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The territorial politics of nation branding: marketing education in the UK and Scotland
Territory, Politics, Governance
... On the other hand, the special culture and region identity could also be used for the positive term. Education region or territory could be applied as a positive value as an education branding that could attract international students (Moscovitz 2024). Giving respect to cultural diversity is recommended to be part of curriculum development for all governments' education ministries, especially for the new normal era. ...
Human rights in education are an essential area that needs to be the highest priority for improving almost the entire world, especially for the 2030 agenda. This research analyzed the human rights in education values inside the UN Economic and Social Council’s declaration goal 4 of the official document entitled “Building back better from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) while advancing the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. The data are analyzed through a critical discourse approach in qualitative design and discourse organization analysis method. There are nine main human rights in education found inside the declaration including ensuring and protecting education equality, education, and learning development acceleration, preparing and providing sufficient education funding, cultural diversity in education, providing a safe environment for physical and mental health, providing safe, modern and convenient infrastructure and teaching-learning facilities, gender equality in education, internet literacy in education, involving every country as to the world’s global meeting and cooperation of education. The focus of improvement on human rights in education is concluded to be dynamic, which is influenced by economic, welfare, politics, IT, and other integral aspects of development and depends on the world’s and a country’s needs and future desire.
Competitive pressure and evolving expectations have driven tourist destinations to adopt increasingly sophisticated branding strategies. Based on a systematic literature review following the PRISMA protocol, this study examines how artificial intelligence and digital technologies can be integrated into territorial branding processes by analyzing key articles published between 2015 and 2024. The results show that digital technologies enable better stakeholder participation and decision-making based on real-time data analysis while facilitating the adapting strategies to visitor preferences. Furthermore, the digitalization of destination management organizations enhances service personalization and reputation management.
Notably brands and branding distinguish and position businesses’ market offerings in relation to competitors’. They constitute parts of the core elements of the marketing system that contribute to how businesses satisfy their customers. Hence, branding is inextricably linked to the marketing philosophy of creating and delivering value to the customers. In fact, it plays key roles in the notion of value co-creation between businesses and their customers. Although they have characteristics that distinguish them from physical products, service offerings also benefit significantly from the use of banding. Besides, as the marketplace consumption behaviour keep changing, the areas of application of branding have also evolved into many more areas than it used to be such as branding in the not-for-profit activities, branding of political ideologies, personal branding, branding in the religious context, branding in a digital age, and branding in the metaverse among others. This chapter explores these issues critically to open the discourse of the brands, branding, and consumerism in this book.
Two months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukraine’s government launched a major nation-branding initiative, which has come to be known as the Brave Campaign. This is, arguably, the first instance of a state using brand communication as a strategic tool in a war. The campaign also marks a significant departure from Ukraine’s previous nation-branding messages. Drawing on critical discourse theory, this essay considers why this change in messaging strategies was possible and what it signals about the larger geopolitical and ideological context within which the Russia–Ukraine war is being fought. The essay concludes by posing a set of new questions for future research on public diplomacy and nation branding, prompted by the events of this war.
This article examines the contrasting norms of sovereignty that underpin the political discourse and policy choices of the UK and Scottish governments in the context of Brexit. Using the lens of contested sovereignty, it explores the meanings attached to sovereignty in both the Brexit process and the response to it within Scotland. It then considers the implications of these contested sovereignties for Scottish self-government, in the context of both devolution and independence. That analysis distinguishes between the locus of sovereignty (parliamentary versus popular) and the form of sovereignty (nation-state versus shared). Both governments have drawn upon popular sovereignty norms, but who makes up the people is contested. The UK’s Brexit policy, in relation to both negotiations with the European Union and its domestic preparations, is underpinned by a nation-state sovereignty norm. By contrast, Scottish nationalism is associated with conceptions of shared sovereignty that have become even more pronounced since the European Union referendum. The difficulty in reconciling these sovereignty norms has destabilized the UK’s territorial constitution and created new challenges for advocates of independence.
