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Nation Branding: A Useful Category for

International History

Jessica Gienow-Hecht

To cite this article: Jessica Gienow-Hecht (2019) Nation Branding: A Useful

Category for International History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 30:4, 755-779, DOI:
10.1080/09592296.2019.1671000

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DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT
2019, VOL. 30, NO. 4, 755–779
[Link]

Nation Branding: A Useful Category for International

History
Jessica Gienow-Hecht
John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, PL Music and Human Rights, Co-Coordinator RU
Borders, Excellence Cluster SCRIPTS, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

ABSTRACT
This analysis suggests nation branding” as a useful category for
the study of international relations and international history. In
the past 15 years, entrepreneurs have invented nation brand-
ing as something new and modern, and governments the
world over have signed up for cost-intensive campaigns to
brand their countries’ images abroad. However, practices of
nation branding have been around much longer. Indeed, the
history of nation branding avant la lettre needs writing. That
history provides a major encasement for the multitude of
individual studies dedicated to soft power, public diplomacy,
and cultural relations across time and space. This analysis looks
first the at current experts and discourses on nation
branding. Second, it sketches nation branding’s emergence
from the end of the early modern period to the present.
Third, it suggests a number of historical examples to inspire
future research.

“Are you not a Great Wizard?”

“Hush, my dear”, he said. “Don’t speak so loud, or you will be overheard
– and I should be ruined. I’m supposed to be a Great Wizard”.
“And aren’t you?” she asked.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 19001

Frank Baum’s ‘Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ is believed by his subjects to be

a frightening creature, a beast with ‘a head like that of a rhinoceros, only
there were five eyes in its face’, ruling over the realm of Oz, comprising four
‘lands’ and the capital, the Emerald City. Yet in reality, the Wizard is any-
thing but powerful: a little old man, with a baldhead and wrinkled face, an
ex-balloonist and circus ventriloquist by training, whose claim to power rests
on a technological device that makes subjects and foreigners believe he is
whatever they expect him to be. Baum’s tale highlights a key issue in

CONTACT Jessica Gienow-Hecht [Link]@[Link] John F. Kennedy Institute for North American
Studies, PL Music and Human Rights, Co-Coordinator RU Borders, Excellence Cluster SCRIPTS, Freie Universität
Berlin, Lansstraße 7-9, Berlin 14195, Germany
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at [Link]/fdps.
© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
756 J. GIENOW-HECHT

international history: the intricate link between a state’s domestic and foreign
self-representation or – in contemporary terms – ‘nation branding’.
The Wizard’s long-time legitimacy rests on his ability to brand himself as
strong, powerful, and terrible by endlessly repeating that same message, yet
adapting it to the individual needs of his visitors. What states like Oz need to
legitimise their existence is ‘recognition’, and they often seek to achieve this
by means of projection. States require a perception as authentic performers
on the international stage to play any significant role. If they fail to achieve
internal and external recognition, they do not exist. If, on the other hand,
they are successful, they can achieve credibility, influence, and power. States
need credibility at home and abroad to sign treaties, draw borders, and
administer social security.2 There is, in other words, an intense interplay
between internal and external projection. Managing that projection is pre-
cisely what experts in nation branding do.
Originating in the world of agriculture, the ‘brand’ describes a complex
mixture of concrete and abstract elements designed to market products,
services, or communications. The brand lives in the perception of the
audience: focusing on feelings, observations, and mental associations, brands
reflect a primarily emotional relationship built by brand owners with pro-
spective customers.3 ‘Branding’ constitutes a set of practices and tools
designed to generate a positive image of the product, whether a detergent
or a car, and trigger a ‘desire’ to ‘have’ it either by way of consumption or
ownership. In one view, branding creates distinctiveness, ‘the application of
a story to a service or a brand. It is the story that makes one identify or desire
a brand’.4 Nation branding is distinct from nationalism and nation building
even though it refers to a similar catalogue of reference points.5 Indeed,
nation branding does not seek to turn people into citizens of a membership
state or enhance citizens’ sense of patriotism.6 Instead, it seeks to tackle the
question of how to market the nation both at home and abroad.7
Nation branding grew out of earlier activities related to the so-called
‘country of origin effect’ – or ‘made-in image’ – that, since the 1960s, studied
how consumers’ general perceptions of a country – national characteristics,
economics, politics, history – collectively create an overall image linked to the
products of that country.8 Specific nation branding practices emerged in the
late 1980s and 1990s, influenced by the increasing corporate presence –
notably in advertising and public diplomacy – in the statecraft of Margaret
Thatcher along with Tony Blair’s subsequent attempts to optimise that
presence. In 1998, an independent British marketing and policy advisor,
Simon Anholt, coined the term ‘Nation Branding’ in an effort to measure
and increase countries’ reputation by focusing on distinct characteristics.9
Simultaneously, experts from the world of business and science devised
new strategies of image management for individual countries: in 1997, British
political scientist Mark Leonard, then affiliated with the think tank, Demos,
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 757

and later chairman of the European Council for Foreign Relations, published
the BritainTM pamphlet.10 He asked ‘What are the tools for shaping an
identity’ of a nation stuck with the image of a ‘backward-looking has-been,
a theme park world of royal pageantry and rolling green hills, where draughts
blow through people’s houses’. Leonard’s pamphlet coincided with the
launch of one of the first nation branding campaigns under Blair’s early
New Labour government, nicknamed ‘Cool Britannia’ – a pun on ‘Rule,
Britannia’ – designed to project a new sense of pride over British accom-
plishments in the world of music, media, and the arts.11 Wally Olins, whose
brand consultancy was involved in the Labour government’s Cool Britannia
campaign, further developed the concept of nation branding whilst advising
countries that struggled with either negative images or lack of visibility,
including Poland, Northern Ireland, and Lithuania.12
Nation branding’s contemporary goals are to improve international cred-
ibility, attract global capital, increase international political influence, tour-
ism, and investment, enhance nation building, solicit and retain talent, and
reverse negative conceptions that might occur alongside international rating
downgrades.13 To this end, experts employ a tripartite practice: selection –
seek characteristics that define the nation; projection – develop mechanics of
implementation; and reception – studying target groups hoping to change
perceptions. First, they study foreign and self-images of individual states and,
in particular, the – occasionally starkly differing – discrepancy between the
two. Second, to bridge the gap between foreign and self-perceptions, experts
pick specific tools from the advertising industry – that is, ‘branding’ specific
characteristics. Finally, they employ strategies to ensure recipients’ ultimate
permanent recognition of the product, including the continuous repetition of
specific peculiarities – ‘unique selling points’ – of the product/state and the
creation of a distinctive ‘corporate identity’ where assistants and employees
are required to ‘live’ the product/state and, indeed, live up to their best
reputation.14 Thus, Iranian self-representation typically celebrates the coun-
try’s cultural achievements such as Persian poetry and garden architecture,
the palaces of Isfahan, or the Tehran bazaar. Foreign perception, in contrast,
tends to focus on contemporary religious culture and the repressive policies
of the Guardian Council. To reconcile the two, the London-based firm
‘Brand Finance’ has developed a strategy focusing on the country’s ancient
treasures but also its strategic location, natural assets, and sophisticated
population.15
Today, nation branding has become central in the context of cultural
policy amongst political decision-makers, cultural diplomats, bureaucrats,
and marketing and advertising experts.16 In July 2008, Google identified
130,000 entries dedicated to the term; by October 2017, the number rose to
over one million. Policy-makers from Finland to South Africa, from the
Ukraine to Australia, are consulting creative managers, advertising agents,
758 J. GIENOW-HECHT

