Broadcasting and National Imagination in Post-Communist Latvia

Defining the Nation, Defining Public Television

Janis Juzefovics, Jānis Juzefovičs

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783207510
• eBook ISBN: 9781783206933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book uses the case study of public television in post-communist Latvia to explore the question of how audiences respond to TV offerings, and how their choices can be seen as an act of agency. J?nis Juzefovi?s builds his book around Albert O. Hirschman's classic concepts of exit, voice and loyalty – the options available to a person within any system. He uses Hirschman's ideas, along with tools from social constructionism, to assess how the publics of both the Latvian-speaking majority and the large Russian-speaking minority have responded to the role of public television in the nation-building efforts of the new Latvian state. Along the way, he develops our understanding of public broadcasting more generally, and the way it can be used to define a national 'we'.

Chapter 1

Broadcasting and the Construction of National ‘We’

Public broadcasting, from its very inception, has been conceived as a national project having close links with the idea of a nation-state. From the very early days of western European public broadcasting, at the heart of public broadcasting’s mandate has been a commitment ‘to construct, protect, inform and entertain the nation’, as Roosvall and Salovaara-Moring have summarized it (2010: 13). In the eyes of public broadcasting pioneers and their governments, public radio and television had been one of the most important institutions reproducing the nation day in, day out and, to borrow from Anderson’s influential concept of nations as imagined communities (Anderson [1983] 2006), allowing their audiences to imagine themselves as part of the national ‘we’, a view of public broadcasting organizations still much alive today.

While bringing the nation together around shared mediated experiences of the national life and thus making the national public possible, as well as providing members of the national community with a sense of national unity, has been, indeed, a significant part of the mandate of public broadcasting organizations, in reality the fulfilment of this task has often been a turbulent one. It is because public broadcasters do not simply reflect the nation as it is but are involved in its construction, establishing and maintaining particular image(s) of the national community. Nevertheless, national imagination has been and continues to be central to the mandate of public broadcasting institutions.

The main idea of Anderson’s approach to nationalism is that nations are created through the act of imagination by their members and that links between people of the same nation are imagined and not given. It is the centrality of the role of communication, namely a daily ritual of media consumption (book and newspaper reading), in the production of a sense of national consciousness that is at the heart of Anderson’s theory, and that also makes it a highly useful starting point for building the theoretical framework of my own investigation into responses of Latvian publics towards the country’s public television as a nation-building resource. For Anderson, the dailiness of mass simultaneous and anonymous experiences of reading the same copy of a national newspaper allows their readership to imagine themselves as part of the national community. In other words, it allows imagining themselves as ‘nationals’. As Anderson argues, this ‘mass ceremony’ of newspaper reading brings the nation’s members together day in, day out, year in, year out, making the national imagined communion possible. Yet, as sceptics of Anderson’s theory point out, his approach tends to romanticize the formation of a national ‘we’ with the help of the ritual of newspaper reading, obscuring the heterogeneous and full of contradictions nature of an actual collectivity of fellow readers, the point I return to in a moment.

Social constructionist approaches to national identity that also forms the basis for the theoretical and analytical framework of my own investigation question primordialist, essentialist perspectives that see national collectivities as given, authentic, natural and static entities. As social constructionists argue, instead of any single homogeneous and harmonious version of the nation, what is in place is multiplicity of different, and also rival, understandings of national identity in the same way as there are not one but several, and not necessarily in agreement with each other, definitions of national culture and the history of the nation. As Billig has pointed out, ‘nations often do not typically have a single history, but there are competing tales to be told’ (1995: 71), and the same could be as well said about national cultures and national identities. To quote Calhoun,

the history which nationalism would write of itself begins with the existence of national identity, continues through acts of heroism and sometimes struggles against oppression, and unites all living members of the nation with the great cultural accomplishments of its past. It is usually not a sociological history, of diversity forged into unity, of oppression of some members of the nation by others, of migration and immigration, and so forth.

(1994: 314)

Social constructionist approaches invite us not only to analyse the mechanisms of production and reproduction of particular constructions of nationhood but also to investigate the ways in which dominant formulations of the national community, its identity, culture and memory are resisted and challenged. As social constructionists stress, any conception of the national ‘we’, no matter how fixed it may appear to be, is subject to dynamic processes of continual negotiation, contestation and reconstruction. From such a perspective the process of nation formation can never be an accomplished project (for further discussion of the social constructionist approaches to nationalism, see, inter alia, Basch, Glick-Schiller and Szanton-Blanc 1994; Jenkins and Sofos 1996; Özkırımlı 2005; Özkırımlı and Sofos 2008).