Brexit and its implications pose the latest challenge to the Union as a political project and to unionism as the doctrine of state legitimacy. How did key unionist actors articulate the legitimizing foundations of the Union in the critical period 2016-20? And to what extent did they set out a renewed case for its continuation? Drawing on an extensive database including parliamentary debates, party documents and conference notes, we find that, despite the profound nature of the challenges posed by Brexit, dominant legitimizing claims continued to be instrumentalist defences of the Union rooted in economics and welfare. These were underpinned by ideas of social union around shared solidarity and belonging and supplemented by an invocation of common British values. Overall, while we identify a plurality of competing and often conflicting unionist themes, we conclude that key unionist actors struggled to adapt the legitimizing foundations of their political project to the realities of a post-Brexit UK.
This article pursues a novel endeavor by anchoring the study of nation branding in the context of multinational federal systems. Through an examination of the manner in which international education strategies are used to cultivate images of “nation” in Canada and Quebec, the study underlines how the “politics of recognition” at the heart of Canada/Quebec relations play out in the international education sphere. The results point to the significance of policy effectiveness for the “politics of recognition,” contributing to the literature on majority–minority tensions, which tends to highlight the symbolic role of policy control as opposed to the realization of said policies. The research also sheds light on the potential interplay between the political autonomy of minority nations and their symbolic recognition, by highlighting how the provision of policy control can work to substantiate the (external) recognition of their distinct nation status.
While digital technologies were initially seen as harbingers of globalisation and cosmopolitanism, scholars increasingly acknowledge their role in the rise of nationalism and right‐wing populism. Yet this surge of interest leaves at least two important questions unanswered. Where was nationalism before its apparent resurgence? Are contemporary forms of nationalism different from their predecessors, and can these changes be linked to digital technologies? To answer these questions, we argue for the importance of understanding the less visible ways in which digital technologies reproduce our sense of belonging to a world of nations. We discuss three such mechanisms: the architecture of internet domains, the bias of algorithms and the formation of national digital ecosystems. Next, we examine three characteristics of contemporary nationalism that can be partly linked to recent shifts in the global communication ecology: diversification, fragmentation and commodification. We conclude by considering the implications of our arguments for future research in the field.
Higher education in the UK constitutes an important (export) sector that depends on mobilities of capital, labour and students. This article contributes to ‘Brexit geographies’ by exploring how the economic geographies of British transnational education are reconfigured during uncertainty over Brexit through spatial strategies of universities. Based on qualitative research and in-depth interviews with decision-makers in higher education in the UK, it maps the investments and analyses the rationales, narratives and spatial imaginaries motivating the construction of universities’ physical presences abroad. Decision-makers’ imagined futures for UK universities, first, reveal a linking to discourses of ‘Global Britain’ and, second, efforts towards European (re-)integration through campus development in European Union territory. The latter is intended by some to ameliorate risks of regulatory changes and provide an ‘insurance policy’ against the anticipated financial consequences of Brexit. However, the resulting geographies of risk and vulnerability are unevenly distributed and seem likely to increase the hierarchically structured (economic) geographies of higher education.