and designers to spruce up the international image of their countries, all

under the umbrella term ‘nation branding’. Large advertising agencies juggle
entire countries as clients, the image of which they are supposed to embellish,
repackage, and then globally advertise. Thus, the firm Saatchi & Saatchi has
been the advertising consultant for the new Republic of Kosovo, the People’s
Republic of China, and Israel; Saffron Brand Consultants markets Poland,
whilst Interbrand sells India and Estonia. The current boom has also given
rise to new advertising firms focusing exclusively on nation brand manage-
ment, often in regions that raise significant ethical questions about the
responsibilities of nation branding consultancies: the Irish firm,
ImageDiplomacy, for example, now brands Myanmar with the slogan ‘Let
the Journey Begin’, notwithstanding the current plight of the Rohingya
population. In 2005, Anholt founded the ‘Nation Brand Index’ – since
2008, ‘Anholt-Gfk Nation Brands Index’ – that updates countries on
a regular basis regarding their international perception. The polls reflect
annual interviews with nearly 20,000 people in 20 countries, encompassing
more than 40 questions about their perceptions of 50 countries concerning
tourism, investment offerings, culture, educational prestige, people, govern-
ance, economy and business environment, products and services, immigra-
tion appeal, overall favourability, and familiarity, as well as other matters.17
The recent rise of the concept of nation branding in politics and advertis-
ing has initiated a flood of academic and semi-academic research projects.
European and American think tanks and academic institutes have developed
numerous information and research projects to study how states represent
themselves and communicate with others, and how they can improve their
political credibility, diplomatic co-operation, trade opportunities, and eco-
nomic investments. These include the Research Centre ‘Nation Branding’ at
the Hochschule RheinMain in Wiesbaden, the Association for Place
Branding and Public Diplomacy, and the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy,
both in Berlin. Journals such as Place Branding and Public Diplomacy
complement this output.
Scholars trained in fields such as communication studies, anthropology,
political science, and marketing studies have critically assessed the political
context and impact of international nation branding campaigns.18 To some,
contemporary nation branding advances a neoliberal vision of individual
nations in the context of the global market. It seeks to correct the gradual
decline of national structures – including identity and autonomy – by
focusing on political attractiveness, cultural peculiarity, and economic auton-
omy. In fact, nation branding guards and supports the essential and territor-
ial characteristics of a given national identity whilst simultaneously
indicating the state’s compliance with the needs of ‘transnational corporate
capital’.19 Others have discovered nation branding as a consideration in
diplomacy, international politics, and ‘postmodern power’. Thus, one can
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 759

point to nation branding’s appeal notably in the context of the United States’
declining international image and the war on terror.20 A Political Science
argument is that nation branding responds to the late modern pressure on
foreign policy decision-makers to heighten a sense of national dignity,
‘making citizens feel better about themselves’ by performative means rather
than conventional tools such as militarism.21 Others believe that nation
branding has produced some powerful examples of good practice, including
a number of awards, websites, and blogs highlighting the co-operative power
that branding can bring to national and regional communities.22
Where did all of this come from? Why does there now exist a world of
nations branded by experts and marketed by advertising means? To most
scholars, this is a novel phenomenon. It represents either an unprecedented
opportunity to form partnerships focusing on community-based values and
enterprises yielding more political, diplomatic, environmental, or corporate
responsibility; or, it constitutes the outgrowth of the marriage between
corporatism and the post-Cold War neoliberal state.23
To date, there has been no history of nation branding beyond regional and
temporal confines.24 It is necessary, therefore, to take the issue with the
current group of experts because there are plenty of indicators, historical
and historiographical, that the term has a history avant la lettre at the
intersection of culture and international history. The nation-state represents
a multi-sited assemblage of agencies blurring the lines amongst rulers,
government, and bureaucratic apparatuses, on the one hand, and civil
society, private enterprise, and associations, on the other.25 Nation branding,
in turn, reflects states’ timeless ‘dash for cash’ under stress – the quest for
money, talent, and people in competitive places along with the constant need
for growth. Even the reasons typically cited for why nations engage in
branding today are well known to foreign relations experts: they include
international competition and differentiation; the worry that a good reputa-
tion yielding influence in the past may change for the worst in the future; and
the desire to be seen as dealing effectively with foreign issues by one’s own
population.26
Discussion of these motivations often occurs in the context of something
labelled the ‘cultural turn’ in international history. As a result of the palace
revolution taking place in the field of diplomatic and international history in
the past 20 years, perceptions, racism, gender, ideology and milieu, medical
innovations, human rights, tourism, and the role of non-governmental orga-
nisations have morphed into standard themes. Today, many international
historians share the conviction that the state is one of many actors, and
governmental policy one of many forms of liaison and interaction. Stressing
subjectivity, identity, and informality, the cultural turn focuses on the ana-
lysis of culture as an essential condition in the relations between and amongst
760 J. GIENOW-HECHT

two or more countries, either as a milieu, an instrument, or a motivation for

intentions, actions, and consequences.27
Much of this research, delineated in countless case studies, has focused on
the twentieth century. Indeed, a central tenet in the scholarship remains that
after the Second World War, in an effort to win the East-West conflict, both
superpowers embarked on fierce propaganda battles designed to convince
people in their client states and beyond of the superiority of their respective
ideologies.28 But how do these superpower information battles relate to
earlier as well as contemporary instances of soft power and cultural diplo-
macy? Most scholars will agree that there is no easy answer due to the
seeming diversity and difference amongst stories and over time. The hall-
mark of twentieth century cultural diplomacy is the state, and a significant
part of the existing research has focused on the post-1945 state-run nature of
cultural policies. Non-state actors may have served as sources of inspiration
and collaboration but not as equal collaborators and rarely as independent
actors.
Yet three things complicate the tale of the preponderant state in cultural
diplomacy. First, studies on superpower client states indicate that even when
attached to one or the other side of the Iron Curtain, individual countries
displayed great diversity in their cultural diplomacy; many, indeed, assigned
the state to the back seat. Thus, in the absence of any official diplomacy
between West Germany and Poland after the Second World War, the
Catholic Church and media worked hard to mend broken ties between
both states. Others, in turn, explicitly ignored ideological orders from
Washington and Moscow. In Hungary, officials strove to renew pre-war
ties to the West by autonomously resorting to informal cultural contacts,
despite the country’s political affiliation with the Soviet Union.29 Again
others powers such as Canada enrolled a host of different domestic actors
and engaged in modes of nation branding without paying much attention to
the superpower conflict.30 Second, beginning in the 1950s, more than 100
new nations tried to put themselves on the map by constructing individual
images complete with folklore, flags, food, and invented tradition. New states
like Morocco or South Korea now competed for recognition, tourism, and
investment. For example, by stressing the uniqueness of its art and role in the
history of human civilisation, Nigeria strove to emphasise its national pecu-
liarity to avoid the stigma of being simply one of the Third World’s impo-
verished countries.31 Finally, for all we know about cultural relations prior to
the First World War in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the state did not
direct most of those relations. Cases differ in terms of decision-making
processes, self-representation, organisational forms, goals and efficiency,
and how the resulting campaigns influence and relate to state policy. They
also depart from the model of cultural performance and diplomacy asso-
ciated with the Cold War.32
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 761

