The Semiotics of Nation Branding

Nation branding, both as a professional service and political project, is a historically recent phenomenon. As Melissa Aroncyzk (Reference Aronczyk2013) explains, the upstart endeavor is inseparable from certain macrolevel changes in the global economy, such as the rise of finance capital, but also responds to the emergence of new methods of reckoning international economic competitiveness that factored in the value of place-based reputation alongside traditional measures such as GDP. Furthermore, the global spread of nation branding has been spurred on by the relatively successful efforts of branding and marketing professionals to “brand” branding itself, that is, to formulate branding and brand management as valuable services that direct and enhance state and commercial efforts to attract tourism and investment. Regardless of its origins and varied motivations, nation branding is increasingly presented by its sponsors and purveyors as a necessary step to ensure competitiveness in the contemporary global economy (e.g., see Anholt Reference Anholt2007).

In practice, nation branding implies a strategic effort to formulate national identity as a branded commodity. Throughout this article, my interest falls less on the concept of a nation brand and more so on the practices organized through state-sponsored projects of nation branding. That said, I offer a brief review of critical literature on brand in order to highlight how the semiotic structure of nation brands presupposes a broader metapragmatic regimentation of public discourse.

In a recent essay, Constantine Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2012) has argued that brand is best understood as a complex cultural and economic artifact whose semiotic structure is defined by the ongoing calibration of some commodity token (e.g., a sports shoe) to a brand type (e.g., Nike or Adidas) and also to a broader brand ontology. According to this view, brand tokens—marked as such by logo instances or unique design features—function as indexical signs that pick out the brand types to which they belong. Brand types, as signaled and qualified by logos, advertisements and marketing discourse, are iconic in the semiotic sense: they assert some aspect of sameness in quality across the commodity tokens that they group together. Ultimately, though, the calibration between brand tokens and brand types depends on a further calibration to an underlying, historically specific brand ontology, that is, “the cultural and legal notion that things such as brands exist and that they have such-and-such properties as specified, and policed, by institutions of trademark law and marketing practice (among others)” (Reference Nakassis2012, 628).

Where such a brand ontology has taken hold, trademark law and marketing practices constitute an important metapragmatics, a set of directives on how to interpret the contextual meanings of signs, in this case, the meaning of the brand fractions, such as logo instances and unique design elements, that ground brand identities and brand value. This brand metapragmatics, in stipulating what counts as an authorized brand usage, socializes domains of consumers to recognize, if not necessarily to always respect, the authority of brand distinction. Thus, as Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2012, 629) elaborates “the fundamental prerequisite of all brand formations” is “their ability to regiment the iconicity of brand tokens—that is, make sure that they are seen as ‘the same’ while excluding the unauthorized and the inauthentic.” Importantly, whether or not a brand formation succeeds in regimenting brand token iconicity in this way presupposes sustained metadiscourses on brand and the institutionalization of brand protections in law.

Projects of nation branding, however, presuppose a somewhat different set of principles and metadiscourses on what constitutes a (nation) brand. Similar to conventional branding practices, nation branding does seek to coordinate, articulate, and maintain a coherent, distinctive and appealing identity across the brand type. Unlike classic brand formations in which brand types encompass a finite range of officially sanctioned brand tokens (e.g., a product line), with nation brands there are no specific goods or services that are presented as authorized tokens of the brand type. That is, while one can purchase Nike shoes and clothing or Lego brand building blocks and video games, neither Macedonia brand wine nor France brand baguettes exist as such. (Although legal designations of terroir for luxury comestibles are an interesting case and on the rise.)

In contrast to conventional branding, then, nation branding is premised on crafting a particular branded identity centered on the nation concept but that extends indefinitely across a range of possible experiences and products made available through travel or export. Rather than regimenting the iconicity of a predesignated (if expandable) set of brand tokens, to adapt Nakassis’s phrasing, nation brands must regiment the iconicity of an open set of experiences, products and services, asserting that they represent the nation brand identity and thus are in some sense “the same.” In turn, nation brands also exclude “the unauthorized and the inauthentic.” Such exclusions, however, are not based on a legally codified brand ontology: such an ontology of nation brands has not yet been established and institutionalized. Instead, they are performatively enacted when government and paragovernment officials (e.g., branding consultants) marshal a metadiscourse on nation branding to frame their nation-branding initiatives and to respond to unwanted representations of the nation.

On one level, nation-branding practitioners and proponents emphasize the need for a national strategy to coordinate communication across government, commerce, and the population so as to mutually specify the nation brand type and to calibrate it with a range of products and experiences. As nation-branding impresario Simon Anholt (Reference Anholt2007, 31) expresses it, “Creating more harmony between the way all of the country’s companies and organizations and people do business and sell their products and services is an important part of the process of building Competitive Identity: if they are all telling the same powerful, believable, interesting story about the country, then the country has started to achieve some control over its international image.” Such policy initiatives work to cultivate sameness, that is, iconicity across the ways in which influential actors represent the nation in their work.