This volume presents ten empirical case studies that demonstrate the added value of integrating Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Critical Policy Studies (CPS), producing a theoretical and methodological synergy we term Critical Policy Discourse Analysis (CPDA). 1 Our aim is threefold: first, to show how this integration can enrich the conceptualisation-and thus analysis of policy; second, to render explicit the methodological steps whereby such analysis can be operationalised; and, third, to reflect on the distinctive contribution made to both fields when such an integrated approach is applied to actual policy problems. These aims are reflected in the way the chapters are organised. First, each chapter investigates a particular policy-relevant problem which was tackled using a critical discourse analytical approach, with a specific focus on detailed textual analysis. This latter focus reflects an important contribution of CPDA to policy research: namely, an analytical framework capable of capturing, and conceptualising in relation to their socially structuring potential , the fine details of text which are often overlooked in policy analysis, but which have effects on how policy is understood, developed, and implemented. Second, each chapter takes the reader through the methodological decisions made, while making explicit the underlying theoretical assumptions which motivated them. Finally, each chapter reflects on the novel theoretical and empirical insights which were born out of this integrated approach. CDA is an approach to social scientific research which combines detailed analysis of texts with theoretically informed accounts of the phenomena under investigation, in order to identify the processes by which language (re)produces social practices and helps privilege certain ways of doing, thinking, and being over others. It investigates how language figures in the constitution, contestation, and transformation of social problems, and thereby processes of social change. CDA 2 has its origins in linguistics and can best be seen as a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, subsuming a variety of approaches, analytical models and research agendas (Fairclough
Existing research on exceptionalism in foreign policy suggests a number of confrontational features making it a threat to peaceful international relations. Largely based on US and European cases, and hardly ever taking a comparative approach, this literature overlooks a variety of exceptionalisms in non-Western countries, including so called “rising powers” such as China and India. A comparison between exceptionalist foreign policy discourses of the United States, China, India, and Turkey shows that exceptionalism is neither exclusive to the United States, nor a “new” phenomenon within rising powers, nor necessarily confrontational, unilateralist, or exemptionalist. As a prerequisite for comparative work, we establish two features common to all exceptionalist foreign policy discourses. In essence, such discourses are informed by supposedly universal values derived from a particular civilization heritage or political history. In order to systematize different versions of exceptionalism, we then propose four ideal types, each of which reflects exceptionalism's common trait of a claim to moral superiority and uniqueness but diverges across other important dimensions, with implications for its potentially offensive character. The article concludes by formulating a research agenda for future comparative work on exceptionalist foreign policy discourses and their repercussions for great power relations and global politics.
To date, (critical) geopolitics has had little to say about contemporary competitive identity practices of nation branding in global politics, while existing analyses of nation branding in other disciplines have tended to overlook its geopolitical dimensions. This expanded Introduction (and the special issue as a whole) therefore seeks to explore some of the implications of nation branding for geopolitics, while simultaneously utilising the insights of critical geopolitics to shed light on nation branding practices. The Introduction makes the case for a broad conception of nation branding that challenges claims it is immutably linked to capitalist logics in an era of globalisation. It subsequently explores claims that nation branding is simply an updated form of nation building and that it is also an inherently benign and peace promoting activity. The Introduction ends by highlighting how, despite claims that the contemporary prevalence of nation branding practices is indicative of a categorical shift from a geopolitical to a geoeconomic world, nation branding practices frequently remain deeply infused with rather traditional geopolitical scripts.
Canada's recently revamped international education brand, EduCanada, offers a rich example of developments at the intersections of higher education internationalization and marketization. In this paper, I examine the EduCanada website to consider how national exceptionalist and 'othering' narratives are reproduced in the recruitment of international students. From these findings I ask how internationalization relates to the overlapping and ongoing legacies of Indigenous colonization, and racialized regimes of personhood, citizenship, and immigration in Canada. Finally, I argue that the international marketization of higher education risks foreclosing critical examinations of the entanglements of empire within which we are all unevenly embedded.