To grasp this complexity and compose a history of place-and-people

identity management, nation branding needs inserting into the picture.
Nation branding’s terminology and its orientation towards marketing tech-
niques seem to link it to the late twentieth century nation state. Yet two
things marked cultural international relations long before the 1990s and
beyond the state, and both can be directly linked to branding. First, promul-
gating conceptions about particular empires and nations already became an
intricate part of ‘relating’ in the early modern period. Second, keenly aware of
the link between cultural representation and political legitimacy, rulers
increasingly sought the support of collaborators treating nations like pro-
ducts for sale.

Between the late middle ages and the nineteenth century in Europe the nation, and
then the nation-state, became an increasingly important focus of faith and trust
amongst ever wider sections of the population. It fortified inherited symbolic
motifs through a national language drawn from the dialects of its ethnic core …
while an expanding educational system brought more citizens into contact with
them”.33

During the period spanning from the late early modern period into the
nineteenth century in the Atlantic world, understandings of nation and
power increasingly shifted from the personal, individual – the dynasty, the
king – to abstract concepts of rule – the authorities, the government. Such
transitions were often gradual – yet essential for promotional operations that
resemble today’s nation branding campaigns. Early modern governments in
the Netherlands, France, Germany, and the United States in particular
devised a variety of branding techniques to put their nations on the map
and, concurrently, assert influence and hegemony. The Prussian king, in one
instance, promoted his land as a haven for refugees in the 1740s to attract
Protestant refugees from Salzburg – even though he simultaneously kicked
out Mennonite families to make room for the newcomers.34 In the 1770s and
1780s, the American revolutionary government sent Benjamin Franklin and
John Adams to Europe to brand the new nation abroad: Franklin’s promo-
tion of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence in France, Adams’s
diplomacy in the Netherlands, and the creation and dissemination of the
stars and stripes banner all contributed to the visualisation of the new nation
abroad. On a more personal level, Franklin – not known as an avid hunter in
his hometown, Philadelphia – made a habit of attending festive dinners
dressed in a hunter’s cap complete with fur and tail to spread an image of
himself and the nation at large, and in stark contrast to French elegant
society.35 Thomas Jefferson, in turn, first as ambassador and later as pre-
sident, arranged for the international exhibition of giant moose and masto-
don skeletons to portray the United States as home of the large rather than
the small – as French philosophers had been arguing.36
762 J. GIENOW-HECHT

The geographical and financial expansion of capitalist markets created

realities of geopolitical international exchange, visions, and representations
of the nation superseding smaller territorial entities.37 This change included
a qualitative transformation with significant implications for the develop-
ment of nation branding. Abstract rather than individual power provided
inexplicit points of identification and distinction to the nation. Abstract
power also emphasised the nation’s meaning for people inside and outside
of it, making it more marketable to both. Self-representation embedded both
an image designed for external audiences as well as domestic understandings
in the nation;38 the two mutually enforced one another. Such visions con-
nected culture, economics and national display, and advertising and market-
ing emerged amongst the ‘new social technologies’ to steer such efforts.39
Throughout the nineteenth century, a broad array of informal actors
played a central role in nation branding at home and abroad, often to the
extent that the lines between domestic and foreign audiences increasingly
blurred. In a gesture to current-day South African nation branders, many
actors perceived branding abroad at least partly if not primarily as an exercise
in rallying home audiences. This mêlée included patriotic associations, busi-
ness people, intellectuals, clergymen, aristocrats, poets, and educators, all
driving the movement of ideas, people, and capital.40 Banks, unions, compa-
nies, women’s and housewives’ associations, educational institutions, political
parties, and governmental agencies now formed part of a network weaving

Figure 1. Nation Branding at the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park during the
Great. Exhibition in 1851. [Link]
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 763

the fabric of the nation, shaping the imagined community and promoting its
image locally and internationally. European musicians, painters, and aca-
demics travelling abroad consciously advertised the image of their nations,
including those wiped off the map. During his world tours, renowned pianist
Ignacy Paderewski pitched himself as both the musical incarnation of and
lobbyist for a new Poland.41 Manufacturers and businessmen used interna-
tional fairs in Europe and the Americas as an ultimate exercise in branding,
connecting commercial consumer goods and national display.42 Friedrich
Krupp’s exhibit of what was then as the largest steel cannon in existence at
the World Exposition of 1893 underwrote Germany’s claim as a world power.
Industrial exhibitions and world’s fairs enhanced opportunities of commu-
nication between networks of non-state nation branders, on the one hand,
and the international target public, on the other.43 They served as points of
identification for national audiences whilst simultaneously impressing inter-
national visitors with national accomplishments.44
The state did not endow these nineteenth century associations and private
actors, yet they all had a profound diplomatic effect: they addressed the
discrepancy between foreign and self-perceptions of nations in the world.
They constituted the core of cultural diplomats and nation advertisers in the
nineteenth century. Their goals were diverse, ranging from the expansion of
German Kultur abroad to Japan’s self-modernisation programmes triggered
by the black ships. Yet their individual intentions are secondary; every one of
them acted in the interest of the nation and its policy-makers, whether
a dynasty, empire, or parliamentary democracy.
Nation branding may assist in understanding various forms of self-
representation in history that other concepts overlook. Nation branding
seeks to boost the legitimacy and attractiveness of a country in the world.
Formal or informal actors use strategies of brand management to boost the
image of an appealing actor for future collaboration. Ideologies may differ
and even be controversial. Collaboration may entail economic exports, for-
eign investments, political trust, tourism, and other forms, yet nation brand-
ing consults existing images and viewpoints as starting points. From that
point, the political, legal, geographical, and cultural structures of a state and
its society find themselves used and incorporated to boost – or recuperate –
a national image.
The nation branding approach enables study of the interplay, competi-
tion, and confrontation between state and non-state actors concerning
national self-representation since at least the revolutionary period.
Indeed, many patriotic organisations of the nineteenth century were deeply
nationalist and dedicated to exporting a positive image of the homeland
but not tied to their respective state governments. In Germany, the
Allgemeine deutsche Schulverband [General German School Association –
ADSV], founded in 1881, purposely and explicitly strove to expand
764 J. GIENOW-HECHT

