Nation Branding for Survival in North Korea: The Arirang Festival and Nuclear Weapons Tests

The article problematises a popular view in nation branding literature that equates nation branding with states’ attendant advertising campaigns. Instead, this article adopts a broader perspective that nation branding can also operate as a policy aimed at enhancing the sense of ontological security among states and as a practice to strengthen the position of the ruling regime by targeting particular audiences within a broader ‘strategic narrative’. From this perspective, this article aims to shed new light on non-liberal capitalist countries’ – specifically North Korea’s – attempts at nation branding policies in terms of various nation branding strategies. In so doing, Clifford Geertz’s anthropological concept of ‘theatre state’ is introduced as an important metaphor to broaden the existing understanding of nation branding by highlighting the unique characteristics of North Korea’s policies of nation branding and nation building. It is argued that great national spectacles such as the Arirang Festival and military demonstrations provide North Korea with a useful platform for participating in the identity competition among other nation states, as well as in the fierce recognition game against the rest of the Korean national community. Obviously, these strategic performances have contributed to communicating with the outside world, deliberately seeking more respect from others, but have simultaneously operated as nation building processes. Therefore, this work concludes that such staged events are sophisticatedly designed to enhance North Korea’s complex interest of nation branding, and, more importantly, argues that techniques and practices of nation branding are neither historically new nor confined to Western liberal capitalist regimes.     

National Meaning-Making in Complex Societies: Political Legitimation and Branding Dynamics in Post-Apartheid South Africa

How does nation branding reflect state–society relations and more pertinently, what does it reveal about the way political power is legitimated by a given state and why? This question seldom receives attention in the rapidly expanding scholarship on nation branding. This article examines and interprets national branding processes in post-apartheid South Africa within the context of larger efforts by political elites to legitimate the new state and society and to address some of the complex legacies of the apartheid past. These efforts targeted domestic and international audiences in distinctive ways, intertwined foreign and nation-building policies, and sought to communicate key ideas about South Africa as state and nation and about the state’s role in the wider world order. The article considers how different groups of state-linked actors participated in exercises of legitimation and the discursive mechanisms that were relied on. Three such mechanisms are highlighted: (i) the construction of a distinct African-style modernity (here termed Afro-modernity); (ii) claims of South African exceptionalism articulated in boosterist branding campaigns; and (iii) expressed, variously through foreign policy signals, diplomatic posturing and hallmark events, the projection of a national role conception as leader on the African continent and of the Global South. These compound political processes had ambivalent and incomplete outcomes, however. This article considers why and what the implications are for the South African state and its society.     

瑞典在提高能源效率方面的政策举措

在全球能源需求日益增大的形势下,提高能源效率成为当前解决能源问题与控制碳排放的关键。瑞典政府高度重视能源利用效率,在工业、建筑及相关服务业、交通运输业这三大主要能源消耗领域,制定与实施了一系列提高能源效率的政策举措并取得了显著成效。如:制定高能耗企业能源效率提高计划,提高企业节能意识;通过出台新的建筑规章及推出各类财政补贴政策等,充分调动建筑及相关服务业的积极性;支持可再生能源的开发利用,鼓励高能效机动车的研发生产;等等。通过介绍与分析这些政策举措,旨在为我国能源战略的实施提供一定借鉴。     

A methodology to position nations’ efforts in a technology domain with a patent network analysis: case of the electric vehicle domain

When a nation is making strategies in a technology domain, it makes sense to know where the nation is currently in the domain and to know where other nations are as well. This paper presents a method to position nations’ efforts in a technology domain. The method builds a network of International Patent Classifications (IPCs) based on their co-occurrence in patent applications and applies an index called the Revealed Patent Application Advantage (RPAA), which reflects where nations’ efforts have been spent in a technology domain denoted as the IPC network. We applied the proposed method to position the efforts that have been spent in the electric vehicle (EV) technology domain by mainland China, Germany, Japan, and the United States.     

