makes no distinction between nation branding, “Competitive Identity,” and public diplomacy because Civil War-era federal officials, had they encountered such language, would have treated them as part of a holistic package.¹² Because Seward featured as the lynchpin correspondent in the inaugural FRUS volumes, the diplomatic instructions he sent and the dispatches he received comprise the principal evidence of intent and assumptions.

The “Union Brand” and Branding the Union: Achieving Credibility and Binding by “Living” the Constitution

Defining the nation-branding task facing Civil War-era government officials can be readily conveyed using Anholt’s admonition that governments and citizens must “live the brand.”¹³ Federal leaders conceived the Union as consisting of a constitutional-republican form of government that comprised the highest expression of popular sovereignty. They believed their authority derived from the consent of the populace exemplified by responsible government: citizens voted and their representatives held the executive branch accountable by requiring, inter alia, frequent reports. The president’s officials routinely responded quickly by releasing information about government operations or policies. Congress regularly published the contents of executive branch documents, which informed the citizenry in a timely manner and enabled them to influence subsequent policy discussions.¹⁴ Executive branch leaders recognized that for the nation to survive they must pursue a multifaceted strategy to promote and embody the “Union brand” to an array of domestic and foreign audiences. Their task entailed not only explaining, but also doing—the functioning of the system comprised both the how and the why of the motivating action to preserve the Union. FRUS volumes served as an integral component of the system that generated support among the domestic populace by exemplifying responsible government. Simultaneously, the books aimed to influence foreign governments’ diplomatic policies, as well as to promote the benefits of representative-responsible government to ordinary people in other countries. The contents of the early FRUS volumes indicate the importance Civil War-era officials ascribed to the strategy Anholt recommends in the quote that heads this chapter: replicating representative regimes abroad comprised the best way to advance US interests. Demonstrating how a republic operated to benefit “the people” proved the attractiveness of the “Union brand,” and encouraged inhabitants of other countries to demand similar forms of representative-responsible government. The Foreign Relations of the United States publication, therefore, served as both an instrument of nation branding and an integral element of the constitutional-republic brand.

Nation branding advocates have increasingly stressed the primacy of the political sphere by noting that even a good public relations campaign cannot make up for “bad policy.”¹⁵ This movement represents an important shift because the essential task of government is not to generate profit. Most fundamentally, states require recognition; they must be “seen” as legitimate performers on the world stage. Otherwise, states, such as those of the Armenians, the Kurds, or the German polities denied a return to independent status at the Congress of Vienna, literally do not exist. States require both internal and external assent to their being in order to exercise any of the faculties attendant to government. In practice, this often means not profit, but loss. For example, although Norway¹⁶ and Austria¹⁷ had very different international reputations in 1945, governmental leaders in both countries committed their states to significant involvement in UN peacekeeping operations. This policy certainly depleted national coffers—peacekeeping is intrinsically unprofitable. Nevertheless, both states judged the gain in transnational political capital worth the expenditure. Current-day nation branders advise clients that to support revenue accretion, governments must conform to international norms about best-practice standards, policies, and procedures.¹⁸ To receive recognition, states require credibility, which depends on a complex interplay of relationships across domestic constituencies and recognized external actors taking place on a shifting playing field of expectations about state behavior.

This chapter highlights the centrality of state cohesion to the nation branding enterprise. The assumption of modern nation branding is that a recognized state already exists and that some modicum of agreement also exists about the goal of the campaign, at least among those who wield authority to project an image of the country. FRUS, however, emerged in an extraordinary moment when the very...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Beyond Marketing and Diplomacy: Exploring the Historical Origins of Nation Branding
• Part I. Branding the Nation and Selling the State: Case Studies
• Part II. Promises and Challenges of Nation Branding: Commentaries on Case Studies
• Annotated Sources
• Index