‘German cultural space’ by educational means. The ADSV’s public debates,

published newspaper articles and pamphlets, and engagement in
Hungarian educational affairs – notably its protest against local language
laws – nearly destroyed official relations between Hungary and Germany.
Here, two brands of Germany competed for recognition abroad: the state
as represented by the Reich government and its bureaucratic apparatus
distinct from civil society, and the nation as an international actor
embedded in the association’s activities. Officials in Berlin and ADSV
members repeatedly clashed over their respective visions of the nation,
both seeing themselves as the ultimate representatives of Germany. More
examples exist elsewhere in Europe: in Britain, Cecil Rhodes single-
handedly created a prestigious study programme for foreign students
aimed at enhancing foreign elites’ appreciation of the Empire and creating
a transnational Anglo-Saxon leadership caste that would lead the world.45
In France, patriotic media expounded on the significance of ‘Frenchness’,
calling for a blockade of the ‘Germanisation’ of the world without paying
much attention to diplomatic approval.46
Such non-state activism deeply worried governments. Whilst they appre-
ciated non-state individuals and private organisations’ expertise and inde-
pendence – after all, the latter required neither governmental funds nor
administrative input – they saw with concern how these very actors trans-
formed into self-appointed diplomats in their own right. Foreign ministry
officials throughout Europe in particular increasingly dreaded that private
actions could interfere with state policy and interest: groups such as the
ADSV seemed to work hard to realise their own political agenda whilst
simultaneously endangering diplomatic relations.
Nation branding’s accentuation of actor heterogeneity helps to grasp
this messy relationship between the public and private, notably the
potential for domestic conflict in the struggle for self-representation.
Different groups of actors fought over national profiles and who should
do the profiling: whose version of the nation to incorporate into the
image of the nation abroad? Individual policies and perspectives often
collided and conflicted with each other as well as with foreign percep-
tions. Private actors, in particular, often threatened to transform minor
diplomatic disputes into a deadly-serious international conflicts in which
the honour and image of the nation was at stake, and in which they had
a calling to save the nation’s image through essays and personal
appearance.47 Whilst grasping the challenge, officials could do little to
stop non-state activities. Lack of state activism always meant lack of state
control. It, in turn, posed a challenge to the state because, eventually, the
state had to react to the consequences of such non-state actions. Such
consequences could mean political alienation, international tensions,
antipathies, and armed conflict.
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 765

The quintessential watershed in the history of nation branding for most of

Europe and parts of Asia and the Americas occurred during and after the
First World War; by 1918, the state began increasingly to control channels of
international cultural communications and displayed a permanent willing-
ness to monitor, control, and correct. Now, the representation of the nation
became a principal task of governmental agencies throughout Europe, North
America, and even Asia. Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, China, France, the
United States, and other Powers fashioned divisions endowed with the
management of cultural relations and the promotion of a positive image in
the world.48 These divisions’ job was to both refute existing stereotypes and
centralise control. Beginning at the end of the First World War, British
administrators and propagandists in the ‘Overseas Information Services’
fought veritable image battles. Agencies such as the Foreign Office News
Department and the newly created British Council along with the nascent
BBC Empire Service pitched programmes to engage in the ‘projection of
England’ and refute totalitarian propaganda with the help of posters, press
advertisements, exhibitions, display material, lectures, leaflets, broadcast
talks, and film. Founded in the 1920s, an ‘Empire Marketing Board’ was
designed to sell ‘the idea of Empire production and purchase’, as Leo Amery,
the Dominions secretary, put it, and ‘make it live as a society for mutual help,
a picture of vivid human interest as well as of practical promise’.49 Elsewhere,
the creation of interwar offices such as the Kulturabteilung in the Auswärtiges
Amt or the United States’ ‘Office for Coordination of Commercial and
Cultural Relations’ amongst the American republics all reflected the
enhanced interest in national image management on the part of officials in
modern states.
Propagandists in authoritarian states such as the Third Reich, Japan, and
Italy likewise devised advertising campaigns and transformed into brand
articles complete with public orchestrations, mass mobilisation, jingles, and
gigantic advertisements featuring leaders and artefacts as brand icons.50 In
Spain, for example, the Caudillo, Francisco Franco, invested heavily in the
inter-continental branding of Spain as a tourist destination full of folklore,
including flamenco-clad women and bullfights as well as old castles and
cathedrals harking back to the time of the Spanish Reconquista. Franco’s
thinking was both cunning and strategic: whilst a visit by the Spanish dictator
in Western Europe was unthinkable, Spanish cultural self-representation
flourished due to contacts with private actors and advertising agencies.
Such informal channels enabled the dictator to win recognition and influence
amongst democratic nations along with foreign currency investment.51
Why did state governments become interested in nation branding after
1918? First, during the war, administrators came to believe that their laissez-
faire attitude in the field of culture prior to 1914 had created more antagon-
ism than exchange. The German Empire, for one, had entrusted much hope
766 J. GIENOW-HECHT

and responsibility in the hands of non-state actors travelling abroad. German

professors lecturing for a semester at vanguard institutions such as Harvard,
Johns Hopkins, and Columbia universities turned out to be more outspoken
about the superior ways of Kultur than administrators deemed diplomatically
useful. ‘We confused culture with scholarship’, the Prussian minister of
culture in the 1920s, Carl Heinrich Becker, concluded when pondering the
Reich’s negative pre-war image. ‘That has rendered us so unpopular
abroad’.52 Becker admitted both a lack of state control but also
a competition of images: the cultural brand forwarded by German informal
actors had had more impact than Auswärtiges Amt diplomacy. Nations,
Becker realised, can have more than one brand.
Second, this development led to a groundbreaking change in the structure
of cultural relations in Europe, Asia, and the Americas: now, the state became
the nation’s principal advertising agent. During the interwar period, the state
increasingly engaged in the regulation of transnational connections.53 It
significantly expanded the number of people working in foreign affairs
administration – the British Foreign Office, for one, grew from 187 members
in 1914 to 855 in 1919.54 In line with this development, European and North
American decision-makers concluded that state bureaucrats were more apt to
harmonise foreign and self-perceptions than private individuals.
Third, the consolidation of the state along with its emergence as
a principal branding agent of the nation coincided with the explosion of
and redirection in the advertising industry in North America and Europe.
Whilst during the decades prior to the First World War, advertisements
typically focused on the quality of a product and its benefit for the consumer,
interwar advertising increasingly sought to establish brand loyalty by citing
fun and modernity. Manufacturers tied their products more to brand and
recognition value and less to their inherent quality. Originally introduced in
the 1880s as a medical cure for headaches, Coca Cola is the most notorious
example. By the 1920s, the company’s advertising sought to expand its
market share and create brand loyalty by portraying their soft drink as
distinctive from others: Coke was cool and young.55 Branding’s most impor-
tant quality was that it established control over the meaning of goods and
introduced goodwill as a marketable quality. It turned consumer goods into
individuals with a public reputation, similar to a political officer or a movie
star.56 A new ‘scientific’ formula sought to encourage people to purchase
a specific product based on the claim that it contained a unique ingredient –
later called the ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ – that would improve the con-
sumer’s life.57
Political actors interested in international co-operation and advertising
experts met halfway to collaborate as both held specific interest in each
other’s work. The idea of a unique selling proposition, for instance, on
Chinese art reception in the West, applied exactly to a new understanding
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 767