Foreign policy as we know it today emerged with the ministry of foreign affairs (MFA) in the 18th century. Although factors such as the merging of the diplomatic and consular corps with the MFA from the first decades of the 20th century onwards, the growth in the number and size of state agencies and the proliferation of international organizations have changed foreign policy-making, foreign policy has kept its coherence as an object of study. The goal of this chapter is to think through the extent to which globalization is changing foreign policy. In order to do so, I draw on literatures on the state and on diplomacy. Globalization is understood as an intensification of relations between an increasing number of polities, both in the sense that relations become denser and in the sense that the speed of interaction increases. As with internationalization before it, this process cannot fail to challenge the importance of foreign ministries. The chapter ends with a discussion of how foreign ministries strike back by orchestrating the action of other types of entities. What takes place in the area of foreign policy is part of a wider shift in state practices, away from governing directly towards governing from afar. Foreign ministries join other parts of the state apparatus in governing through other state and also non-state entities.1
This article examines national branding of UK higher education, a strategic intent and action to collectively brand UK higher education with the aim to attract prospective international students, using a Bourdieusian approach to understanding promises of capitals. We trace its development between 1999 and 2014 through a sociological study, one of the first of its kind, from the ‘Education UK’ and subsumed under the broader ‘Britain is GREAT’ campaign of the Coalition Government. The findings reveal how a national higher education brand is construed by connecting particular representations of the nation with those of prospective international students and the higher education sector, which combine in the brand with promises of capitals to convert into positional advantage in a competitive environment. The conceptual framework proposed here seeks to connect national higher education branding to the concept of the competitive state, branded as a nation and committed to the knowledge economy.
If nation branding is about constructing and promoting national identity, what kind of ‘identity’ could it possibly be? This article analyses how the branded nation qualitatively differs from earlier forms of imagined communities by focusing on the tension between inward- and outward-directed dimensions of nation branding. A particular focus is placed on the concept of ‘identity’, which, it is argued, is insufficiently problematized in previous research. The discussion takes its departure in a case study of Ukraine, where all nation branding attempts came to an abrupt halt when political unrest broke out in late 2013. The political unrest led to a rapid shift in forms of concern over Ukraine, since nation branding can only be conducted in times of relative social harmony. The case further illustrates the argument that collective identity is not a main issue when branding a nation, and it is argued that a perspective of cosmopolitanism can bring new insights to the phenomenon.
Surprisingly, the emergent and increasingly popular phenomenon of nation branding has received only scant attention from International Relations scholars. While most analyses account for the phenomenon by emphasizing the perceived material benefits to be derived from establishing a positive national brand, this article provides an alternative perspective. It argues that nation-branding processes need to be understood as responding to the need of states and state leaders to enhance both their citizens and the nation's sense of ontological security and (self)-esteem. Moreover, this quest for self-esteem and ontological security is unfolding in the context of broader realignments occasioned by the advent of late modernity. While nation branding represents an understandable response to these developments, the article questions the strategy's overall efficacy by highlighting its implications for how national subjectivity is constituted, its notable disciplining elements and its potentially undemocratic implications.
This paper examines what it means to study national identity politics in an age during which state-to-state relations are being conceptualised increasingly in terms of economic rivalry and less in terms of political enmity. It is suggested that this transformation has not been sufficiently taken into account in the study of national identity politics that continues to operate on the basis of the friend-enemy distinction. It is also suggested that the 'old school of national identity politics' with its emphasis on territorial exclusion and geopolitical images of threat and enmity has done highly important work in deconstructing security discourses and it is noted how they are linked to a specific, realist understanding of the world. That is, they have disclosed how what Alexander Wendt calls the 'Hobbesian culture of anarchy' has motivated national identity politics. Further using Wendt's characterisation of the three cultures of anarchy, the paper suggests that in the practices of contemporary national identity politics the logic of economic competitiveness and the logic of political enmity continue to co-exist but that 'state survival' is being increasingly understood as a matter of economic competitiveness and decreasingly as that of military power. On this basis it is argued that the era of competition states begs an analysis of the conflictual and often contradictory articulations of the Self's relation with the Other. It is proposed that a fruitful road of enquiry would open up if national identity politics was examined within the framework of political struggles whereby the national survival and Self/Other relations are played out against the background of the global marketplace paradigm which resonates more with the Lockean than the Hobbesian culture of anarchy.