On another level, it has become increasingly common for government officials to voice a metadiscourse on nation branding in order to challenge unsanctioned representations of the nation.Footnote ³ That is, government and paragovernment officials will indict a less-than-glowing or off-message representation of a country not only as offensive but also as harmful to its nation brand and international image. For example, the movie Borat, in which British actor Sacha Baron Cohen plays the titular character, a fictional Kazakh journalist prone to crude behavior in violation of contemporary multicultural norms of conduct, raised great anger in Kazakhstan, not only because of its offensive portrayal of the country and its nationals, but also due to the fear that the movie’s representation of Kazakhstan would unfairly tarnish the country’s international image and nation brand. Indeed, Kazakh officials threatened legal action against Baron Cohen, citing damages caused by the film’s depiction of Kazakhstan (see Saunders Reference Saunders2008).

Such tactics are also used to police the circulation of national representations at home. For instance, across the globe it has become increasingly common to accuse protesters or government critics of damaging the nation brand or the national image. Indeed, the 2014 protests in Brazil, which wracked Dilma Rousseff’s government in advance of the Rio de Janeiro World Cup, were routinely described as and, by some, condemned as a threat to Brazil’s national image and in consequence to its economy.Footnote ⁴ Such metadiscourses on nation brand value thus serve as the primary source for a broader metapragmatics that anchors distinctions between who can and cannot represent the nation in an age of nation branding.

Given the sustained social practices that produce a metapragmatics of nation branding, nation brands are best construed not as stable objects, but as ongoing projects that depend on continuous governmental and paragovernmental agency. Similarly, Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2012) points to the temporality and labor that are integral to the formulation and reflexive reformulation of any brand. Brands, under Nakassis’s analysis, are inseperable from the structures of citationality that allow them to perdure, which again suggests that brands must by understood as projects in time rather than as things in the world (see also Lury Reference Lury2004; Manning Reference Manning2010). The structure of a nation brand, then, to borrow Greg Urban’s more general argument on structure (Reference Urban2001, 32), “is a consequence of the way in which cultural elements move through time.”

In effect, then, nation-branding projects operate through the (re)production of public media and discourse, on the one hand, and the regulation and refutation of unauthorized public media and discourse, on the other. Nation-branding projects seek to entextualize (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1992; Silverstein and Urban Reference Silverstein and Urban1996), or render textually consistent and portable, a sanctioned representation of nation across public spheres while limiting unsanctioned, rival representations and recontextualizations (cf. Foster Reference Foster2007). If successful, the nation brand appears to “circulate,” which as Susan Gal (Reference Gal2007) elucidates, is a process that describes achieved instances in which some discursive stretch is reanimated in a new context and also framed as similar to (i.e., iconic of) previous moments (cf. Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1992; Nakassis Reference Nakassis2012). Such activities thus constitute the semiotic regimentation of nation brand iconicity, which works to separate and mark authorized from unauthorized representations of the nation within public spheres.

Nation Branding in Macedonia

These two currents of nation branding—the need to cultivate some distinctive consistency across public representations of the nation and the move to police unwanted representations—are both on display in Macedonia. For being such a young country—Macedonia gained its independence from Yugoslavia only in 1991, and widespread diplomatic recognition arrived still later—Macedonia has an extensive history of national promotion and nation branding. Perhaps, the first widespread and integrated campaign to draw tourism and general interest to Macedonia was sponsored by the Ministry of Economy’s Tourism Department and titled “Macedonia: Cradle of Culture, Land of Nature.” Throughout the early 2000s, the campaign was realized through a variety of promotional media—posters, video spots, brochures, booklets, and a logo—and framed Macedonia as unique destination that offered exciting heritage and history as well as impressive nature. In 2007, a government funded agency launched an economically focused advertising campaign, entitled “Invest in Macedonia,” promoting the country as a “New Business Haven” in Europe. Ads for this campaign appeared in the likes of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

In 2008, Macedonian efforts to promote and brand the country as a destination for tourism and business reached new levels with the “Macedonia Timeless” campaign (fig. 7). The campaign debuted on CNN and CNN International for the 2008 Christmas season with a highly polished video spot that was directed by acclaimed Macedonian film director Milcho Manchevski. This inaugural commercial, framed by shots of a father reading his daughter a bedtime story, presented Macedonia as a fairytale literally come to life. Stylized depictions of Macedonian folk culture, history, and natural beauty, however, quickly give way to depictions of the modern day that culminate in an energetic, symphonic concert. Several additional video spots—on nature tourism and on food and dining—followed.Footnote ⁵ As stated in the government press release prepared to accompany the debut of Manchevski’s first video, no less than Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski celebrated the video as an excellent start to “a broader project that aims to brand Macedonia, alongside representing it as a tourist destination.”Footnote ⁶ Gruevski continued that “With this video we are at the beginning of a new era in the promotion of Macedonia.”Footnote ⁷ Indeed, “Macedonia Timeless” not only accelerated state-sponsored nation branding in Macedonia, but the campaign continues into the present, having been expanded to feature Skopje 2014’s architectural additions.Footnote ⁸

Figure 7.

The Macedonia logo created for the “Macedonia Timeless” campaign. Image courtesy of the Agency for the Promotion and Support of Tourism in Macedonia.