of foreign relations: a country was ‘attractive’, presumably, because it had

a unique ingredient – such as Chinese antiques – that, in turn, invoked
universal values like perceptions of beauty.58 Advertisers constituted a new
group of professional experts who deliberately sought out the state as
a source of legitimacy. Thus, the Swiss advertiser, Karl Lauterer, proclaimed
in 1922 that advertising and propaganda were but the same thing, ‘one of the
strongest spiritual weapons of the state’. He recommended establishing
a Swiss advertising office that would serve the state and its cantons as
a clearinghouse for information on how to promote ideas as well as products
both at home and abroad. Equally, export promotion seemed to benefit the
entire nation, and advertising, as an expert, Adolph Guggenbühl, stated in
1931, ‘remains advertising whether it concerns soap, shoes, or a country’.59
All of this is to say that the cultural and information programmes devised
after the end of the Second World War were hardly new. Much of what
historians have said about superpower Cold War cultural state politics had
long-term roots well before the post-war period. This concerns, above all, the
realisation that the image of a nation had a direct impact on both the
diplomatic process and the constitution of recognition, domestically and
globally. What was new about the Cold War was that it further expanded
the state’s involvement in nation branding activities by establishing sizeable
information and propaganda programmes, exchange venues, and permanent
cultural relations in the name of the security state, complete with jingles,
repetitive messages, and the mobilisation of every single citizen in the
country.
The Cold War invited the state to become the nation’s foremost propa-
gandist. Administrators in both the United States and Soviet Union grasped
that cultural identity and cultural attractiveness was key to winning over
prospective client states and their populations for one or the other ideological
side. Both sought to stress distinctiveness as key to an understanding of the
nation in cultural programmes designed to win the hearts of people around
the world. Cultural productions mutated into not only powerful exchange
and geostrategic instruments, but also informal encounters in the form of
exhibitions, stipends, plays, travel programmes, and more. During the
Korean War, American officials developed the ‘campaign of truth’, which
used film, publications, and travel stipends to convince target audiences that
the United States, too, had contributed to the textbook of western civilisation.
The job of the United States Information Agency [USIA], created in 1953,
was to ‘tell America’s story to the world’, in other words, to represent the
existing brand more effectively. Over time, a number of major elements were
edited out of the new brand, for instance, religious components, whilst there
were also efforts to brand elements of American life, including ‘People’s
Capitalism’.60
768 J. GIENOW-HECHT

Again, students of United States cultural diplomacy during the post-

Second World War period know that story well, but they tend to overlook
several things marking the trans-temporal context: for one thing, American
cultural and information programmes represented only a part of a much
larger, global story. In addition to comparing and contrasting America’s Cold
War cultural information programmes horizontally – to other countries’
efforts at the same time – they need to be seen in a much larger context,
one that started, at the latest, in the Age of Revolutions. In this story, United
States cultural policies represent the end rather than the beginning of history.
Moreover, state-run cultural diplomacy only constituted a small portion of
nation branding. In the United States, a multitude of often-contradictory
aspirations contested domestic notions of American power, internal struggles
over identity, and meaning, all complementing and frequently challenging
governmental programmes and actions. Many, if not most, of the ideas
generated by the private-public Cold War consensus never materialised.
Still, the participants co-operated, discussed, and fought over issues that
they felt were vital and demanded instant attention.61 Other countries
experienced similar internal contestations over nation branding. In the
Soviet Union, art critics witnessed a growing discrepancy between state-
sponsored art and the new Russian avant-garde. Soviet political leaders did
not always appreciate what they saw on canvas, but they understood that the
latter appealed to wealthy western collectors such as Peter Ludwig – and
brought in German cash.62 These domestic frictions, wherever they took
place, are important because nation branding both explains the nation’s
identity abroad but also reinterprets that identity for domestic audiences
and consumption. Regardless of the ‘success’ of a campaign, domestic
debates over the nation brand matter as much as the eventual programme
because they form part of the branding process. As a perceptive essay on the
American post-war art programme pointed out, ‘nearly every exhibit of
modern or abstract expressionist art was met with harsh public and congres-
sional criticisms at home in the United States whether such art was truly
“American” art (or art at all)’. Without the support of the citizenry, without
people ‘living the brand’, programmes were bound to fail.63
What was new in the tale of nation branding after the Second World War
was the level of professionalisation and intensity with which national debates
now led the nation’s image at home and abroad. In the United States, church
leaders, corporate entrepreneurs, women’s groups, union officials, and gov-
ernmental leaders clashed over visions of self-representation to an extent
never before seen.64 In many ways, this development mirrored a domestic
phenomenon: in post-1945 America, the marketplace’s techniques and stan-
dards increasingly affected national politics and the notion of public
government.65 Rather than searching for common ground, parties and non-
state groups interested in nation branding progressively viewed the
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 769

international arena as a realm comparable to other purchased goods and,

more important, a marketplace for competing ideas and visions.
Finally, much of the ideological rhetoric of the Cold War had less to do
with the East-West conflict than with the ways in which specific interest
groups – from government leaders to independent actors – wanted interna-
tional audiences to see them. Accordingly, in the United States, visions
ranged from an influential Power on the world scene to a musically sophis-
ticated cosmopolitan well versed in the songbook of western composition.
The on-going debates amongst these many different groups echoed a timeless
concern over American identity that originated in the nineteenth century and
continued after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, most of the themes
covered by USIA officials and their predecessors neither originated in nor
primarily concerned the Cold War. For example, Soviet propagandists link-
ing progress and modernity both to their history and the future touted that
their nation had a great cultural past whilst Americans to date had not
produced any high culture. To defy this campaign, American strategists
hammered out a massive propaganda crusade, only to realise that it was
impossible to contest the Soviets’ negative portrayal: stereotypes focusing on
America as a country with no culture and no history had existed since 1776
and would remain in place after the end of the Cold War.66
The concept of nation branding helps make sense of these seemingly
disparate efforts and grasp their significance in a much larger context. The
story of Cold War propaganda is a chapter in the history book of nation
branding, and even that chapter spans not 40 but close to 100 years: it is the
chapter of the modern state’s desire to solicit recognition by resorting to
advertising means and grappling with internal contradictions over who and
what the nation is. And whilst the number of civil servants appointed to
image management expanded, these officials and their work met with pop-
ular objections and protests typically associated with democratic societies.
Many of the state structures emerging after 1918 collapsed with the end of
the Cold War, not just in the United States but also in many other liberal
states. Their demise had less to do with the Cold War ending than with the
development of marketing strategies in modern democratic societies. Today,
states increasingly outsource vital functions they used to cover for much of
the twentieth century, including welfare, security, and infrastructure. The
British Council, for example, significantly reduced its activities; in Europe,
much of its work focuses on television and online media. In 1999, USIA
found itself effectively buried for both political and financial reasons: tax-
payers found it hard to believe that an institution designed for Cold War
purposes needed to exist after the Berlin Wall fell.67 At the beginning of the
new millennium, many states in the western world returned to a position not
much unlike the scenario of Great Power politics before the Second
World War.
770 J. GIENOW-HECHT