Defence and Promotion of Desired State Identity in Russia’s Strategic Narrative

This article examines how the Russian state promotes and protects its preferred self-identity, using the conceptual framework of ‘strategic narrative’. Nation branding practices, including state-funded ‘mega-projects’ like the Sochi Olympics, have contributed to the narrative by characterising Russia as a welcoming, attractive destination. However, a more salient feature of Russia’s strategic narrative is intense ‘anti-Western’ and ‘anti-American’ political and media discourse, formulated to defend against rival, threatening narratives projected from other countries. Through analysis of official statements and state television content, this article demonstrates how determination to protect ‘great power’ and ‘European’ identities underlay Russia’s strategic narrative in 2014. It considers responses which the narrative has prompted, arguing that desired results in domestic reception have been achieved at the expense of unsatisfactory results internationally. Heavy-handed attacks on the identities of other states boost collective self-esteem among Russian citizens, but they fail to produce – and arguably obstruct – desired responses among foreign audiences.     

Reading Brand Africa Geopolitically: Nation Branding,Subaltern Geopolitics and the Persistence of Politics

In 2010, the ‘Brand Africa’ initiative was launched with the mission to transform perceptions of Africa from a continent of calamities into one of promising economic prospects and entrepreneurial populations. This transformation, ‘Brand Africa’ claims, is one where Africans take their representation from the hands of foreigners and make, through a new image, their own (hi)story. In this respect Brand Africa can be interpreted as a form of subaltern geopolitics seeking to subvert dominant geopolitical knowledge and to fight established structures of domination. However, the article argues its subversive elements are limited, especially when compared to the historical discourses of decolonial pan-Africanism upon which it draws for legitimacy. Indeed, while appropriating this legacy Brand Africa offers up a very different geopolitical vision of possible/desirable African futures. It is argued that this may be accounted for by understanding the extent to which the Brand Africa initiative appears embedded within a South African national context and its own geopolitical ambitions evident within its own nation branding project. What this highlights in turn is that the emancipatory potential and assumed synergies between national and supranational branding central to the Brand Africa initiative are not as unproblematic or uncontested as claimed.     

Eisenhower's economic strategy: Promoting growth and personal freedom by creating conditions favorable to the operation of a market-based economy

Here is considered the substance and goals of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's economic initiatives. The intention of these initiatives was to shift the relationship between public and private efforts in a way that would strengthen the underpinnings of the market-based and market-directed entrepreneurial economy, as well as enhance personal freedom. Also considered are the success of the initiatives, how the economy fared under the initiatives, and how the prospect for growth and improvement in the economy has been borne out since Eisenhower's administration.     

Eisenhower's economic strategy: Promoting growth and personal freedom by creating conditions favorable to the operation of a market-based economy

Here is considered the substance and goals of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's economic initiatives. The intention of these initiatives was to shift the relationship between public and private efforts in a way that would strengthen the underpinnings of the market-based and market-directed entrepreneurial economy, as well as enhance personal freedom. Also considered are the success of the initiatives, how the economy fared under the initiatives, and how the prospect for growth and improvement in the economy has been borne out since Eisenhower's administration.     

The Nordic Model on the Global Market of Ideas: The Welfare State as Scandinavia’s Best Brand

This article analyses the contemporary deployment of the Nordic welfare state model as a centrepiece of Nordic competitive identity and strategic communication on the global market of ideas. First, it looks at the interrelated phenomena of global competition, competitive identity and region branding. Second, it studies the interplay between Nordic transnational public diplomacy and national public diplomacy of individual Nordic countries, in particular Sweden, on the one hand and international media outlets’ reporting on the Nordic countries on the other. In analysing this cross-fertilizing genre, the article identifies how the welfare state is being repackaged for export along with a set of “progressive values” which are coded as specifically “Nordic.” The article discusses (1) the interaction between outer images and inner visions; (2) the place and significance of the Nordic model, progressive values and the welfare state in today’s Nordic branding; and (3) the possible function of outward competitive identity as a kind of “compensatory imagination” directed inward as well as outward.     

Are auction revenues affected by rising art buyers’ premia? The case of early American art

The steady rise in the premiums charged to art buyers at auction (above hammer price) has been underway since 1992. This article, using a stable and bounded sample of repeat purchase of American works created before 1950, reveals that this tact has reduced hammer prices for that art. However, renewed and hyper-competitive efforts to bring more and higher quality art to market by the two main houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have resulted in general profitability. Nevertheless, we calculate that a rise in buyers’ premia at Sotheby’s, a publically traded company, has reduced revenues and profits below their potential in the absence of such increases.     