In some sense, the explicit content or message of the media produced for “Macedonia Timeless” did not differ greatly from the “Cradle of Culture, Land of Nature” campaign that preceded them—or from any other country’s tourist-oriented celebration of rich heritage, natural beauty, and modern luxury. The campaign, and specifically Manchevski’s video spots, did however mark a substantial increase in production quality and campaign aggressiveness. This, of course, matters. Given the generic and clichéd quality of much nation brand messaging, high production values can distinguish and authenticate the promise of pleasure offered by promotional media. As Manchevski stated at the Macedonian premiere of his “Macedonia Timesless” video, “Most important to us was to make a project according to the highest standard, without apologies or excuses, to protect the fatherland with quality.”Footnote ⁹ Manchevski’s point here is astute. Nation branding inevitably works on a numerous communicative levels, serving to promote a country as tourist or business destination but also serving to demonstrate that state sponsors understand branding and have mastered its generic conventions.

Skopje 2014 thus built on preexisting Macedonian strategies to present an appealing and tourist- and investment-friendly image of Macedonia. Like the polished commercials and ancillary media that made up “Macedonia Timeless,” Skopje 2014’s new construction and public art installments were tethered to a campaign to strengthen and expand awareness of Macedonia outside the country’s borders and especially among imagined, international business and tourist publics (see Graan Reference Graan2013).Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, the sheer scale and ambition of the Skopje 2014 served as its own advertisement on Macedonia. It is fair to say that the Skopje 2014 project has done more to generate sustained international press coverage on Macedonia than any other happening since the 2001 armed conflict that had threatened the country with civil war.Footnote ¹¹ Skopje 2014—the idea and spectacle, the bronze and marble—has been hugely effective in elevating international consideration of Macedonia and in catalyzing the public circulation of Skopje 2014’s allied branding project. And, although much of the international news coverage of Skopje 2014 includes critical voices that question the project’s underlying politics and economics, it also tends to reproduce the spectacle of Skopje 2014. The curiosity of the project has fed back and fueled how the branding campaign continues to reverberate within and across the publics that it targeted.

Nation Branding and/as Publicity

As indicated by these examples from Macedonia, nation brands depend on and manifest through ongoing, coordinated but nonetheless contingent processes of participating in and across public spheres. Michael Warner (Reference Warner2002, 97) wrote in his celebrated essay on publics that, “A text, to have a public, must continue to circulate through time, and because this can be confirmed only through an intertextual environment of citation and implication, all publics are intertextual, even intergeneric.” Brands, including nation brands, must also continue to circulate over time in order to have a public. The process that is described in terms of circulation, however, consists of multiple, sequenced interventions in public spheres through which actors, of varying degrees of authority and access, reproduce and reform (parts of) brand discourses and brand identities (see Briggs Reference Briggs2005; Gal Reference Gal2007). Nation-branding projects thus seek to entextualize preferred representations of the nation and to circulate them through other’s uptake (Urban and Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Urban1996).

In short, nation-branding campaigns, like those organized around Skopje 2014, work to organize the intertextual and interdiscursive relationships that constitute brand circulation. The media and media genres used toward this end are varied but typically include print, radio, television and online advertisements; websites; billboards and brochures; and other such professionally designed media. As in the Macedonian case, government representatives often support such campaigns through public statements made at press conferences, dedications, and other such “pseudo-events” (Boorstin Reference Boorstin1961) that occasion news media coverage. Furthermore, signature infrastructural enhancements, as witnessed with Skopje 2014, can serve as media in the promotion of the nation brand.

The media that comprise nation-branding campaigns, however, not only represent the nation in question but also, in their selected combination of text and image, address specific target audiences and index preferred routes of circulation (cf. Manning and Upshivili Reference Manning and Uplisashvili2007). One consequence of this is that the media artifacts used to express nation-branding strategies tend to be remarkably generic despite their ostensible purpose to distinguish some place as a travel or investment destination (see Dzenovska Reference Dzenovska2005; Aronczyk Reference Aronczyk, Calhoun and Sennett2007). That is, the language of nation-branding advertisements often sounds the same. The photographs and videos—of notable historical sights, lovely beaches, and fine dining—tend to look the same. The logos and slogans, excepting difference in country name, appear interchangeable. Such generic similarities indicate how branding professionals as a whole draw on well-worn tropes that serve to identify campaigns as tokens of the nation-branding type and further, to limn itineraries of circulation within and across elite publics.

Such characteristics of nation-branding campaigns confirm the reflexive world-making character of public discourse. To again draw on Warner (Reference Warner2002, 114):

Nation-branding campaigns, which form an organized set of public discourses, strive to do just this. They mobilize an array of semiotic resources, the pragmatic meanings of which serve to call forth, that is, to index and interpellate, their desired publics in pursuit of participants’ uptake and citation.

Coordinated, serial interventions into a public sphere thus constitute a primary activity of nation brand management, beyond the overarching formulation of brand strategy. Advertisements, press releases, news reports, magazine features, public statements, and so on, all contribute to produce a dense, to degrees, intertextual and interdiscursive field that serves to advance a particular brand identity for the nation. The resultant intertextualities ideally reach a level where they are reinforced by consumers who neither recognize nor attribute the authorship of the brand consultants but nonetheless contribute to the branding process by faithfully recontextualizing sanctioned brand messages via instances of unwitting endorsement.