Even when political rule is territorial, territoriality does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which dominant understandings of the modern territorial state attribute to it. However, when the territoriality of the state is debated by international relations theorists the discussion is overwhelmingly in terms of the persistence or obsolescence of the territorial state as an unchanging entity rather than in terms of its significance and meaning in different historical‐geographical circumstances. Contemporary events call this approach into question. The end of the Cold War, the increased velocity and volatility of the world economy, and the emergence of political movements outside the framework of territorial states, suggest the need to consider the territoriality of states in historical context. Conventional thinking relies on three geographical assumptions ‐ states as fixed units of sovereign space, the domestic/foreign polarity, and states as ‘containers’ of societies ‐ that have led into the ‘territorial trap’.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE NATION-STATE INTO A ‘COMPETITION state’ lies at the heart of political globalization. In seeking to adapt to a range of complex changes in cultural, institutional and market structures, both state and market actors are attempting to reinvent the state as a quasi-‘enterprise association’ in a wider world context, a process which involves three central paradoxes. The first paradox is that this process does not lead to a simple decline of the state but may be seen to necessitate the actual expansion of de facto state intervention and regulation in the name of competitiveness and marketization.
When the states of England and Scotland combined in 1707, conditions were created whereby English nationalism could merge into British nationalism. With the expansion of empire, English nationalism was expressed through imperial-national discourses allowing English nationalists to claim non-English space when articulating what might be best understood as an Anglo-British nationalism. Accordingly, such discourses largely ‘hid’ what one might now understand as ‘English nationalism’ within a ‘British’ discourse of empire. The case of England illustrates that imperial discourses can become intimately bound up with the ‘national’ discourse of the nations at the core of the imperial structures. Accordingly, it is here argued that imperial and national discourse are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are able to feed into each other, affecting the manner in which ideas of the nation and empire are conceived and articulated.
Brexit has continued to capture the attention of International Relations (IR) scholars, where it has been linked to the burgeoning debate on race and postcolonialism. This article adds to this scholarship by historicising the question of imperial nostalgia, which has been central to these intersecting literatures. It re-examines how influential theorists Hall and Gilroy linked the peculiarities of British national consciousness to traumas issuing from the loss of great power status. It emphasises two themes often lacking in recent accounts of Brexit nationalism: namely, the centrality of military mobilisation to national consciousness; and the unevenness between popular and elite sentiment with regards to the imperial dimension. In historicising themes of extroversion and introversion, it reconsiders the significant metamorphoses in post-Thatcherite British nationalism, which had centred on proclaiming a national renaissance founded in foreign policy successes, international moral leadership and a state-led consensus for rolling out globalisation worldwide. The research shows that revisionism about the British Empire played a significant role in foreign policy discourse across this period, as did pro-EU sentiment among the governing and ruling elite. It highlights the mechanisms which allowed UK foreign policy intellectuals to link the military roll-out of ‘postmodern’ social norms with the European project’s end goals. These findings help historically situate Brexit amid a succession of crises for the liberal global order. The research finds that, whereas Brexit appeared initially as a retreat or break from the UK’s post-Thatcherite ‘globalising’ nationalism, subsequent developments highlight significant continuities.
In this paper, we theorize the 2016 Brexit referendum as a critical juncture in UK politics and analyse its effects on devolution using the concept of regional authority. We argue that Brexit raised the option of re-balancing the self-rule and shared rule dimensions of regional authority present in UK devolution. We generate hypotheses regarding parties’ territorial strategies and test them against a content analysis of 2015 and 2017 UK general election manifestos. We demonstrate that proposals dealing with shared rule grew between 2015 and 2017, within the context of consistency in parties’ overall territorial positioning. The governing Conservatives also offered more proposals on shared rule but not ones that increased devolved influence. Overall, they moved from favouring an increase in regional authority in 2015 to the cusp of maintaining existing regional authority and somewhat reducing it in 2017. This helps to explain whypost-Brexit UK government policy in practice maintained a primary focus on self-rule within a general approach of limiting the further growth of regional authority.