Brand Turkey: Liminal Identity and its Limits

Since the 2000s, Turkish policymakers and private sector interests have combined representations of Turkey as both Western and Eastern with a branding approach to identity in foreign policy, trade and investment promotion, and cultural sector activities. This article analyses how the commodification of its liminal identity as a dual identity allowed Turkey to invoke different aspects of its identity in the West and the East in ways that catered to both audiences and enabled the pursuit of different political and economic objectives. However, the article also notes how this branding strategy was limited by the national identity debates and dominant geopolitical discourses that continued to situate the West and East as mutually exclusive and binary opposite identity markers. Overall, the case of Turkey underscores the complex relationship between branding, identity, and discourse, which has thus far received scant attention in the literature.     

So Close,So Far. National Identity and Political Legitimacy in UAE-Oman Border Cities

ABSTRACT

Since the accession of Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the independence in the early 1970s, the building of both a state apparatus and a nation has lain at the heart of the political projects of respective rulers of these countries to assert their legitimacy and control over their respective territory. This issue of the mutual relationship has been particularly crucial, given the two countries’ shared modern history, and the tribal and ethnic proximity between inhabitants living across the new international boundary. The study of the two border towns of al-Ayn (United Arab Emirates) and al-Buraymi (Oman) provides a unique window onto unfolding patterns of the construction of political sovereignty in post-colonial states and the link between the building of national identity and the physical demarcation from the (br)other.

These two towns existed as a single oasis prior to the 1970s. However, the act of drawing an international demarcation across the oasis has led to the sprouting of new dynamics resulting from the increasing difference of social and economic development. This article argues that the adversarial political and economic trajectories of al-Ayn and al-Buraymi have been epitomising the evolution of the relationship between the two countries. While the UAE authorities have been pushing for a stricter regulation of the flow of migrants, it has been in the interest of Oman to keep fluidity in order to alleviate the social and economic challenges on its side of the border. This disparity of interests has impacted bilateral political relationships, as the Omani authorities have had to face the question of the strong extraversion of northern Oman towards the UAE globalised cities and the possibility that these areas could escape Muscat’s allegiance. Growing suspicions and mistrust in both capitals have been accompanied by renewed questioning related to respective national identities, especially when dealing with the relation to the ‘brother.’     

Goodwin’s structural economic dynamics: Modelling Schumpeterian and Keynesian insights

In this paper we pursue the work started jointly with R. Goodwin in the 1990s. Goodwin’s later work went very much in the direction of modelling Schumpeter’s insights into structural and technological transformations in the context of disaggregated models while allowing for non-full employment outcomes and macroeconomic cyclical patterns to develop alongside these transformations. In a series of papers we have followed up this work for closed and open economies, drawing out in particular the implications of structural transformations for macro-distributional dynamics and effective demand problems. This has been analysed for advanced and catching-up economies and their interdependencies on the global stage. We shall review our modelling efforts in this respect and trace these back to Goodwin’s life-long preoccupation with synthesising disaggregated (linear) modelling with macro-dynamic analysis.     

Inclusive healthcare and the political settlement in Cambodia

Over the past 15 years Cambodia has made significant strides in expanding effective access to free healthcare for the poor, thanks largely to ‘Health Equity Funds’ (HEFs), a multi-stakeholder health-financing mechanism. HEF operators have helped expand access, incentivise health staff, and lobby on behalf of poor patients. However, despite their successes, they have been unable convincingly to address some of the deeper-seated problems of the Cambodian health system, such as under-resourced facilities, underpaid, poorly qualified staff and a burgeoning private sector. This paper explains this state of affairs as a product of Cambodia's ‘political settlement’, in which relatively successful multi-stakeholder initiatives exist as ‘islands of effectiveness’ in a sea of rent-seeking and patronage. While such islands may currently be the best solution available for the poor, the deeper problems are unlikely to be solved without a shift in the political settlement itself.     

Securing Japan in the ‘West’: The US-Japan Alliance and Identity Politics in the Asian Century

Why has the military dimension of the US-Japan relationship remained the central point of reference for Japanese foreign relations, despite the demise of the Soviet Union? Why has Japan, deepening economic interdependence notwithstanding, remained politically distant from East Asia? Based on analysis of statements by Japanese and US political elites and academics regarding the US-Japan alliance, this article argues that the rise of China, coterminous with the rise of ‘Asia’, challenges the notion of the ‘West’ as, according to standards of industrial modernity, a superior social and political order. These moving ideational boundaries question Japan’s position as the most advanced Asian nation and member of the (Western) international society of states. Therefore, the US-Japan alliance has since the mid-1990s become increasingly important for securing Japan in the ‘West’ and the ‘West’s boundaries in East Asia.     