I encountered one mass-mediated example of this in early 2015. As part of Macedonia’s ongoing project of nation branding, the local wine industry has been vigorously promoted as a one of the country’s luxury offerings (see Otten Reference Otten2013). Although I had read about the state-sponsored efforts to draw attention to Macedonian wines and had encountered promotional media celebrating Macedonian wine, I was nonetheless surprised to see Macedonia ranked at number ten on the New York Times list of “52 Places to Go in 2015” with its wine industry singled out as a major attraction. Upon reflection, the New York Times ranking surely evidences the journalist’s uptake of promotional discourses on Macedonian wine. That is, on some level, the journalist’s endorsement of Macedonia channeled a more broadly circulating marketing discourse on the Macedonian wine industry although this point of origin was erased in the New York Times list. The result, a prominent review in a major news daily that recapitulated but failed to attribute branding discourse, was a perfect example of how nation brand campaigns, by design, aim to perpetuate themselves across public spheres.

Given how nation-branding campaigns seek to coordinate such reanimations of brand message and to specify how the brand will circulate in advance, we can follow Celia Lury (Reference Lury2004, 3) in conceiving of branding as a feedback process whose aim “is to make the brand itself dynamic, to put brand into process through the management of change.” My argument here is that this conception of branding and nation branding must recognize these practices as forms of publicity. To produce a “dynamic brand,” nation-branding campaigns strategically permeating public spheres with a coherent set of media artifacts and communications and by soliciting uptake by others, consumers and commentators alike. In consequence, I contend, the semiotic regimentation of the nation brand entails a larger project of regulating publicity, that is, of how texts circulate within and across public spheres.

Semiotic Regimentation and Nation Brand Publicity

In the current age, a country’s success in the effort to develop a preferred brand identity underlies broader assessments not only of a country’s brand equity but also of its soft power. The purported value of each of these things is such that the strategic communication represented by nation branding now appears as a lasting component of transnational politics and trade. Consequently, the investment that governments have dedicated to national promotion and branding projects often motivates a deeper concern over how representations of a place travel across public spheres and across cultural difference (cf. Allison Reference Allison2009).

Especially when appealing to international publics, the practices and discourses that formulate the nation as a brand must compete with a wide variety of alternative and in many instances better-established discourses on nation-states, for example, as a polity governed by some sort of constitution and social contract; as stereotyped by some national essence; as destiny; as marked by a (positive or negative) historical event. That is, the already established and heterogeneous discursive field into which nation-branding projects launch inevitably complicate, and perhaps push back against, the brand identity advanced through nation-branding campaigns.

The uneasy relationship that exists between nation brands and other narratives on the nation is especially acute due to the fact that nation-branding campaigns target international publics. As Brian Larkin (Reference Larkin2009) has argued in an essay on national allegory, the international circulation of media artifacts often produces interpretations that draw on stereotypes of the places that the media artifacts are deemed to represent. In the original debate that Terry Eagleton and Aijaz Ahmed waged over the concept of “national allegory,” of particular concern was how stereotypes of “the Third World” influenced the reception of literary works by authors from non-Western countries. Larkin, however, reinterprets their exchange as a meditation on the stakes of texts’ international circulation, a process that has only been accelerated by increased economic globalization and the rise of digital media. As Larkin (Reference Larkin2009, 165) writes, whether or not a media artifact is taken as allegorical of a place, “is not tied to the imagination of the writer or director but is derived externally from the movement of the text in and out of different publics.” Given the perceived political and economic stakes of a strong national image, officials from around the world increasingly issue responses, even in the form of legal threats, to media artifacts that in the course of their international circulation are seen as detrimental to the national image or nation brand. Larkin’s case is Slumdog Millionaire, which, similar to Kazakh reactions to Borat, produced anger among Indian officials who took issue with how the film represented India. In such cases, unsanctioned representations, it is feared, might be of an unsavory or misleading character that audiences will nonetheless treat as authentic representations of a place, a consequence that might negatively affect a country’s reputation among international publics.

As nation-branding projects reveal, government officials not only agonize about the risks associated with how media artifacts circulate internationally, they also attempt to steer media trajectories both through proactive messaging and also by policing, to the degree that it is possible, how or whether unwanted representations might circulate. Officials will rebut and disparage unwanted representations of the nation or even answer them with a countercampaign.Footnote ¹² As described above, sometimes legal action is threatened. Such tactics function to create impediments to the repetition of unwanted national representations in future contexts. Efforts to formulate the nation as brand must thus carefully appropriate, obscure, reframe and limit alternative discourses on the nation-state. Such practices reflect the broader concern with controlling the intertextual and interdiscursive environment in which a brand circulates.

Efforts to control the public circulation of national representations that are unwanted from the perspective of nation-branding projects also extends into the domestic public sphere. Nation branding, in this light, is not only about the expert production of marketing emblems and devices but also about “harmonizing” representations of the nation with the official brand presentation. While there is a wide range of practice toward this end, such a project is at its core both disciplinary and targeted at policing the public sphere. In Macedonia, such efforts have been realized in two major ways, namely, through policies and programs to recruit the public to participate actively in Macedonia’s nation-branding campaigns and through an intensification of efforts to limit the broadcast of voices critical of the Macedonian government.