This article analyses the EU-UK Future Relationship negotiations on Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) through the lenses of ‘exceptionalism’. This concept refers to a given state’s self-understanding as being not only fundamentally different from other states, but also morally superior. In its exemptionalist variant, exceptionalism also calls attention to the belief that one is entitled to exemptions from ordinary rules. This article argues that, whilst exemptionalist exceptionalism can be said to characterize the UK’s position in relation to European integration in general, it has been particularly pronounced in the JHA policy area. This is shown through an analysis of the various exemptions from ordinary rules and arrangements obtained by the UK over the years. The existence of those also demonstrates a broad acceptance by the rest of the EU of this selfperception of the UK as being an exceptional state. Furthermore, this article shows that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the UK government has retained this stance in the Future Relationship negotiations with the EU. It has set its expectations of negotiating agreements with the EU that would set it apart from all the other partners of the EU. It has attempted to justify such an exceptional treatment on the basis of the remarkable quality of the contribution that it has been able to make to EU internal security as encapsulated in the idea that ‘the EU needs us more than we need them’. However, recent developments suggest that the EU is no longer as favourably disposed to grant exceptional treatment to the UK in the field of JHA now as it was when the UK was a Member State.
United Kingdom, exceptionalism, Justice and Home Affairs, Internal security, Brexit
Contrary to the dominant expectations of the late 20th century, secessionism surged in two West European minority national communities, Catalonia and Scotland, over the last decade. Yet, in two others enjoying similar degrees of autonomy, Flanders and South Tyrol, secessionism did not gain strength. This outcome suggests that focusing on the degree of autonomy afforded to minority national communities is misplaced. This article shows that the nature of autonomy is more important than its degree for understanding the strength of secessionism. It demonstrates that the key to autonomy regimes weakening secessionism is their capacity to adjust and expand over time. Dynamic autonomy staves off secessionism while static autonomy stimulates it. The article is based on a controlled comparison of, on the one hand, Catalonia and Scotland, where autonomy regimes have been mostly static during key periods of time, and, on the other hand, Flanders and South Tyrol, where they have been dynamic.
On March 21, 2014, in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, a select group of government officials, foreign diplomats, tourism executives, NGO representatives, and members of the media gathered in the ritzy InterContinental hotel for a conference titled ‘Promoting Ukraine’s Image and Tourism Potential.’ The event included a presentation, delivered by a joint team of public officials from the Ministry of Tourism and marketing experts from the private sector, which announced the launch of Ukraine’s new tourism ‘brand platform’ (‘Conference’, 2014).1 There would have been nothing too remarkable about this event had it not been for the fact that just a month earlier, on February 20, Kiev’s main square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti — a ten-minute walk from the InterContinental — had seen an eruption of violence against anti-government protesters leading to the death of at least 88 people in 48 hours. Furthermore, a mere three days before the conference, on March 18, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin had signed a bill to absorb the Crimean Peninsula into the Russian Federation after a controversial referendum had found that 9 7 per cent of Crimea’s residents wanted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia (‘Ukraine Crisis Timeline’, n.d.).
Universities and Globalization: To Market, To Market examines the operations of power and knowledge in international education under conditions of globalization, with a focus on the three biggest exporters of higher education--the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. An interdisciplinary approach based on the core social sciences is used to explore the power relations that shape global education networks. The role of nation-states in creating the conditions for education markets and the desire for a Westernized template of international education in the postcolonial world is discussed. The volume offers a sophisticated attempt to recast international education as a series of geopolitical and geoeconomic engagements that transcend simple supply and demand dynamics. Engaging with the theoretical debates about education and globalization, this book examines global cultural"flows" and boundary crossings, the cultural economy of education networks, and the possibilities for supra-territorial subjectivities. International education markets are examined from the perspectives of both first world producers and postcolonial consumers. By investigating how first world universities imagine and enact the global in their marketing practices, the expressions of cultural diversity valued by education markets, and the types of individual and institutional subjectivities merging from markets, Universities and Globalization: To Market, To Market offers students, faculty, administrators, marketing consultants, and others who work in the area a highly nuanced account of the global relations fostered by education markets. This original, critical examination of the forms and cultural politics of international education is a significant contribution to the field. © 2006 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
This book examines the concept of new public diplomacy against empirical data derived from three country case studies, in order to offer a systematic assessment of policy and practice in the early 21st century.