Is EU Cross-border Cooperation Ethical? Reading Cross-border Cooperation Through the ‘Needs for Roots’ by Simone Weil

This article applies Simone Weil’s philosophical concept of ‘uprootedness’ and the ‘14 needs of the soul’, set out in her 1943 book ‘The Need for Roots’, to the empirical case study of the border ‘Italy-Slovenia’ considered within Programme 2007–2013. A multi-dimensional qualitative approach that relies on an extensive literature, consultation of primary sources and semi-structured interviews carried out between October 2013 and February 2014 has been adopted.

The article questions why does cross-border-cooperation often fail to develop an ‘integrated’ border territory and a cohesive ‘moral’ community? Conversely, why does social fragmentation emerge from cross-border-cooperation? It is argued that while the EU (Commission) has focused on initiatives and projects in order to achieve regional, economic border integration, it has instead failed to develop an ‘ethical framework’ for promoting a ‘rooted’ integrated borderland and a cohesive moral community.     

ADMINISTRATIVE CHANGE IN THE EU: A CROSS‐COUNTRY EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE CONTEXTUAL DETERMINANTS OF NPM REFORM RHETORIC

Framed within the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), structural reforms in the EU aimed at modernizing the public administrations of Member States (MSs) have long since been a priority area of the EU's economic policy. Since the 1990s, these reforms have been sharply intensified across European countries with the declared purpose of enhancing economy, efficiency and effectiveness in their national public sectors’ organizations. In line with the European Commission's recent research initiatives in search for novel quantitative data on NPM in the EU, this paper studies European parties’ NPM reform rhetoric. More specifically, it investigates the MSs’ institutional, economic and political context within which parties have declared their intention of reforming national administrative systems. Thus, it sheds light on the MSs’ domestic factors that are associated with the diffusion of the NPM values across the political discourse of EU's national parties.     

Land Restitution in Post-Communist Bulgaria

While international scholarship has generally been laudatory of Bulgaria's land restitution efforts, painting them as part of an overall success story and yet another example of the country's sharp break with communism, a real analysis of Bulgaria's so-called 'success story', particularly by the legal community, has been sorely lacking. This author has found that in many ways the approbation Bulgaria has received from the international community for its restitution efforts is more a reflection of the Bulgarian government's willingness to confront the problem than its ability to effectively deal with it. Through the use of documents, court records, and interviews conducted by the author, this article endeavours to document the problems and shortcomings of a system that is considered such a courageous and worthy pursuit that few have been willing to criticize it. Essentially, this paper attempts to answer the question, not of whether Bulgaria's restitution effort was able to do some good, but whether it could have done--and could still do--much better.     

The End of ‘Central Europe’? The Rise of the Radical Right and the Contestation of Identities in Slovakia and the Visegrad Four

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the effects of the migration crisis and the parallel rise of right wing parties on national and regional identities in Slovakia and the broader subregion of the Visegrad Four. It argues that the recent right wing political discourse around migration has been reshaping the meaning of ‘Central Europe’ as a normative project and an identity shared by the V4 countries. The post-Cold War narrative of Central Europe was a story of ‘returning to the West’, which in practice meant that normative conformity with the West was a precondition of membership in key Western institution. The situation has changed visibly after the migrant crisis, as the V4 political elites have now been constructing new identities, in partial juxtaposition with Western European liberalism. These new identities favour a culturalist, conservative interpretation of the nation and reject humanitarian universalism, epitomized by the European Union’s decision to welcome the refugees. This arguably devaluates the previous notion of ‘Central Europe’ as a region that seeks to identify itself firmly with the West. Slovakia is chosen as a case study because of the recent success of the radical right in the 2016 parliamentary elections. The article concludes that although the situation of being structurally locked into the EU does not allow the V4 countries to openly challenge its main principles, the V4 political elites pursue a counter-hegemonic strategy, subverting and resignifying some of its key political notions. One should, therefore, speak not of an end of ‘Central Europe’ but rather of its evolution into a new, hybrid stage, where normative conformity and identification with the West will only be partial. The article makes use of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and related concepts as well as insights from constructivist geopolitics literature to track articulatory practices of the regional establishments. The study relies on evidence from recent political campaigning in Slovakia as well as official Visegrad Group documents from 2015 to 2016.