Especially in the wake of Skopje 2014, government-sponsored efforts to interpellate the people of Macedonia as representatives and exponents of the nation brand have ranged from the subtle to the explicit. On a general level, from the 2010 press conference that announced the project onward, government officials have consistently presented Skopje 2014 as economic development plan that will catalyze tourism and foreign investment and as a strong public statement on Macedonian identity. Such rhetorical framings, I argue, sought to recruit Macedonian citizens to support and participate in the project’s nation-branding mission. To do otherwise, according to this framing, would be to appear as antigrowth and anti-Macedonia.

Perhaps not surprisingly, however, given the dramatic scale of Skopje 2014, the project nonetheless proved to be polarizing within Macedonia (see Graan Reference Graan2013; Muhić and Takovski Reference Muhić and Takovski2014). Over broadcast media, on social media, and during interpersonal conversations, furious debates erupted over the project following its February 2010 announcement. Tellingly, while critics of Skopje 2014 would commonly attack the project as expensive totalitarian kitsch, project supporters would routinely decry project opponents as enemies of the Macedonian nation-state, using such terms as traitors (predavnici), freaks (izrodi), communists (komunjari), and Soros-ians (sorosidii).Footnote ¹³ Such epithets were not used lightly but rather bespoke the ferocity of disagreement over the project. The result of such polarization, as Maja Muhić and Aleksandar Takovski (Reference Muhić and Takovski2014, 150) argue in their recent analysis of the public debate on Skopje 2014, was a field of argument “metaphorically structured on binary oppositions such as ‘builders/destroyers’, patriots/betrayers’, ‘totalitarians/democrats’, ‘amateurs/experts’.” The hostile nature of the debate over Skopje 2014 and the use of antagonistic epithets both signal some Macedonians’ uptake of Skopje 2014’s nation-branding project and also illustrates the aggressive way in which public discourse on the project has been both policed and dismissed.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the controversy over Skopje 2014, the Macedonian government has used some high-profile strategies to recruit citizens to participate in the country’s nation-branding project, most notably through a series of public service announcements (PSAs) that were produced for the Macedonian Tourism Board and broadcast in 2012. Boldly, the PSAs offered Macedonians lessons on how to conduct themselves in the presence of foreign tourists, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek manner. The central conceit of the PSAs is that of an Australian adventurer in the mode of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin has arrived in Macedonia to explore the local wildlife. Through the five commercials broadcasted as part of the campaign, the Australian guide, speaking in English that is subtitled in Macedonian, encountered a variety of Macedonian “endemic species”: the Macedonian taxi driver, the Macedonian bed and breakfast owner, the lakeside waiter, the market vendor, the alpha male.Footnote ¹⁴ In each case, these figures are represented as wild, dangerous, and grotesque creatures around whom one must demonstrate caution. The message of the commercials, directed to Macedonians, was that the behaviors represented by such stereotypic figures were ones to be avoided when interacting with foreign tourists.

The structure of each PSA commercial was the same. They open with the Australian adventurer using English to narrate an encounter with a Macedonian “endemic species,” as if the commercial was a segment of the adventurer’s own television show. For example, in a hyperbolic and goofy manner, he relays his brush with the Macedonian bed and breakfast owner in her “native habitat,” that is, the home where she lets rooms to visitors. Similarly, he details the characteristics of the Macedonian lakeside waiter, whom he discovers reading a newspaper in the kitchen while ignoring his customers (figs. 8–9). The commercials then fade to a slide in Macedonian that lists the “species’” defining characteristics. The Bed & Breadfast Owner is described as: becomes agressive in the presence of foreigners, only speaks Macedonian, agressively protects her territory. The Lakeside Waiter is characterized as: needs at least twenty minutes to bring coffee, never smiles, his natural enemies are tourists (figs. 10–11). Following these species summaries, a voiceover in Macedonian says: “Don’t allow this to be the picture of Macedonia. Let’s help to quickly extinguish these endemic species. Good hosts for good tourism.”Footnote ¹⁵ Each commercial ends with the species profile being replaced by the campaign logo and the seal of the Macedonian government, which sponsored and here endorses the commercial (fig. 12). The overriding message of the campaign is summarized in the tag line incorporated into the logo “You Are the Face of Your Country!”Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 8.

A still from Macedonian Tourism Board’s “You Are the Face of Your Country” campaign. The Crocodile Hunter figure discovers a Macedonian Bed and Breakfast Owner “in the wild.”

Figure 9.

A still from Macedonian Tourism Board’s “You Are the Face of Your Country” campaign. The Crocodile Hunter figure discovers a Macedonian Lakeside Waiter “in the wild.”

Figure 10.

The profile of the Macedonian bed and breakfast owner, one of the country’s “endemic species.” A still from Macedonian Tourism Board’s “You Are the Face of Your Country” campaign.

Figure 11.

The profile of the Macedonian Lakeside Waiter, one of the country’s “endemic species.” A still from Macedonian Tourism Board’s “You Are the Face of Your Country” campaign.

Figure 12.

The “You Are the Face of Your Country” campaign logo, with the official seal of the Government of the Republic of Macedonia beneath it. This slide concludes each of the commercials produced for the campaign.