Making of the national ‘we’ is problematic at its very essence as the construction of any collective form of identity, including identity of the nation, inevitably involves drawing of borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Paradoxically, when you include someone, you at the same time exclude another. Through making ‘we’, you also make ‘the other’. Whatever the formulation of national membership, someone has to be included and someone has to be left behind; there is no other way to define who ‘we’ are than positing this ‘we’ against ‘the other’. The nation has to be imagined and membership of the nation has to be formulated, and, as I will demonstrate in the following discussion, it is media, first books and newspapers and later radio and television, that play a crucial role in establishing distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, defining who constitutes the national ‘we’ and who are to be left outside the national communion.

For Schlesinger, it is the national culture that not only ‘allows “us” to define ourselves against “them” understood as those beyond the boundaries of the nation’ but, what is important in the case of my own study into responses of publics of the Latvian public television, ‘it may also reproduce distinctions between “us” and “them” at the intra-national level, in line with the internal structure of social divisions and relations of power and domination’ (1991: 174, original emphasis). ‘National cultures are not simple repositories of shared symbols to which the entire population stands in identical relation. Rather, they are to be approached as sites of contestation in which competition over definitions takes place’, Schlesinger argues (1991: 174).

With Schlesinger’s proposed conceptualization of national identification in mind, we can look also at the media, and public broadcasting institutions in particular, as one of the key producers of the (official) national culture with their power to set demarcation lines between ‘our’ culture and identity, and ‘theirs’ both beyond and within national borders. As Schlesinger, commenting on Anderson’s idea of the communicative community, has rightly pointed out: ‘the boundedness of a given national imagery is one thing; homogeneity within those boundaries is quite another’ (1991: 165, original emphasis).

In a similar vein, Billig, who has introduced the concept of ‘banal nationalism’ to describe everyday forms of nationalism, reminds us that the idea of an imagined community of a nation does not necessarily imply the idea of an imagined unity and, instead of unity, the daily ritual of newspaper reading that Anderson sees as the producer of a feeling of the national ‘we’ can as well reproduce fissures in a reading collectivity (see Billig 1992, 1995). While in his study of discourses of ordinary Britons discussing royalty, Billig agrees that through the newspaper reading ritual ‘a sense of a shared world is imagined’, he also adds that ‘it is not that simple, for the imagined community is not imagined as a harmonious unity’ (1992: 171).

What Schlesinger and Billig are suggesting is that there is no, and has never existed, such a thing as one unproblematic national ‘we’ and, instead, we should think of an imagined national communion as a sum of different, and often contradictory, versions of the national ‘we’. This, in turn, implies that the process of forming a nation, with the help of broadcasting institutions or not, has never been a smooth one. No matter how nation-builders would like to see their constructions of the national ‘we’ as part of a national consensus, in no society has there ever existed an agreement among all members of the national community on what the national ‘we’ actually means. In a similar vein, instead of thinking of national identity as a singular, uniform, fixed and unproblematic category, we should think of different, and often conflicting, constructions of what it means to be a member of one or another national community shifting over time.

‘Being national is the condition of our times’, Eley and Suny have once argued (1996: 32). As they remind us,

we are ‘national’, when we vote, watch the six o’clock news, follow the national sport, observe (while barely noticing) the repeated iconographies of landscape and history in TV commercials, imbibe the visual archive of reference and citation in the movies, and define the nation day by day in our politics.

(1996: 29)

Schlesinger has noted that in Anderson’s approach ‘the newspaper is singled out for its insertion of the “imagined community” into a simultaneous mode of address’ (1991: 164). ‘But that has long been the effect of radio, and latterly of television’, Schlesinger reminds (1991: 164). Indeed, as Morley and Robins argue, ‘on either side of the Atlantic, broadcasting has been one of the key institutions through which listeners and viewers have come to imagine themselves as members of the national community’ (1995: 10–11). What is more, as in response to Anderson Hartley points out, ‘like newspapers, television may be more than merely a metaphor for imagined communities; it is one of the prime sites upon which a given nation is constructed for its members’ (1987: 124). Instead of ‘merely “reflecting” the complex make-up of a nation which pre-existed it’ television, as well as radio, has served as ‘an instrument, an apparatus, a “machine” through which the nation was constituted’, to quote Hall describing the nation-forming aspirations of the BBC (1993: 32).