Despite the recent proliferation of literature on nationalism and on social policy, relatively little has been written to analyse the possible interaction between the two. Scholars interested in social citizenship have indirectly dealt with the interaction between national identity and social programmes such as the British NHS, but they have seldom examined this connection in reference to nationalism. Specialists of nationalism rarely mention social policy, focusing instead on language, culture, ethnicity, and religion. The main objective of this book is to explore the nature of the connection between nationalism and social policy from a comparative and historical perspective. At the theoretical level, this analysis will shed new light on a more general issue: the relationships between identity formation, territorial politics, and social policy. Although this book refers to the experience of many different countries, the main cases are three multinational states, that is, states featuring strong nationalist movements: Canada (Quebec), the United Kingdom (Scotland), and Belgium (Flanders). The book looks at the interplay between nationalism and social policy at both the state and sub-state levels through a detailed comparison between these three cases. The concluding chapter brings in cases of mono-national states (i.e. France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States) to provide broader comparative insight on the meshing of nationalism and social policy. The original theoretical framework for this research is built using insight from selected scholarship on nationalism and on the welfare state.
This article applies recent critiques of branding and marketing to a case study of the nation branding trend. We argue that critical approaches to brand "co-creation"-a reliance upon consumers to build and disseminate brand identity-help illuminate the ways in which nation branding serves as a technique of governance in the era of global capitalism. The article first considers the recent development of nation branding as a global phenomenon and then explores the details of one such campaign in post-socialist Slovenia. The case study illustrates the ways in which nation branding enjoins the populace to "live" the national brand, and to promulgate it nationally and internationally in the name of taking responsibility for the homeland's economic development. The article concludes with a consideration of the way in which nation branding's framing of the state as an "enterprise" fits with the logic of emerging forms of so-called commercial nationalism.
Preface and Introduction PART ONE: THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL STRUCTURATION: STRUCTURE, AGENCY, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN STATE Political Structuration and Political Science The Elements of Political Structure Patterns of Agency Markets, Hierarchies and Political Allocation The Modern State at the Crossroads Structuring the Field of Political Action PART TWO: CHANGING PATTERNS OF POLITICAL STRUCTURATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE STATE The Limits of Political Power Personal Leadership and Party Systems The State and Interest Intermediation Patterns of Collaborative Behaviour The Paradox of Civil Society De-differentiation and Re-differentiation in the Contemporary State Transnational Structures and the State Responses From the Welfare State to the Competition State Epilogue Political Structuration and Political Ideas in the 21st Century
Nation branding, as a phenomenon, is attracting increasing scholarly attention. However, much of the existing literature has been written by those involved in the public relations industry themselves. There have been some studies which have been written from a critical viewpoint; however, the tensions of branding a nation have often been neglected. This paper aims to explore the inherent tensions between nation branding and nation building. To what extent is nation branding a tool or a practice? What images of the nation do branders seek to promote, and who is this image for? Is nation branding merely a more palatable version of nationalism? In particular this paper focuses on the debates surrounding the launch of Brand Estonia in 2001/2. Brand Estonia, with the slogan Welcome to Estonia: Positively Transforming, was launched to coincide with Estonia staging the Eurovision Song Contest in 2002. It is a unique and interesting case study given the level of controversy that the initiative generated amongst the Estonian public. Estonia was the first Former Soviet Republic to launch a nation branding project and, perhaps more controversially, it was managed by a British-based company, Interbrand. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to public-level discourses concerning Brand Estonia. The empirical findings discussed in this article highlight some of the more salient narratives on national identity that Brand Estonia engendered and therefore aims to fill this gap.