Despite the humorous premise of the commercials, the intended uptake was clear: everyone ought to contribute to the country’s efforts to develop the nation brand and attract tourists and this demands policing how one presents oneself in public and toward tourists. That is, since “you are the face of your country,” you are responsible for representing it to targeted outsiders in a cultured and attractive fashion. Instrumental in this thinking was the assumption that nation brands, as social technologies, demanded active maintenance and expansion and that a national population as possible representatives of the nation were bound to serve nation branding. An idiom of belonging based on legal identification, that is, the being of a citizen, was leveraged into responsibilization for state-sponsored nation branding (cf. Allison Reference Allison2009).

The highly polished, high-concept PSA commercials, which were broadcasted on Macedonian television and the internet, evidence the lengths that the Macedonian government went to recruit its citizens to participate in its nation-branding effort. While jocular in nature, the commercials nonetheless beckoned Macedonians to take up projects of self-reform in service of a tourism promotion agenda. The comments posted to the YouTube page for the bed and breakfast owner spot suggest just this. While some commentators protested that the English-language parts of the commercial would only perpetuate negative images of Macedonia among foreign tourists (see also Petruseva Reference Petruseva2014), most commentators celebrated both the humor of commerical but also pointed to the truth assumed to underlie the spots, namely, that Macedonians must improve how they present themselves to tourists. To share one representative example, a person commenting under the username RedNax_Ela clearly offered that, “What kind of picture we produce for Macedonia depends mostly on us—no one “Macedonia Timeless” commercial can develop tourism like we can!!!”Footnote ¹⁷ In this way, the spots drew on the social terrain that Michael Herzfeld (Reference Herzfeld1997) captures with the term “cultural intimacy,” that space of national self-understandings that are considered both sources of potential embarassment before outsiders but also as grounds for pleasurable and irreverant critique of power (see also Shryock Reference Shryock2004). The commercials reproduced several long-standing stereotypes of Balkan sociality (i.e., gruffness, pushiness, and other signs of uncultured or “peasant” upbringing) in order to encourage citizens to set them aside when in the company of foreigners.

The Macedonian Tourism PSA campaign thus constituted a metapragmatic commentary on public behavior in an era of nation branding. Certain manners of interaction—whether gruff, pushy, or monolingual—were captioned as antithetical to the massive effort to revitalize the national economy through Skopje 2014 and its associated nation-branding initiatives. The commericals said: do not be an unpleasant curiosity to foreign tourists but instead present a welcoming, urbane and accommodating persona. Like the Skopje 2014 project itself, which sought to create a shiny, “European” facade for the city center, these commercials too requested that Macedonians put their most “civilized” face forward under a presumably normative gaze of European cultural superiority. To be recognized as desireble to outsider tourists demanded that one (and all) police his or her own behavior.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Macedonian government also launched many other media campaigns that targeted public behavior. As journalist Ana Petruseva (Reference Petruseva2012) sarcasticly wrote in an op-ed piece on the Macedonian Tourism PSA spots, “Dozens of promotional videos and different campaigns have been done since 2006” that seemingly exist, “to advertise how hard [the government] is working, which we all know it does 24/7, but mostly it is to tell its humble citizens the difference between right and wrong, and most importantly educate Macedonians how to behave, as they don’t seem to fit the high standards of the government.” Such campaigns—and related public ordinances on littering, panhandling, loitering, alcohol sales, and so forth—engaged the citizenry in the general upkeep of public space as a way to support Skopje 2014 and the government-driven programs to attract tourism and investment.

Governance and the Nation-Branding Regime

Nation-branding campaigns, when they are construed as warrants for the governmental and paragovernmental policing of the public sphere, constitute more than a marketing strategy, they form a domain of governance. By conceptualizing nation-brand image as a collective, public good, state logics of nation branding thereby authorize state officials and allies to protect the integrity of the nation brand. If the Macedonian case is at all representative, this mandate has significant bearings on the organization of politics and public communication. As several, recent scholars of nation branding have argued (e.g., Dzenkovska Reference Dzenovska2005; Jansen Reference Jansen2008; Volcic and Andrejevic Reference Volcic and Andrejevic2011), nation branding anchors a decidedly nondemocratic conception of the nation, especially because of the communicative space that it authorizes. Nation branding posits not a public sphere attuned to liberal notions of deliberation, but rather elevates “message” (cf. Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003), the marketing imperative for strategic coherence and reflexivity within public communication, as a regulating ideal. One must stay on message or risk damaging the nation brand and the public good imagined by it.

Said otherwise, nation branding authorizes a metapragmatics of brand message that is called on to ascribe moral statuses to how people speak in public. The failure to speak publicly in ways that enhance the brand makes one construable as contrary to the public good and the public interest. Thus, in the Macedonian case, where brand equity and national integrity blurred in the public presentation of Skopje 2014, criticism of the project might earn one the public label of traitor, communist, Soros-ian and freak. As mentioned, given the heated and polarized reactions to the project, such epithets constituted a serious rhetorical attack on individuals’ membership in the nation-state. Similarly, failure to inhabit hospitality industry ideals of politeness might slot one in the company of the peasant grotesque as a liability to the nation brand. Such public practices of typification constituted ways in which the underlying metapragmatics of brand message was called upon to sanction public behavior in the milieu of the spectacular Skopje 2014 and its nation-branding aims. Such discourses, in regimenting the indexical meanings of public words and actions, thus served as mechanisms that functioned to regulate how and whether one could participate in the Macedonian public sphere and behave in the country’s public spaces.