The history of western European public broadcasting shows that in the eyes of its pioneers and their governments public broadcasting was an ambitious bringing-the-nation-together project. This was to be achieved with the help of the ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) – namely, through the exploitation of invented traditions that Hobsbawm has classified as ‘communitarian’, ‘establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities’ (1983: 9). Public broadcasting was expected to provide its publics with symbolic resources that could allow viewers and listeners to imagine themselves as part of the national ‘we’ and, hence, to promote a sense of national ‘we-ness’. This was hoped to be achieved first and foremost through the provision of its geographically dispersed national publics with access to the collective life of the nation.

Public radio and television became instruments for the creation and maintenance of a single unitary national public sphere expected to hold the national public together, though for the most of the time it has remained only a normative ideal and has little to do with an empirical reality, just as the Habermasian public sphere model itself, which has long served as a source of inspiration for those seeing public broadcasting as an institutional embodiment of a modern public sphere of the Habermasian tradition (thus, for Garnham, public broadcasting is ‘an embodiment of the principles of the Public Sphere’ [1986: 45], though, as he admits, imperfect in practice). The idea of an all-embracing nationally bound Habermasian-style public sphere and public broadcasting as its central element is an idealization of what appears to be a more complex and problematic reality, in which parts of the citizenry have been excluded from the national public as constructed by public broadcasting institutions – see, for instance, Collins who among others accuses public broadcasters of being elitist in their approach to their publics in the era of their monopoly: ‘Rather than a democratic public sphere, in which the actual experience and interest of a real empirical public was represented, monopolistic European public service broadcasters too often addressed the public experience and interests, the public sphere, of elites’ (2004: 43) – in precisely the same way that the eighteenth-century Habermasian public sphere was open only to a small fraction of the national population, namely educated and propertied middle-class men.

This suggests that instead of understanding the relationship between public broadcasters and their publics in terms of the utopian ideals of an all-encompassing public sphere of the nation (with one national public) we should think of several public spaces (and various publics), be they marked by ethno-linguistic cleavages, as it is in the case of my own study, or other types of divisions/particularities, interacting, and, at some points, also contending, with each other. It is also important, if to remember about different transnational audio-visual spaces, to think of these various public spheres and publics as not necessarily limited to national boundaries.

Reflecting on the introduction of public broadcasting in Europe, Ellis, who has famously described television as ‘the private life of a nation-state’ (1992: 5), notes that European governments ‘realized the potential of broadcasting as a unifying force, pulling together individuals, families and groups into a national whole’ (2000: 49). ‘Through the ideal of public service broadcasting, broadcasting became another tool in the construction of the nation state’, Ellis concludes (2000: 49). For him, early television, by bringing national populations together, ‘had an important national role, unifying the nation around a common television culture’ (2000: 46).

Yet, we should not forget that national imagination projects of early western European public radio and television sought to achieve the ideals of national coherence through standardization (unification) of national cultures. It is also Ellis himself who speaks about public broadcasting of that time as ‘the agent of a standardizing notion of national unity’ (2000: 87). Something like an official culture of the nation was made obscuring the actual diversity of identities and internal tensions found within societies which recently launched public radio and television organizations were supposed to serve, and for that same reason we should keep in mind that these national cultures as made by these institutions were often underpinned by an illusion of unity of the nation as their publics not always readily accepted that role of national subjects public broadcasters had reserved for them. The ‘national whole’ Ellis is referring to has never been a harmonious category. Though that version of the national culture as created and disseminated by the public broadcasting organization might be available to all members of the national community (in terms of providing access to public broadcasting services to all citizens), it has not been necessarily accepted by the whole population. Likewise, not all members of the national communion have felt addressed and embraced by the national unity project as offered by this institution.

Remember the introduction of commercial broadcasting in a number of European countries during the 1980s and the early 1990s and the concomitant end of the monopoly of public broadcasting and arrival of competition that have exposed the fragility of often taken-for-granted loyalty of their publics towards institutions of public broadcasting during the long years of their national monopoly. As Flew has pointed out, ‘greater competition for public service broadcasters from commercial services challenged many of the often implicit assumptions of loyalty that had existed between broadcasters and their publics and underpinned their status and implied contribution to national culture’ (2009: 983).