In an age marred by limited government spending, the recent demise of

the state as the nation’s foremost image manager coincides with advertising
agencies’ increasing involvement in nation branding. Today, the state has
returned to what might appear as the nineteenth-century division of labour,
enrolling non-state actors to run the brand management of the nation
abroad. The result is a re-allocation of creative energy and financial resources
away from government offices and their attendant strategies, including
cultural diplomacy and soft power, and into the hands of the emergent
nation branding experts portrayed at the outset of this analysis.
The benefits of assigning cultural self-representation to private actors and
organisations are obvious but also deceivingly simple: the latter may incur
less or no cost – even if, in effect, privatisation often simply transfers tax
funds to the private sector. Non-state actors are also self-reliant, motivated,
and savvy. Their funds are non-state, their contacts international, and, in
case of a mishap, the state cannot be held responsible. This scenario is very
different from the Cold War but constitutes instead a return to the nine-
teenth century politics of image management – as outlined herein –
a neoliberal turn towards private contractors to represent state and national
interests. The projection and thereby the definition of state interest becomes
anew an object of non-state actors whose visions for the future may not align
with that of the state government.
Even Anholt, who originally coined the concept, has become one of its
foremost critics. Indeed, he now questions about branding nations and sees
the enormous amount of funds that governments locate for such campaigns
as wasteful expense. Key to his conviction is the recognition that image
management, such as Britain’s GREAT campaign, can only succeed when
they work along policy rather than only publicity. Anholt advises that
countries should not merely celebrate their own attractiveness but, instead,
live up to them by contributing to the greater national and global good.68 In
line with such reasoning, a number of early subscribers to nation branding,
including Britain, have entertained an off and on relationship with it, and
‘Cool Britannia’ – as significant of an inspiration as it was in the global
world – is a good example. Whilst nation branding certainly met with a great
deal of enthusiasm amongst both conservative and liberal governments, quite
a few – including South Korea and Britain – eventually decentred the brand
by integrating a mêlée of activities involving public diplomacy and bilateral
cultural partnerships.69
The recent turn to a public-private partnership of image management is
not a millennial invention; what is new is its name – nation branding – and
the rise of a new group of experts dedicated to national self-representation in
a global world. As argued above, since at least the revolutionary period, states
have understood the quest for cultural prestige and political influence in an
increasingly corporate way. As a result, the modern nation has developed
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 771

into a brand product at home and abroad. It makes its external claim to
legitimacy by means of the display of images, ideas, and sound. Informal and
official actors have used and continue to use core techniques that today
associate with modern marketing to sell the nation to audiences at home
and abroad, focusing increasingly on perception at the expense of policy and
reality. The modern state derives domestic power from its external standing –
and vice versa. Power, in this context, encompasses more than a state’s ability
to make another state do what it wants. It entails the ability to appear as one
wants – quite literally, like the Wizard of Oz.
A history of nation branding avant la lettre needs examination for reasons
both historical and conceptual. First, nation branding was and is a process of
domestic negotiation and reinterpretation. It is a procedure in which state,
non-state, and even anti-state actors and institutions negotiate and clash to
gain influence at home and abroad. One can study this process including the
actors involved and use the questions and ideas associated with contempor-
ary nation branding to understand the longue durée of cultural exchange and
self-representation in the history of international relations.
Second, nation branding helps contextualise the sea of individual case
studies on cultural diplomacy and soft power, including those focusing on
the Cold War. Historically, the development of the nation’s self-
representation spans several centuries and cannot be explained away by late-
twentieth century approaches such as public diplomacy. Nation branding
admits a multitude of actors and factors, including ideological intention and
the absence of governmental actors. It sees the commonalities amongst self-
representations and cultural relations across various époques. The examples
cited above reveal that the twenty-first century’s promises and pitfalls of
national self-representation in private and commercial hands existed long
before the First World War. Too little state control yielded power to non-
state actors with little understanding of the national interest, too much of it
produced unsavoury results as authoritarian image campaigns have shown.
But regardless of whether the public good was by definition an object of
democracy or authoritarian rule, when that public good was located in the
hands of private actors such as branding experts and advertising agents, the
process and product experienced a transformation that was not often in line
with state interests. Different sets of actors affected the language and cultural
context in which national self-representation were phrased and
comprehended.70
The analogy of diplomacy to the market and the state to the product opens
a Pandora’s box of questions that future research needs to tackle: most
important, how exactly did corporate approaches affect state initiatives? It
might be unpleasant to think about policy-makers and branding agents as
bedfellows crafting and refuting stereotypes, but the fact is that they have
been so for quite a long time. Such domestic and international competition
772 J. GIENOW-HECHT

for attention, reputation, and capital has re-defined the world. As argued
here, this development has a long history that may hint at the future.
Moreover, the specific mechanics of nation branding, including space,
gender, exceptionalism, and quality control, require in-depth evaluation.
Sexism and gender stereotypes, for one, constitute a significant role in
branding campaigns over time, far beyond the identification of the ‘nation’
as a female metaphor. Studies of religious icons, supermodels, and airline
flight attendants might provide a good place to start such investigations.
Specific spaces such as first-class summit hotels – think of the 2015 G-7
meeting at Schloss Elmau – but also reception halls, state dinners, throne
rooms, exhibitions, expo pavilions, and airports constitute a fabulous brand-
ing feat, complete with symbolic imagery, repetitive messages, and mass
mobilisation though their results are increasingly unpredictable. ‘Branded
spaces’ represent another dynamic sideline in contemporary nation brand
mechanics, and it is necessary ask how people in the past created branded,
immersive experiences? Notions of peculiarity likewise consistently play
a strong role in historical and contemporary campaigns. How did attention
to branding intersect with considerations of exceptionalism? In addition,
quality control constitutes a mechanism requiring investigation: how did
nation branders in the past ensure quality control? How did they make
others conform to and live the brand? Whilst monarchical visits, for example,
involved heavy protocol and etiquette, were there any discussions and cam-
paigns centring on how larger segments of the populations were to behave –
how to ‘be British’ or ‘Brazilian’?

Figure 2. State leaders at the G-7 summit in Elmau, Germany, in June [Link]://commons.
[Link]/wiki/File:G7_summit_2015.jpg
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 773

Furthermore, standard narratives of modern state- and nationhood are

crying for revision and the need to be decentred. Accordingly, a history of
nation branding beyond the Atlantic world is needed and, perhaps, beyond
the modern period. Historically, such an approach would address the devel-
opment of nation branding’s globalisation, retracing the stages of its genesis
in or export to and reception in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.71 In
a gesture to contemporary investigations, to what extent has nation branding
emerged – historically – in response to the challenge of the global, helping
people and places to situate and identify themselves in an increasingly
complex world? One might consider the ancient Romans’ carrot-and-stick
method of offering humanitas – not just an education but also a way of life –
or military destruction to lure foreigners into their orbit, or, for the medieval
period, Eric the Red naming Greenland hoping to attract people to the
region. In a related manner, scholars might look for precursors of nation
branding prior to the revolutionary period. William of Orange’s Apologia in
1580 – along with his campaign to promote the new ‘Netherlands’ – comes to
mind,72 as does John Milton’s bestselling ‘Defensio pro Populo Anglicano’,
written in defence of the new republic’s principles.73
Finally, future research needs to grapple with the wider contours of the
story. For one thing, the current interest in the entanglement of nations and
empires needs pushing.74 The modern nation state finds basis on self-
advertisement and, as shown above, modern statehood evolved, hand in
hand, with novel forms of state propaganda when mercantilist and cameralist
literature merged with economic thinking, administrative knowledge, and
self-portrayal to create a state brand. Given the above examples relating to
the United States as an ‘irresistible empire’ or the British Empire Marketing
Board, however, empires engaged in branding as well; the questions are did
imperial branding differ from nation branding and how the two are related?
On a more contemporary note, the European Union is currently working
hard to brand itself as an attractive place. What does that really mean? Is it
branding a union, an empire, or a nation?
Related to that point and given the recent efforts to sell nations to capital,
nation branding remains as part of a story of nations trying to grapple with
the power of economic formation and the increasing heterogeneity of agents
involved in the world of branding as well as those who are criticising it.
These include international agencies like the World Bank and United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation, multinational
corporations such as the Swedish Africa Company, transnational formations
such as the Portuguese Empire, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and
the G-7, alternative polities such as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and sub-
national regions such as Catalonia or the city of Berlin. These organisations
sold their own visions to the world. There have been plenty of organisations
devoted to international or ‘transnational branding’. Their explicit purpose
774 J. GIENOW-HECHT