A related example in which a metapragmatic discourse on brand was taken up when sanctioning public behavior occurred when I helped to organize an online petition though Amnesty International–USA following an act of arson committed against an LGBT center during the 2013 Skopje Pride Week. The petition demanded that the Macedonian government condemn the attack and bring the perpetrators to justice, something that the government had shown little intention of doing. I sent the petition to several friends and acquaintances in Macedonia. One acquaintance, who works as a journalist, responded to me when I contacted him about the campaign, by saying that while he had “nothing against gays and lesbians,” he was frustrated by how LGBT activists in Macedonia had brought negative attention to the country, “hurting its image.” I responded by stating that it was not the activists that were hurting Macedonia’s image but the country’s violent homophobes and a Macedonian government that failed to protect all of its citizens. Sadly evident in the journalists’ interpretation of the events of Skopje Pride 2013 was a metapragmatics that marked LGBT activism as inadmissible within a regime of nation brand message.

Other strategies purportedly used to by the Macedonian government to control the country’s image had a more menacing character and amounted to forms of media control, intimidation and censorship. My evidence here is of the journalistic and anecdotal sort since to my knowledge no one has been able to conduct scholarly research or a thorough investigation on the matter.Footnote ¹⁸ But, numerous press accounts and human rights reports have documented how the government has used its relative monosopy power in news advertising to quiet critical voices in the press (Jakov Marusic Reference Jakov Marusic2013). Allegedly, government officials threaten to reduce or end the government’s purchase of advertising space—an act which given the thin profit margins of news operations can upend financial models—unless editorial policy quelled criticism of the government. The government also targeted Macedonia’s leading independent (and most watched) television news network A1 under tax evasion laws, which resulted in the closure of the network and its print publications (Reporters Without Borders 2011). Furthermore, the several public critics of the Gruevski government that I have interviewed while conducting research on Skopje 2014 all shared their own stories of political intimidation, which they interpreted as efforts to silence their public opposition to Gruesvski and Skopje 2014.

Taken together, the Gruevski government’s tourism readiness campaign and increasing media control constituted concerted efforts to manage both public space and the public sphere in Macedonia. Across speech and media genres, government representatives, including the prime minister himself, produced and voiced a metadiscourse on Macedonian publicity that subordinated public speech and conduct to dictates of the state’s nation-branding projects. As in the corporate world, citizens were encouraged to “live the brand,” that is, to take up, celebrate, and represent the range of associations targeted as part of the branding campaign (Aronczyk Reference Aronczyk2013). Failure to do so could result in marginalization or even penalization. By entextualizing this nation-branding imperative across discursive and media space, government agents enforced a brand metapragmatics with the resources and policing power of the state. The net effect was a social condition akin to a panopticon, but where the figure of an imagined “Western” tourist, rather than a prison guard, was thought to inhabit the watchtower.

As Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (Reference Silverstein and Urban1996, 11) write, there is a “strategic political importance” to “asserting one metadiscursive interpretation over another. Politics, can be seen, from this perspective, as the struggle to entextualize authoritatively, and hence, in one relevant move, to fix certain metadiscursive perspectives on texts and discursive practices.” As I have argued here, Skopje 2014 and its accompanying discourses on nation brand constituted a multipronged effort to control the metadiscursive interpretation of public communication. The ongoing controversary around Skopje 2014 makes clear that this effort has very much been a struggle but one that has indeliably marked political and social life in the country in parallel to the indeliable marks that Skopje 2014 has left on Skopje’s built environment. To extend the argument of James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (Reference Ferguson and Gupta2002), states are not only powerful sites and objects of cultural production but further the struggle over authoritative representation of the state can constitute the very heart of politics.

The specific way in which agents within the Macedonian government coopted an outside-facing nation-branding strategy for a domestic project of social reform and social control likely marks an extreme case. But, similar examples span the globe, from New York and Chicago to Dubai and Delhi, especially ones in which policing powers are used to remove and even jail groups (e.g., protestors, the homeless) that are deemed by governing powers to be disruptive to the tourist- and commerce-focused experiences (see Collins Reference Collins2008). Such nation branding regimes operate by normalizing a metapragmatics of brand message in order to exact increasing forms of social control, typically in the service of elite capital.

Skopje 2014 Critics and a Counterpolitics to Brand

Despite government and allied efforts to police the Macedonian public sphere according to a metapragmatics of brand message, the Skopje 2014 project has been subject to immense criticism within and without the country. From the first signs of the government’s plan to remake Skopje’s center and Macedonia’s brand in 2009, there have been concerted efforts by NGOs, student groups, and alarmed citizens to challenge the political, economic, and aesthetic logics of what became the Skopje 2014 project (see Janev Reference Janev2011; Mattioli Reference Mattioli2014; Muhić and Takovski Reference Muhić and Takovski2014). International press coverage of the project has also expressed concern over the historical narrative enshrined in the project’s buildings and monuments as well as over Gruevski’s tightening grip on power in the country (e.g., Brunwasser Reference Brunwasser2011). Such critical and often vociferous reactions to Skopje 2014 and its nation branding aims speak to Nakassis’s point (Reference Nakassis2013) on the unruliness of social actors within branding regimes as well as the instability of the brand token, type, and ontology calibration. Thus, while supporters of the Skopje 2014 work continually to portray the project as building a positive nation brand for the country, criticism and reportage on the project have recognized and decried it as a token of other types, such as, political propaganda, megalomania, and kitsch (Graan Reference Graan2013).

