IMAGINATIVE DYNAMICS
A
lthough private interests have been involved since the nineteenth century in projects to market and promote the nation, from boost-erism to corporate public relations campaigns to tourism initiatives, 1 the emergence of a particular phenomenon called nation branding is linked to concrete structural changes in the political and economic dynamics of the nation as well as changes in the perceived role of the nation in the latter decades of the twentieth century.Th e case of Spain provides an illustrative example of these changes.
Spain is considered the original success story of nation branding, and until recently, most countries contemplating the process looked to Spain as proof that it works. 2 In the late 1970s, the democratization and decentral-ization of the country’s institutions were part of Spain’s eff orts to raise its population’s standard of living and create new ties with the rest of Europe following the demise of General Francisco Franco’s regime. Aside from the major changes in political structure, the next twenty-fi ve years saw revo-lutions in the areas of cultural production (the Bilbao museum, the fi lms of Pedro Almodovár, the fashion of Agatha Ruiz de la Prada), architecture (Santiago Calatrava’s Telefónica communications tower, the Velodrome by Esteve Bonell and Francesc Rius, the Agbar skyscraper), economy (the revitalization of cities through increased spending by the public and pri-vate sectors on infrastructure and institutional and tourist advertising, the privatization and transnationalization of Spanish multinational companies), and international attractions (the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, the 1982 FIFA World Cup of soccer, the 1992 International Expo
T H E N E W A N D I M P R OV E D N AT I O N ( 35 )
in Seville). 3 Accompanying these changes was a national promotional pro-gram, initiated in the early 1980s, which stamped virtually all of the coun-try’s innovations with a colorful, widely distributed logo.
Th e logo and the impact it came to have on the international imagina-tion are widely considered to have been instrumental in the “reposiimagina-tion- “reposition-ing” of the country. Once an impoverished and isolated nation emerging from dictatorship, the country now put forward an image of an eff ective democracy and a cultural and cosmopolitan destination. Indeed, the logo was seen to symbolize Spain’s entry into modernity.
At the same time, another logo inspired by Joan Miró was being adopted for a diff erent modernization project in Spain: the revitalization and ex-pansion of the Barcelona-based savings bank ( caja de pensiones ), La Caixa.
Since the bank’s inauguration in 1904, La Caixa had served a dual role: as fi nancial repository for the pensions of residents of the region of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, and as a pillar of social security, assisting the wel-fare of the community through contributions to education, programs for seniors, and patronage of Catalonian cultural production. In this latter role it arguably served a cultural function as well, refl ecting the distinctive iden-tity of Catalans. 4 Th is cultural function was especially important in light of the region’s ongoing claims for recognition as a historic “nation,” having enjoyed the autonomy of separate laws and institutions in the 1700s.
Under the Franco regime, the banking system in Spain was informally called one of the “powers that be” ( poderes facticos ), along with the Church
Figure 2.1:
Spanish Tourism Institute “Sol de Miró” logo. © Tourspain.
( 36 ) Branding the Nation
and the military, because of its strict and largely secretive regulatory and bureaucratic systems. 5 But critical structural changes in the late 1970s and 1980s radically changed the topography of the fi nancial sector. Large com-mercial banks lobbied for looser banking regulations and encouraged for-merly banned foreign acquisitions and mergers. Th e country’s admission among the member states of the European Union in 1986, its growing reli-ance on exports and foreign direct investment (FDI), and the liberalization of its stock market in 1988 further altered fi nancial regulatory structures.
