All the World’s a Stage: Promotional Politics and Branded Identities in Asia

ABSTRACT

This article highlights key questions raised by the growing concern for global competitiveness and promotional politics in contemporary Asia. Global politics is increasingly governed by promotional imperatives and in the last two decades it has become a common practice for governments to engage in nation branding. Asian states have been particularly eager to implement such promotional strategies, as their rapid development in the last decades has increased their international presence and the overseas expansion of their national corporations. Why and how do Asian states promote themselves? Where and how do promotional imperatives interact with traditional state policies? How are national identities produced, reproduced and challenged through promotional practices in Asia? This article introduces a series of three articles that underline the significance of these policies with regard to renewed, market-based forms of nationalism in the region. It highlights the way questions of image projection within a global capitalist order are becoming crucial for major emerging Asian economies such as China as they integrate and seek to reshape the global political economy. Finally, it considers how, in several regimes in the region, nation branding and the necessities of image projection serve as powerful governance tools to recreate apolitical versions of national identities that serve domestic political purposes.     

The rediscovery of ‘the national’ in the 1990s – contexts,new cultural forms and practices in reunified Germany

This article examines how and in which societal and political contexts nationhood is expressed and symbolised in reunified Germany. This ‘rediscovery’ of nationhood since the 1990s mixes new and old motifs of the cultural repertoire of ‘the national’ for different purposes. Three main contexts triggered a rediscovery of ‘the national’ after 1989: reunification, immigration and the retrenchment of the social state. I argue, by analysing ethnographic material and political discourses, that these contexts, on the one hand, rearticulate old forms of ethnic and cultural nationalism and, on the other hand, create new images and symbols of an open civic society and immigration country. There are ‘playful’ forms, such as campaigns of nation branding, that symbolically include the ‘productive’ and ‘useful’ immigrant into the national project. Moreover, such campaigns serve to legitimatise the downsizing of the national state that – according to a neoliberal attitude – relies on a new community spirit of entrepreneurial, ‘activated’ citizens who ‘help themselves’. Thus, focusing on these pluralised renationalisation processes makes evident how polyvalent ‘the national’ still is. It can be employed by those who attempt to ‘reunite’ the East and West Germans, by businesses to sell their goods and ideas and by almost any political orientation, be it right‐wing or left‐wing.     

论和谐民族观

构建社会主义和谐社会必须高度重视民族问题。中国共产党关于构建和谐民族关系的一系列重要观点,构成了我们党和谐民族观的核心内容。构建社会主义和谐社会,必须大力倡导并树立社会主义的和谐民族观。     

Film policy in Japan – an isolated species on the verge of extinction?

This article examines changes of the place that film has occupied in the public policy of the Japanese government, including not only cultural policy per se, but also industrial and economic policy. After describing some of the distinctive features of the Japanese film market, this paper discusses the inadequate basis of the government’s cultural policy for film. Film in recent years has received some attention as an industry with export potential, particularly with the rise of ‘Cool Japan’, the policy of promoting Japanese culture abroad as a tool for economic and diplomatic aims. In the chequered history of economic growth strategies and nation branding of recent years, the film industry has had some good news but received no serious attention either as a sector with economic significance or as a form of national culture.     

一个民族,两种想象:马来人与华人关于马来西亚民族建构问题争论之述评

结合部分学者的研究成果,对马来人和华人在马来西亚民族建构问题中存在着的民族概念的界定、民族建构的途径等诸多分歧和争论进行了梳理和评析。马华双方都认为马来西亚是马来西亚人的马来西亚,而马来人从历史的角度出发,认为马来西亚民族应以马来人为核心,以马来文化为特征,分散的马来西亚社会应当用马来人的历史、文化和语言来整合;华人则从公民权的角度出发,认为马来西亚文化是在吸收各个族群的文化之后才形成的,不论哪个族群的公民都应当享有平等的权利与义务,在此基础上,各个族群才能融合。马来西亚民族建构争论和研究中出现的一些问题,有待深入探讨。     