Macedonian critics of Skopje 2014 have pursued a variety of tactics to protest the project, from public demonstrations and published polemics to cartoon caricatures and performance art (see Janev Reference Janev2011; Mattioli Reference Mattioli2014; Muhić and Takovski Reference Muhić and Takovski2014). Explicitly, these political displays indict the nationalist politics that Skopje 2014 is seen to represent, question state priorities and expenditures, criticize the Disneyland-ification of Skopje wrought by the project, and to fight to preserve the openness of public spaces. From the perspective developed here, however, they can also been seen as efforts to resist the state-led regimentation of the Macedonian public sphere. As Francis Cody (Reference Cody2011, 45) has argued, within contemporary political formations, “sovereignty is asserted in the very capacity to regulate limits of public display” (cf. Gupta Reference Gupta1995; Ferguson and Gupta Reference Ferguson and Gupta2002). The public criticism delivered by Skopje 2014 opponents, insofar as it challenges the Gruevski government’s sovereign claim to regulate publicity, is thus nothing short of an insurrection against Macedonia’s nation-branding regime. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Skopje 2014 critics’ refusal to abide by a metapragmatics of brand message is hinged to a larger critique of the public good offered and celebrated by the nation-branding state.

As I have elaborated elsewhere (Graan Reference Graan2013), in one way, opponents of Skopje 2014 have recapitulated a logic of nation branding when criticizing the project. In lambashing Skopje 2014’s collection of neoclassical statues and buildings as kitsch and as second-rate copies of styles from elsewhere, critics have charged that the Skopje 2014 project turns the country into a laughingstock, thereby harming the country’s image. In some sense, the metapragmatics of brand message articulated through the Skopje 2014 project created the conditions for a political critique in kind, anchoring the negative evaluations produced by project critics. This line of criticism has constituted a direct indictment of the Macedonian government’s flagship project to build a central public good—the nation brand—for the Macedonian nation. It questions the government’s ability to deliver on the professed economic and symbolic goals of the project.

Yet on a deeper level, project critics have challenged the very quality, utility, and necessity of the nation brand as a public good. Thus, both published critics and also casual, everyday commentators have protested the exorbitant costs of the Skopje 2014 project—estimated at 500 million euros in an impoverished country of 2 million inhabitants—as well as its opportunity costs, that is, its redirection of investment from other sectors. These critics have been angry to see vainglorious statues to the Macedonian nation when schools and roads are crumbling and much of the population remains mired in conditions of un- or underemployment. They have argued for investment in infrastructure and education over investment in abstract and intangible brand value. In short, this collection of activists and concerned citizens challenges the apotheosis of neoliberal market naturalism that the statutes and structures of Skopje 2014 have enshrined.

For example, one of the first and most influential public statements against the Skopje 2014 focused on the project’s consequences on public space and democratic decision making on the public good. Titled “Against the Wall of Kitsch,” the critique was written and circulated by a group of architecture students from the University of Skopje who called themselves the “Prva Arhi Brigada” (First Archi Brigade). While, as the title of the polemic attests, the students did take issue with the Skopje 2014 project aesthetics, they couched this critique of kitsch within a broader discussion of how Skopje 2014 would transform the public good. The essay portrays Skopje 2014 as enacting a lamentable politics of enclosure that would divide and limit public space just as it also reframed the public good in the narrow terms of national promotion (see Prva Arhi Brigada Reference Gelevski2010). The authors thus interpret Skopje 2014’s ambitious building plan, in which centers of public gathering (e.g., arts buildings, the Old Turkish Market) would be obscured by symbols of state power (e.g., court buildings, the national archive, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), as a nondemocratic colonization of public space that furthermore displaced more pressing citizen needs and concerns. In contrast, they call for public consultation to address the city’s and the citizens’ existing infrastructural needs in a transparent manner.

In making such arguments, opponents like the Prva Archi Brigada produced an alternative political and moral discourse on the Macedonian state in explicit contrast to Skopje 2014 and its nation-branding ends. Perhaps recalling the promise of Yugoslav state socialism, when state resources are not invested in abstract branding schemes and their trickle-down entrepreneurialism but were instead remembered as being invested in infrastructural projects and worker capacities, critics articulated a different notion of the public good from the one presented though the nation-branding regime. At the heart of this opposition is thus not only a reaction critical of the political project represented by Skopje 2014 but also the political economic vision it casts for the Macedonian state and its subjects.

Akhil Gupta (Reference Gupta1995, 384) wrote, “Representations of the state are constituted, contested, and transformed in public culture,” which is nothing less than “‘the site and stake’ of struggles for cultural meaning.” As I have argued here, analysis of public culture in these terms demands an account of publicity and the metapragmatic commentaries through which struggles over state representation take place. The example of the opposition to Skopje 2014 makes clear that, even in the context of the state regulation of the public sphere, counterrepresentations of the state can ground alternative visions for how polity and society should intersect and around what definition of the public good they should organize.