In the context of this newly expanded economic playing fi eld, the bank sought to widen both its market and its geographical and cultural pur-view. It engaged the services of the American corporate identity consult-ancy, Landor Associates, to create a visual logo that would consolidate and convey the bank’s modern objectives. Th e consultants searched for a symbol that would incorporate a variety of lines of resonance. Th e logo had to simultaneously represent regional identity for domestic consumption while conveying national and international sophistication to the rest of Spain and to potential foreign clients. Landor settled on artist Joan Miró as the ideal symbolic personage to design the logo. As the chief executive of Landor Associates, Claude Alverson, explained:
Th e choice of maestro Joan Miró fulfi lls many of the prerequisites of La Caixa:
born in Catalonia, a resident of the Balearic Islands and a world-famous artist, Miró has the unique ability to communicate eff ectively with all of the possible market segments of La Caixa and its main clientele in Spain and abroad. 6
In the political context of 1980s Spain, achieving this simultaneous rep-resentation of local and global was deemed critical. Th e centralized au-thority structures that had been the hallmark of Franco’s rule were undone with the country’s 1978 constitution, which symmetrically devolved po-litical power into seventeen regions known as “autonomous communi-ties.” Th is devolution satisfi ed the sovereignty demands of some of these communities; others—notably Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque region—
continued to call for further autonomy. As a pillar of Catalonian pride and self- suffi ciency, the bank’s brand needed to strike a balance between recog-nizing the importance of this national patriotic sentiment and presenting an image of a unifi ed Spain to its foreign interlocutors, who might hesitate to truck with a country whose political landscape appeared unstable.
Miró himself was a rather ambivalent Spaniard, having achieved artistic fame only by leaving his native land, and the logo that was eventually ad-opted from one of Miró’s artworks was not exactly what the consultants had wished for. 7 But all this was beside the point. Th e symbolic eff ect of a
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logo designed by a world-famous Catalan was perceived as an integrative device, uniting key target populations. Perhaps more important still was the other kind of integration represented by the logo: the harnessing of fi nance to society and culture.
It is the institutional and symbolic similarity of these two logos by Miró that is at the heart of the phenomenon of nation branding. Th e “logoifi ca-tion” of both the bank and the nation, and its attendant structural changes, have come to be seen as an inexorable response to the changing role of the nation in an increasingly globalized context. As I described in the previous chapter, nation branding is promoted as a corrective measure to the de-cline of legitimacy of national structures in a context of globalizing fl ows.
As traditional sources of national power, identity, and autonomy break down, political leaders, economic actors, and national citizens seek alter-native ways to articulate cultural specifi city and political-economic sover-eignty. Th e use of a brand—a metonymic or metaphoric image designed to evoke particular attitudes, behaviors, and values in particular categories of international exchange—is intended to accomplish two seemingly irrec-oncilable objectives: to convey and promote the essential and territorial characteristics of a given national identity while signaling the state’s read-iness to comply with the globally footloose needs of transnational corpo-rate capital. Indeed, part of the success of the nation brand is its ability to overcome the tensions inherent in these politics of identity.
Figure 2.2:
Th e symbol of “La Caixa” created by Joan Miró in 1980. Th e consultants had wanted an eight-pointed star, to represent the new range of communities they wanted to do business with; but Miró provided a template for a fi ve-pointed star. Th ey could not very well ask him to change his artistic rendering. Courtesy of Caixa d’Estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona.
( 38 ) Branding the Nation
Th e critical issue at stake in the isomorphism of these two examples is the perceived convergence of interest and form between the private indus-trial corporation and the nation-state. Th is chapter looks at how the state has been transformed into a corporatized and entrepreneurialized institu-tion, in the context of injunctions that the state become competitive in the global market. 8 As state theorists have shown, the interpenetration of such an instrumental economic imperative with national state governance has had important consequences for its moral and material architecture. Philip Cerny characterizes the shift as one from a welfare state to a “competition state”—where various forms of social welfare provision are now seen as
“counterproductive” to national prosperity. 9 Tore Fougner addresses the implications of reframing the state as an institutional unit of productivity, showing how the notion of international competitiveness shifted from the realm of the corporate fi rm into the domain of the state, so that compet-itiveness became not a problem of management but a problem of govern-ance. 10 If one of the aims of this chapter is to consider the transformation of the state, a second and more pertinent aim is to consider the impact of such logics on the nation. In the context of a competition state, the hyphen linking state to nation is seen as a particular kind of problem. If the expan-sion of fi rm-centered strategy to the space of the state creates a new role for state leadership, it also establishes a new set of coordinates for national identity. To fully understand the impact of bringing the state under the umbrella of the market, we must look at how the market cast its shadow across the nation form as well.