was and is to advance the interests of an international community, often over

and against the interests of individual nations within that community – for
example, the Catholic Church.75 All these organisations were heavily
involved in self-branding promotional activities, but very little about them
remains known. It is important to think about how nation branding fit with
and operated at odds with these regional, transnational, and cosmopolitan
inspirations. And attention is needed to the roles that anti-branders, such as
émigrés, refugees, and critics of national policies play in this scenario.
In a unique fashion, nation branding tackles the role of statehood, self-
representation, and identity management, domestically and internationally,
in the projection of power and culture over time. In the long run, studying
nation branding in a historical context can help develop a long-term
trajectory of how these projections meshed and continue to mesh compe-
tition, compromise, and contrasting perceptions of reality. Or, as the
Wizard of Oz put it at the end of chapter 16, ‘How can I help being
a humbug … when all these people make me do things that everybody
knows can’t be done?’76

Notes
1. Herzlichen Dank to the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their thoughtful com-
ments and suggestions as well as to David Armitage, Giles Scott-Smith, Justin Hart,
William McAllister, and Michael Krenn; and the participants of workshops and con-
ferences in Berlin, Cambridge, Oxford, New Haven, Leiden, Arlington, Middelburg;
and to Vincent Herr, Craig Cheetham, and Connor Ruby for formatting this essay.
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (NY, 1900), 184.
2. William McAllister, “Nation Branding Amidst Civil War: Publishing U.S. Foreign
Policy Documents to Define and Defend the Republic, 1861–66,” in Nation Branding
in Modern History, ed. Carolin Viktorin, Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Annika Estner, and
Marcel Will (NY, 2018), 29–51; Don Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International
History of the American Civil War (NY, 2015); Jessica Gienow-Hecht, “The World is
Ready to Listen: Symphony Orchestras and the Global Performance of America,”
Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (2012): 17–28.
3. Paul Temporal, Branding for the Public Sector: Creating, Building and Managing Brands
People Will Value (Chichester, 2015), 12.
4. J.E. Peterson, “Qatar and the World: Branding for a Micro-State,” Middle East Journal
60, no. 4 (2006): 732–48. See also Christopher S. Browning and Antonio Ferraz de
Oliveira, eds., “Nation Branding and Competitive Identity in World Politics,” Special
Issue, Geopolitics 22, no. 3 (2017), 481–501.
5. Robert Govers, “Why Place Branding Is Not about Logos and Slogans,” Place Branding
and Public Diplomacy 9, no. 2 (2013): 71–75; Michael Ignatieff, “Winter Wonder
Brand,” NY Times Magazine, February 4, 2010, [Link]
magazine/[Link].
6. Göran Bolin and Per Stahlberg, “Between Community and Commodity: Nationalism
and Nation Branding,” in Communicating the Nation: National Topographies of Global
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 775

Media Landscapes, ed. Anna Roosvall and Inka Salovaara-Moring (Göteborg, 2010),
105–22.
7. Domestic and international audiences may play an active, even antagonistic role in
nation branding efforts. See Nicolas Glover, “A Total Image Deconstructed: The
Corporate Analogy and the Legitimacy of Promoting Sweden Abroad in the 1960s,”
Carl Marklund, “American Mirrors and Swedish Self-Portraits: US Images of Sweden
and Swedish Public Diplomacy in the USA in the 1970s and 80s,” Paul Jordan,
“Walking in Singing: Brand Estonia, the Eurovision Song Context and Estonia’s Self-
Proclaimed Return to Europe, 2001-2002,” all in in Histories of Public Diplomacy and
Nation Branding in the Nordic and Baltic Countries, ed. Louis Clerc, Nikolas Glover,
and Paul Jordan (Leiden, Boston, MA, 2015), 123–44, 172–94, 217–36.
8. Keith J. Dinnie, “Country-of-Origin 1965-2004: A Literature Review,” Journal of
Customer Behaviour 3, no. 2 (2003): 65–213, [Link]
Dinnie_COO_litreviewpdf; Nick Cull, “Public Diplomacy and Nation Brands/
Branding,” in Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice, ed. Keith Dinnie, 2nd ed.
(London, NY, 2016), 153–54.
9. Nick Cull, “The Iron Brand: Margaret Thatcher and Public Diplomacy,” Place Branding
and Public Diplomacy 9, no. 2 (2013), 67–70: [Link]
journal/v9/n2/full/[Link]; Simon Anholt, Places: Identity, Image and
Reputation (Basingstoke, 2010); Carolin Viktorin, Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Annika
Estner, and Marcel Will, “Beyond Marketing and Diplomacy: Exploring the
Historical Origins of Nation Branding,” in Nation Branding, ed. Viktorin et al.
(2018), 6–9.
10. Mark Leonard, “BritainTM: Renewing Our Identity,” Demos (London, 1997), http://
[Link]/files/[Link].
11. “Cool Britannia: Nothing is Sadder Than Trying Too Hard To Be Cool,” Economist,
March 12, 1998, [Link]
12. Wally Olins, “Branding the Nation – The Historical Context,” Journal of Brand
Management 9, no. 4 (2002): 241–48.
13. Temporal, Branding for the Public Sector, 13, 264; Lee Hudson Teslik, “Nation
Branding Explained,” November 9, 2007, [Link]
communication/nation-brandingexplained/p14776#p5.
14. Gyorgy Szondi, “Public Diplomacy and Nation Branding: Conceptual Similarities and
Differences,” in Discussion Papers in Diplomacy, ed. Virginie Duthoit and Ellen Huijgh
(The Hague, 2008), 5.
15. ”Iran Fastest Growing Nation Brand,” Financial Tribune, October 16, 2015, https://
[Link]/articles/economy-business-and-markets/28111/iran-fastest-
growing-nation-brand.
16. Samanth Subramanian, “How to Sell a Country: The Booming Business of Nation
Branding,” Guardian, November 7, 2017.
17. EastWest Communication, “Perceptions Drive Decision-Making. How is your country
viewed by others,” n.d., [Link] Simon Anhalt, “The Good
Country Index, a new way of looking at the world,” n.d., [Link]
18. See the survey in Nadia Kaneva, “Nation Branding: Toward an Agenda for Critical
Research,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 117–41; idem., ed.,
Branding Post-Communist Nations: Marketizing National Identities in the ‘New’
Europe (NY, 2012); Peter Van Ham, “Place Branding: The State of the Art,” Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 61, no. 1 (2008): 126–49;
Dinnie, Nation Branding; Bob White, “L’incroyable machine de l’authenticité:
776 J. GIENOW-HECHT

l’animation politique et l’usage public de la culture dans le Zaire de Mobutu,”