South Korea’s North Korean Image Problem: Human Rights under the Spotlight

ABSTRACT

The 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea (UN COI) had a decisive impact on South Korea’s approach to North Korea’s human rights abuses in the several years following its release. This article interprets moves within South Korea to support the UN COI’s recommendations as taken in the interests of ontological security, or a stable sense of identity, which has also driven the state’s broader initiatives on image management and nation branding. It extends the boundaries of nation-branding research by considering why and how a state may adopt policies that enhance its moral visibility and reputation in world affairs. It considers how a positive reputation is enhanced by demonstrating good international citizenship, promoting the visibility of state identity parameters beyond its culture and core industries. This article interprets the South Korean government’s efforts to act on North Korean human rights following the UN COI, as well as the significance of being seen to be doing so at home and abroad as security-giving behaviour asserting its moral authority in relation to North Korea. It explores how a longstanding policy of relative silence on North Korea’s human rights record acceded to identity-driven pressures arising from the UN COI and influencing South Korea’s international image-management strategy between 2014 and 2017.     

Manoeuvring men: masculinity as spatially defined readability at the grandes manoeuvres of the Belgian army, 1882–1883

This article uses the case study of the Belgian grandes manoeuvres of 1882 and 1883 to explore the ways in which self-defined ‘all male’ spaces can contribute to the study and deconstruction of historical masculinities. Using the manoeuvres of the Belgian army at the end of the nineteenth century as a theatre of (military as well as civilian) corporeal and discursive practices, the simultaneous enactment of masculinity and nation is analysed. The material spaces in which these military exercises took place are understood as contingent creators instead of passive containers of masculinity: that is, rather than as a passive background to soldiers' movements, the champ de manoeuvres appears as an active stage, aiding the construction of a gendered military identity, but also challenging dichotomous understandings of gender. Likewise, the gaze upon both landscape and soldiers by different audiences plays an active part in the story of the construction of masculinity and nation: the act of recognition, performed by male and female civilians, during and after the manoeuvres was crucial for the continuous repetition of the discourse that created and upheld notions of ‘man’ and of ‘Belgium’.     

Pop-culture diplomacy in Japan: soft power,nation branding and the question of ‘international cultural exchange’

This paper critically examines the development of what is known as ‘pop-culture diplomacy’ in Japan. In the postwar era, the country’s cultural diplomacy was propelled by the necessity to soften anti-Japan perceptions, notably in Southeast Asia. In the late 1980s, the popularity of Japanese media culture in Asia began to attract the attention of policy makers, while subsequent globalized practices of soft power and nation branding gave greater emphasis to the use of media culture to internationally enhance the image of the nation, which has meant the promotion of ‘pop-culture diplomacy’ and, more broadly, ‘Cool Japan’. It is argued that pop-culture diplomacy goes no further than a one-way projection and does not seriously engage with cross-border dialogue. The Japanese case also shows that pop-culture diplomacy hinders meaningful engagement with internal cultural diversity and suggests the necessity of taking domestic implications of cultural diplomacy seriously.     

Myths and the political use of religion in Christian Democratic culture

Abstract

In this essay, the author will attempt to analyze the overall relationship established between the party of Christian Democracy (so named for its affiliation with a traditional religion) and the phenomena of the sacralization of politics that have so profoundly shaped the character of mass parties in the twentieth century. The quest for consensus led the Catholic party to adopt a new language, based on mythical thinking and profoundly indebted – in content and mode of communication – to the experiences of totalitarianism. The active rivalry with political religions marked, both in the phase of development and in the process of communication, the forms of mass political expression of Christian Democracy. De Gasperi's proposal concerning the definition of new identities and political affiliations, both on the national level and on the broader Western level (both in European and Atlantic terms) was the product of a unique ideological development in keeping with the requirements of modern mass politics.     

皖北乡土因素与淮系集团的发展

皖北乡土因素在淮系集团的发展和崛起过程中发挥了重要的影响.皖北贫困、动荡的社会局面、错综复杂的三缘关系和刚劲剽悍的民风推动了淮系集团在军事方面的崛起,而落后的文化教育水平则限制了淮系集团在政治方面的发展.乡土因素成为淮系集团呈现军强政弱特点的原因之一.     

抗美援朝的战略决策在政治与军事互动中的得与失

抗美援朝战争的特殊性决定了其政治与军事的互动作用与以往战争相比更有特殊性的表现 ,如政治对军事的主导作用增强 ;军事行动所追求的目标已不再是以全歼敌人并摧毁国家机器为目的的全面胜利 ,而是在力争维护国内国际和平前提下取得打退敌人有限胜利等。由于这些特殊性 ,使我党在以政治和军事互动作用为基础的抗美援朝的战略决策上有得有失