To do so, this chapter traces the work of a group of experts who propose to “improve” the nation’s culture and identity by bringing it into alignment with the exigencies of global “realities.” I call this group a transnational promotional class (TPC). Th is is not a self-consciously constituted move-ment but rather a loosely allied group of actors and institutions that share a common goal: to advocate for the continued relevance of the nation-state in a twenty-fi rst-century context of global change. My use of the term transnational promotional class draws substantially on Leslie Sklair’s idea of a transnational capitalist class (TCC). Indeed, my use of a diff erent term to describe the experts involved in nation branding has less to do with a diff erence between the two classes in terms of their professional positions (which are overlapping, if not isomorphic) or their perspectives on the cen-tral role of corporate knowledge and techniques in contexts of globaliza-tion (which are essentially identical), than with the ways in which the TPC constitutes the object of its attention—the nation—as well as the ways in which these actors legitimate their actions in focusing on this object of at-tention. Put another way, by using the term promotional , I wish to highlight
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the discursive strategies and rationales this class employs in working on the nation, and to demonstrate how these strategies and rationales serve to simultaneously perpetuate and transform the nation form. 11
In Sklair’s formulation, the TCC is devoted above all to advancing a vision of the world as a thoroughly globalized entity with “a unity of economic in-terests, political organizations, and cultural and ideological formations.” 12 Th is unity is achieved because its core members “own and control the major means of production, distribution and exchange through their ownership and control of money and other forms of capital [political, organizational, cultural, knowledge].” 13 Th e TCC “seeks to exert economic control in the workplace, political control in domestic and international politics, and culture-ideology control in everyday life through specifi c forms of global competitive and consumerist rhetoric and practice.” 14 It is made up of four fractions: a “corporate fraction,” which consists of “those who own and con-trol the major corporations”; 15 a “state fraction,” made up of “globalizing bu-reaucrats and politicians” who “accept and propagate the necessity for the permanent expansion of the global capitalist system”; 16 a “technical frac-tion” of “globalizing professionals”—“lawyers, management consultants, and legions of other business service providers in private practice; statu-tory bodies; and knowledge institutions (research centers, universities, business colleges)”; 17 and a “consumerist fraction,” composed of “globaliz-ing merchants and media” who circulate and reinforce the “global vision” of consumerism advocated by globalizing corporations. 18 To the extent that the state plays a role in the aims and objectives of the TCC it is as a resource to help grease the wheels of corporate interests and remove all fetters to the “natural” market forces of trade. Th e concept of the nation, the other side of the hyphen, is almost entirely absent from the globalizing work of the TCC. At most, the nation functions as an adjective to qualify corporate structures and industries—German engineering, Italian leather, and so on.
Th e TPC, by contrast, is heavily invested in the cultural dimensions of the nation. As I explore in this chapter, the promotion of national cul-ture and identity as not only germane to, but actually responsible for, the nation-state’s ability to perpetuate its legitimacy is the raison d’être of this class formation. 19
Th ere is a second distinction between the TCC and the TPC that is crucial to my analysis. It lies in the way the TPC situates itself within the networks of global production and exchange. While the TCC is made up of owners, controllers, and producers whose capital assets go unquestioned, the mem-bers of the TPC seek a decentered and less hierarchical position. Consti-tuting their role as one of circulation, mediation, communication, promo-tion, and calculapromo-tion, these actors seek to place themselves at a remove.
( 40 ) Branding the Nation
A detailed review of the output of this class reveals a marked preference by this group to present themselves as calculators, conduits, facilitators, guides, intermediaries, managers, middlemen, promoters, strategists, or shepherds—in short, as anything but responsible for the political impact of their work.
