COMMUNI COMMUNI CATING THE NATION COMMUNI CATING THE NATION N ational Topographies of Global Media Landscapes N ational Topographies of Global Media Landscapes C ATING THE NATION Anna Roosvall & Inka Salovaara-Moring (eds.) Anna Roosvall & Inka Salovaara-Moring (eds.) The nation is one of the most resilient concepts in our understanding of the world and its societies. Politics, sports and cultural events, in news as well as in fiction, are largely structured by the national logic. Internationalism – be it in representation, production or consumption – does not challenge the privileged position of the nation. Globalising processes do offer an alternative to the primacy of the nation, but have so far been unable to overcome its dominance. The nation’s resilience is, in part, due to its continuing relevance: ontologically, it offers a sense of territorial stability and security while epistemologically it can supply a sense of familiarity and order in the global landscape. This volume provides cutting edge analysis of old and new architectures of the nation and its mediated presence in everyday life. In an age of alleged globalisation, nations and nation-states have been claimed to be out-dated. However, the proclamation of the end of the nation (-state) Inka Salovaara-Moring (eds.) Anna Roosvall & has been premature. Eschewing fashionable obituaries for media, geography and the nation, leading media scholars explore the complex ideological and spatial changes in contemporary understandings of the nation. The nation can be seen as a nodal point of media discourse. Hence the power, the politics and the poetics of the nation will be the subject of this book. NORDICOM Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research University of Gothenburg Box 713, SE 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden Telephone +46 31 786 00 00 (op.) | Fax +46 31 786 46 55 www.nordicom.gu.se | E-mail: [email protected] NORDICOM NORDICOM Communicating the Nation Communicating the Nation National Topographies of Global Media Landscapes Anna Roosvall & Inka Salovaara-Moring (eds.) NORDICOM Communicating the Nation National Topographies of Global Media Landscapes Anna Roosvall & Inka Salovaara-Moring (eds.) © Editorial matters and selections, the editors; articles, individual contributors; Nordicom 2010 (with one exception, see page 163) ISBN 978-91-89471-96-2 Published by: Nordicom University of Gothenburg Box 713 SE 405 30 Göteborg Sweden Cover by: Daniel Zachrisson Cover picture: Nebojsa Seric-Shoba “Remote Control”, 2005 Sculpture (paint on plaster), 71 x 32 x 20 cm from the exhibition “Another Expo- Beyond the Nation-State” Courtesy of the artist and Shinya Watanabe Printed by: Litorapid Media AB, Göteborg, Sweden, 2010 Environmental certification according to ISO 14001 Contents Acknowledgements 7 Anna Roosvall & Inka Salovaara-Moring Introduction 9 I. THE MAKING OF Nations Terhi Rantanen Methodological Inter-Nationalism in Comparative Media Research. Flow Studies in International Communication 25 Britta Timm Knudsen The Nation as Media Event 41 Lilie Chouliaraki The Mediation of Death and the Imagination of National Community 59 Göran Bolin & Per Ståhlberg Between Community and Commodity. Nationalism and Nation Branding 79 II. Nations AND EMPIRES REVISITED Inka Salovaara-Moring The Future is a Foreign Place. Topographies of Post-Communism, Nation and Media 105 Ivan Zassoursky Imperial Glory is Back? Retelling the Russian National Narrative by Representation and Communication 123 Toby Miller Holy Trinity: Nation Pentagon, Screen 143 Andrew Calabrese Vox Americana. Why the Media Forget, and Why it is Important to Remember 163 III. National SELVES AND OTHERS Tamar Ashuri The National vs. the Global. Producing National History in a Global Television Era 177 Kristina Riegert National Television News of the World. Challenges and Consequences 195 Anna Roosvall Image-Nation. The National, the Cultural and the Global in Foreign News Slide-shows 215 Anu Kantola The Disciplined Imaginary. The Nation Rejuvenated for the Global Condition 237 The Authors 255 Acknowledgements In considering writing, Samuel Johnson once described the two most engaging powers of an author as the ability to make new things familiar and familiar things new. Writing about the nation challenges an author in both these senses. Exploring the meaning of the nation is a continual balancing act; juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy, independence and academic detachment. To meet this challenge, one has to explore the intimacy a nation brings to its subjects whilst remembering the revulsion this intimacy can cause in those excluded by it. The Janus-faced characteristic of the nation was the starting point for this book. Academic edited volumes are often said to be written by friends and col- leagues who wanted to work together. This is said in a disapproving manner, as if the enjoyment of exploring things in concert would lessen its academic worth. We did have the privilege to work with people we like, but who are also widely respected academics in their fields due to the fact that they have important things to say and write about the subject. So, as we Nordics often say, ‘it is not the ship so much as the skilful sailing that assures the prosper- ous voyage.’ In addition to the deepest appreciation to the contributors, we would also like to thank the Ahlström-Terserus Foundation at Stockholm Uni- versity and Letterstedtska föreningen for funding this project. Our grati- tude goes to Ulla Carlsson for her valuable support to this book, but also for her constant work at Nordicom for the Nordic academic com- munity. A special expression of gratitude goes to our language checker, Stephen Bennett, and his deep well of patience with our eccentricities. We dedicate this book to the memory of the late Professor Jan Ekecrantz, a mentor to us both when we were young researchers on different sides of the Baltic Sea. Seas often constitute divisions between nations, but, as pointed out by Jan Ekecrantz in his inaugural lecture at Stockholm University, they have also worked as vehicles of globalisation. Jan knew much about the sea, ships and sailing and had an instinctive understanding of its essentiality in grasping what life is about. ‘It is not the goals we set, or the ports in which we rest, it 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS is the journey itself’, he used to say. On different sides of the North Sea, as we are now, we conclude our work on a book that tries to capture the journeys of the national and the global, and their intersections. Örebro and Oxford, April 2010 Anna Roosvall Inka Salovaara-Moring 8 Introduction Anna Roosvall & Inka Salovaara-Moring The nation is one of the most resilient concepts in our understanding of the world and its societies. It can be seen as a nodal point of media discourse; an ‘empty’ but privileged centre around which discourse is organised (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002: 26-28; Laclau and Mouffe 1985/2001). Politics, sports and cultural events, in news as well as in fiction, are largely structured by the national logic. Internationalism – be it in representation, production or consumption – does not challenge the privileged position of the nation, but adds another level to the equation (Beck 2006: 123).1 Globalising processes do offer an alternative to the primacy of the nation, but have so far been unable to overcome its dominance. The nation’s resilience is, in part, due to its continuing relevance: ontologically, it offers a sense of territorial stability and security while epistemologically it can supply a sense of familiarity and order in the global landscape. The nation is often described as an imagined community, thus media is crucial for the nation to be ‘imagined into being’ and embraced by large populations (Anderson 1983; Frosch and Wolfsfeld 2007; Chatterjee 1996). One could eas- ily claim that for the media the nation has been and remains to be almost as important, even though it is constantly challenged in times of alleged globalisa- tion. In this book we argue that the nations’ roles in different geopolitical and media environments need to be revisited for three main reasons. Firstly, the nation as a crucial social category has been under-theorised in media studies of the global era. It has either been explicitly written out through terms such as ‘post-national’ or ‘de-nationalisation’, or has been forgotten/ ignored in discussions about glocalisation as well as in large parts of the more general globalisation paradigm. In the glocalisation trajectory the nation linguis- tically and, subsequently, conceptually disappears between the global and the local dimensions. A similar disappearance occurs in broader discussions about globalisation as something essentially new and different from previous times and geographies, for instance, as an increasing awareness of a world ‘where there are no “others”’ (Giddens 1991: 27). However appealing and desirable that idea might be, there are still national others, as well as national selves, and these divisions continue to organise everyday life. 9 ANNA ROOSVALL & INKA SALOVAARA-MORING Secondly, simultaneously and paradoxically, the nation has not been for- gotten in the structuring of empirical analyses. Rather it has been over-used as an often un-motivated and un-problematised unit of analysis; serving as an explanation of difference without an accompanying critical distance from the different roles it can play in varying geo-political settings and times. Moreover, this has been often acted out without considering alternative explanations, categorisations and spatialisations. The nation has thus served as a nodal point for both media studies and media discourse. This organisation of empirical data and analyses is generally recognised as methodological nationalism (Beck 2006; Calhoun 2007; Ekecrantz 2007) based on a ‘territorial trap’, and will be discussed and examined further in several chapters in this book. Thirdly, and following on from the above, at a time of powerful re-organi- sation of the space around us (spaces of nature, politics and different capital- isms) it is good to remind ourselves that all spheres of human activities create their own geographies.