This article analyses Ben Wellings’ recent contribution to the debate over the English Question, English Nationalism and Euroscepticism: Losing the Peace, and places it within the context of the British Political Tradition (BPT). Wellings develops the case for an English nationalism characterised by an opposition to European integration. Although this article is broadly in agreement with his central proposition that Euroscepticism is the most coherent expression of English nationalism, it takes issue with his secondary argument – that this nationalism is populist. Instead, this article reframes the case for Eurosceptic English nationalism in terms of a continued adherence to a BPT characterised by elitist ideas of responsibility and representation. Rather than being genuinely populist, the adoption of Eurosceptic attitudes by a growing section of the political class has been driven by a desire to perpetuate a political system that protects elite power and a culture of limited democratic participation. A study of Euroscepticism consequently offers evidence, not only of English nationalism, but also of the existence of a BPT that constrains and facilitates political action and development.
Nation Branding is broadly conceived of as an apolitical marketing strategy that targets external markets to establish and communicate a specific image of national identity. However, in this article it is argued that Nation Branding displays characteristics that make it constructive to analyse in terms of an implicit cultural policy. The main point is that Nation Branding is essentially an inner-oriented, cultural-political measure that targets the citizens of the national state, characterized by conservative, transformative and transferring political agendas. On the background of an analysis of these characteristics, it will be argued that Nation Branding may work in a self-defeating manner and endanger democratic processes.
This article critically examines the emergence of nation branding as a commercial practice at the end of the Cold War by conceptualizing it as a means for nations to redefine and reposition themselves within the master narrative of globalization. It examines the industry literature of the nation branding movement, which seeks to legitimate the practice. It argues that nation branding is an engine of neo-liberalism that explicitly embraces a reductive logic, which privileges market relations (market fundamentalism) in articulations of national identity; also contends that nation branding is a risky business that can backfire, since its success depends, in large part, on the intuitive knowledge of individual industry ‘creatives’. It maintains that the methodology of nation branding, qua methodology, is profoundly anti-democratic. It offers recommendations for making nation branding more transparent and accountable to democratic values, but also explores Umberto's concept of ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’ as a possible strategy for disrupting nation branding and redirecting initiatives to rethink national identity in more democratic directions.
This article seeks to contribute to opening up a space of possibility for the state to become something other than a competitive entity in and through a critical (re)problematisation of 'international competitiveness' as a governmental problem. In more specific terms, it inquires into how international competitiveness was constituted as such a problem in the first place; how both the meaning of international competitiveness and the terms of the 'competitiveness problem' have been transformed by globalisation talk and multilateral efforts at neoliberal global governance; and how the discourse of international competitiveness works to (re)produce the state as a competitive entity on a continuous basis.
Jim Bulpitt understood the UK as an eminently political creation, emphasizing the role of elites in managing diversity. He can be criticized for underplaying the ideology of union, for dismissing Labour unionism and for an excessively central and Tory perspective. His insights, however, remain useful in analysing the current collapse of unionism, if not of the Union itself. His key concept of central autonomy explains why current neo-unionist efforts to forge Britishness are unlikely to succeed, since they imply a stronger territorial articulation of the state itself.
Although the dominant political ideology in Scotland between 1707 and the present, unionism has suffered serious neglect. One of the most distinguished Scottish historians of our time looks afresh at this central theme in Britain’s history, politics and law, and traces the history of Scottish unionist ideas from the early sixteenth century to the present day. Colin Kidd demonstrates that unionism had impeccably indigenous origins long predating the Union of 1707, and that it emerged in reaction to the English vision of Britain as an empire. Far from being the antithesis of nationalism, modern Scottish unionism has largely occupied a middle ground between the extremes of assimilation to England or separation from it. At a time when the future of the Scottish union is under scrutiny as never before, its history demands Colin Kidd’s lucid and cogent examination, which will doubtless generate major debate, both within Scotland and beyond.
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