For the project of branding the nation, this class includes transnational economic institutions and national government departments devoted to in-vestment and tourism promotion; marketing and management academics at international business schools and affi liated think tanks; and multinational consultancies operating in a range of capacities, from strategic communica-tions to location and tax advisory, to marketing, advertising, and branding strategy. Th is group participates in branding the culture, so to speak: estab-lishing rationalized and instrumentalized frameworks of legitimacy within which to situate a new and improved version of national culture.
As I make clear elsewhere in the book, this process did not occur in a single direction from brand to national culture. It took place in the other direction as well—a curious process of osmosis. As the rational and mon-etizable frames of branding and marketing came to be applied to national culture, the concept of the brand became more cultural, built up as a plat-form of personal, emotional, and devotional characteristics to which indi-viduals could relate and identify. Th eories of national consciousness started to appear in management literature. Texts on how to create effi ciencies in corporate culture began to focus on tropes of loyalty, allegiance, and be-longing, with the nation held up as the idealized model for corporations to emulate. It is via this permeability of brand and culture that the imagina-tive dynamics of nation branding emerged.
How these imaginative dynamics came to pass is a story of several facets and dimensions. To fully understand the emergence of nation branding as a conceptual and practical phenomenon requires that we dig deeper into the contradictions underlying the ways that such transitions have been implicated and transformed at the level of national culture. While brand-ing the nation is seen by some as a necessary solution to inevitable global problems, the task at hand is to question whether these problems were in fact so clearly or inevitably determined.
THE SPATIAL FIX
In the increasingly integrated economic world system of the postwar period, the movement of capital from place to place has perhaps best been described as impatient. In the context of the decline of the Fordist
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model of industrialization, replaced by so-called postindustrial forms of production, companies began to adopt infrastructural strategies of both vertical disintegration—outsourcing and downsizing—and fl exible accumulation—seeking capital from a variety of diff erent sources. Critical geographers, sociologists, and economists began to note that postwar cap-ital was beset by “short-termism” and managerial “myopia” with respect to fi nancial investment. 20 Diff erent explanations were off ered to account for this new kind of movement. Some pointed to the increasingly prev-alent practice of companies to subcontract and outsource labor to wher-ever it was cheapest in favor of a more streamlined and effi cient corporate model. 21 Others charted the shift of the locus of capital from the workplace to alternative sites of experience: to leisure, to new models of consump-tion, or to the entrepreneurial qualities of the self.
Only a year after the end of the Second World War, the sociologist C.
Wright Mills had begun to place his fi nger on the pulse of this latter trans-formation. For Mills, major changes in the ways corporate structures op-erated had started to have dire consequences for the conception of the individual as well as his relations with others. Th ough competition had ar-guably always been part of the spirit of enterprise, what Mills observed was that as companies consolidated power and resources while divesting themselves of industrial labor, there occurred a shift of the site in which competition took place. Th e new white-collar worker devoted more and more of her time to competing—not out there, in the market, but on the inside, by cultivating a “competitive personality.” 22 Mills’s insights about the competitive personality would inform subsequent investigations by his colleagues. A few years later, sociologist David Riesman described the
“other- directedness” of the contemporary self in Th e Lonely Crowd . Th is book also focused on the transformation “from morality to morale,” iden-tifying the modern individual as one who looks not to her own moral com-pass for direction but rather seeks the constant approval of others. 23 And in Man for Himself , Riesman’s professor Erich Fromm also took up the idea of competitive identity, classifying a particular type of character orientation as the “marketing orientation.” Th e marketing orientation was a modern construct, where “the economic function of the market in modern society”
is “not only analogous to this character orientation but . . . the basis and the main condition for its development in modern man.” 24
Riesman, too, saw an explicit connection between the other-directed personality and changes in the economy. In the context of mass produc-tion, where goods became essentially indistinguishable, and the
Riesman, too, saw an explicit connection between the other-directed personality and changes in the economy. In the context of mass produc-tion, where goods became essentially indistinguishable, and the