Scannell and Cardiff in their analysis of the early years of public radio and television in Britain have demonstrated how enthusiastically the BBC utilized royal rituals and other state ceremonials, public events and national festivals to provide its publics with ‘symbolic images of national unity and identity’ (Cardiff and Scannell 1987: 169). Radio and, later, television, they argue, served as instruments for the creation of that special ‘we-feeling’ of a sense of belonging to the national community. For Scannell and Cardiff, live broadcasting opened access for all to an array of national events, which have previously been exclusively available only to the few privileged being present at the scene, and thus made national life public: it created ‘a sense of participation in a corporate national life’ (1991: 277). Broadcasting, they write, ‘made the nation real and tangible through a whole range of images and symbols, events and ceremonies, relayed to audiences direct and live’ (Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 277). ‘The nation as a knowable community became available to all members with access to broadcasting’, Scannell and Cardiff claim seeing it in a rather idealistic manner as a democratization of the public sphere (1991: 280). It is this purportedly egalitarian character what in their eyes makes public broadcasting a common good. This is how in the spirit of the Habermasian public sphere ideals, Scannell puts it:

In my view equal access for all to a wide and varied range of common informational, entertainment and cultural services, carried on channels that can be received throughout the country, should be thought of as an important citizenship right in mass democratic societies. It is a crucial means – perhaps the only means at present – whereby common knowledges and pleasures in a shared public life are maintained as a social good for the whole population.

(1989: 164; see also, for instance, Scannell 1990; Scannell and Cardiff 1991)

To quote Moores, ‘BBC radio sought to build a sense of collective national identity by creating an annual calendar of public events and occasions alongside the little ceremonies of everyday consumption’ (2000: 55), and, just as the BBC, other early western European radio broadcasters, as well as their counterparts in other parts of Europe, were also engaged in similar projects of national imagination in their own societies. As Löfgren in his study on the role of radio in everyday nation-building concludes, radio in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s ‘above all served the task of binding the nation together’ (2001: 26). It ‘created new forms of imagining the nation, novel modes of sharing as well as new frames of reference’ (Löfgren 2001: 29).

British public broadcasting sought to offer its publics an image of the national community as a family. The live broadcast rituals of the monarchy were of particular importance in the nation formation project as orchestrated by early BBC radio. In the early 1930s, BBC radio established a tradition of the monarch’s Christmas speech to the nation, an example of ‘invented, constructed and formally instituted’ type of traditions (Hobsbawm 1983: 1), that, as Scannell concludes, ‘set a crowning seal on the role of broadcasting in binding the nation together, giving it a particular form and content: the family audience, the royal family, the nation as family’ (1988: 19) (for further discussion, see also, for instance, Cannadine 1983; Moores 2000).

These mediated royal ceremonies, seen by Cardiff and Scannell as moments of broadcasting as a national integrator at its best, are what Dayan and Katz (1992) have labelled as the genre of ‘media events’. Just as in Scannell and Cardiff’s analysis, for Dayan and Katz, the shared simultaneous viewing experiences these broadcasts offer to their mass audiences makes national integration with the help of broadcasting possible: ‘All eyes are fixed on the ceremonial center, through which each nuclear cell is connected to all the rest. Social integration of the highest order is thus achieved via mass communication’ (Dayan and Katz 1992: 15; see also Dayan 2010; Katz 2009). However, as Dayan and Katz’s media events approach itself has been highly criticized (most notably in the writings of Couldry who rightly argues that these mediated national events do not necessarily perform an integrative function as responses of audiences to these events are far from being uniform and may produce a variety of interpretations; see Couldry 2003; Hepp and Couldry 2010), so has Scannell and Cardiff’s account on the power of broadcasting in binding the nation together. Thus, for Morley, this approach is premised on an ‘over-simplistic model of the media, as producing some indivisible form of sociability, equally inviting and accessible to all’ (2000: 118). To quote Morley,

sociability is simply not the indivisible Good which Scannell assumes it to be. By the very way (and to the very extent that) a programme signals to members of some groups that it is designed for them and functions as an effective invitation to their par...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Broadcasting and the Construction of National ‘We’
• Chapter 2: (Not) At Home: Public TV and Its Publics of the Ethno-linguistic Majority and Minority
• Chapter 3: Television News Preferences and a Sense of Belonging: The Case of Panora–ma and Vremya
• Chapter 4: Celebrating the Arrival of New Year Twice: Public TV and National Celebrations
• Chapter 5: Popular Culture Bringing the Nation Together: The Case of Live Sports Broadcasts and the Eurovision Song Contest
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index
• Back Cover