Anthropologie et Sociétés 30, no. 2 (2006): 43–64.
19. Melissa Aronczyk, Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (NY,
2013), 37. Aronczyk and others argue that contemporary nation branding accords to
a fundamentally different logic linked to the competition state, different from the
strategies informing previous practices of promoting state image policy. Others wonder
whether the logics of nation branding align with the logics of cultural and public
diplomacy at all. Cf. Mods Mordhurst, “Public Diplomacy vs. Nation Branding: The
Case of Denmark after the Cartoon Crisis,” in Histories of Public Diplomacy, ed. Clerc,
Glover, and Jordan, 237–56.
20. Van Ham, “Place Branding,” 147; Mark Leonard, “Diplomacy by Other Means,”
Foreign Policy 132 (2002): 48–56.
21. Christopher S. Browning, “Nation Branding, National Self-Esteem, and the
Constitution of Subjectivity in Late Modernity,” Foreign Policy Analysis 11, no. 2
(2015): 202, 206.
22. City/Nation/Place, “Connecting nations, cities, regions and place brands around the
world to focus on strategies for engaging citizens, driving investment, attracting talent
and developing sustainable tourism,” n.d., [Link]
3623.
23. Jennifer Winngard, Branded Bodies, Rhetoric, and the Neoliberal Nation State (Lanham,
MD, 2013); Temporal, Branding for the Public Sector, 264; Hye-Kyung Lee and
Lorraine Lim, eds., Cultural Policies in East Asia: Dynamics between the State, Arts,
and Creative Industries (London, NY, 2014), 12.
24. Clerk, Glover, and Jordan, Histories of Public Diplomacy provide a promising start,
focusing on the post-Second World War period.
25. Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800
(Cambridge, NY, 2013); Peter Baldwin, “Beyond weak and strong: Rethinking the State
in Comparative Policy History,” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 1 (2005): 12–33.
26. Temporal, Branding the Public Sector, 10–11, 13, 264.
27. Frank Ninkovich, Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism
(Cambridge, 2009); Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in
France (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Thorsten Schulz-Walden, Anfänge globaler
Umweltpolitik: Umweltsicherheit in der internationalen Politik (1969-1975) (Munich,
2013); Jeffrey Keith. “Civilization, Race, and the Japan Expedition’s Cultural
Diplomacy, 1853-1854,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 2 (2011): 179–202; Steven Conn,
“An Epistemology for Empire: The Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 1893-1926,”
Diplomatic History 22, no. 4 (1998): 533–63.
28. Kenneth Osgood and Brian Etheridge, eds., The United States and Public Diplomacy:
New Directions in Cultural and International History (Leiden, 2010); Antonio Niño and
José Antonio Montero, Guerra fría y propaganda: Estados Unidos y su cruzada cultural
en Europa y América Latina (Madrid, 2012); Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American
Way: National Identity, Propaganda, and the Cold War (Philadelphia, PA, 2008).
29. Aniko Macher, “Cultural Diplomacy in Hungary from 1957 to 1963 – Echoes of
Western Cultural Activity in a Communist Country,” Annika Frieberg, “Ostpolitik?
Networking and Non-State Diplomacy in the Bensberger Polen-Memorandum, 1966-
1970,” both in Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, ed. Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Mark
C. Donfried (NY, 2010), 75–108, 109–36.
30. Mara Goldwyn, “A Home with no History: Indigenous Architecture and Canadian
Nation Branding in British Columbia” (unpublished paper, Freie Universität Berlin,
2017).
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 777

31. Lateef Akanbi Adetunji Adeniji, Sobalaje A Adeyemo, and Adeniji Daud R, eds.,
Rebranding Nigeria for a Better Future: The Position of Religion, Education, Language,
and General Studies (Nigeria, 2011); Patrick Sharma, “The United States, the World
Bank, and the Transformation of Development in the 1970s,” Diplomatic History 37,
no. 3 (2013): 586–87.
32. Dana Cooper, Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and
Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1945 (Kent, OH, 2014); Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Sound
Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850-1920 (Chicago, IL,
2012).
33. Geoffrey A. Hosking, Trust: Money, Markets and Society (London, 2010), 141.
34. Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-
Century Germany (NY, 1992).
35. Franklin’s was a gesture to J.J. Rousseau and Carl Linnaeus who had themselves
portrayed as fur-cap-wearing critics of ‘polite’ society in the mid-eighteenth century:
Christoph Laugs, “Between Fur Caps, French Women, and Foreign Affairs: Benjamin
Franklin’s Demeanour as Commissioner to the Court of Louis XVI, 1776-1779” (MA
thesis, University of Cologne, 2010), 2.
36. Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early
America (Chicago, IL, London, 2009); Andrew Wulf, U.S. International Exhibitions
during the Cold War: Winning Hearts and Minds through Cultural Diplomacy
(Lanham, MD, 2015), 5–13.
37. Aronczyk, Branding the Nation, 75.
38. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London, NY, 2006).
39. Oliver Kühschelm, “From the Moralizing Appeal for Patriotic Consumption to Nation
Branding: Austria and Switzerland,” in Nation Branding, ed. Viktorin et al., 52–78.
40. Mark Renella, The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and
Letters (NY, 2008); Jon Witte, „Die Rolle nichtstaatlicher Akteure in den internationa-
len Kulturbeziehungen des 19. Jahrhunderts: Der Allgemeine Deutsche Schulverein
und die deutsch-österreichischungarischen Beziehungen“ (MA thesis, University of
Cologne, 2012).
41. Helena Paderewska [edited with Ilias Chrissochoidis], The Struggle for Polish
Independence (Stanford, CA, 2015).
42. Robert Rydell, Kimberley D. Pelle, and John E. Findling, Fair America: World Fairs in the
United States (Washington, DC, 2000); Marieke Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles: The
Netherlands and the Dutch Indies at the World Exhibitions, 1880-1931 (Singapore, 2006).
43. Paul Greenhalgh, Fair World: A History of World’s Fairs and Expositions, from London
to Shanghai, 1851-2010 (Winterbourne, 2011).
44. Kühschelm, “Moralizing Appeal”.
45. Witte, “Schulverein”; Thomas J. Schaeper and Kathleen Schaeper, Cowboys into
Gentlemen: Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite (NY,
1998); Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
(NY, 1990), 298–99; Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future
of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton, 2007).
46. Gerhard Weidenfeller, VDA: Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland: Allgemeiner
Deutscher Schulverein 1881-1918: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen
Nationalismus und Imperialismus im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt a.M., 1976), 316–19.
47. Jessica Gienow-Hecht, “Cultural Diplomacy and Civil Society since 1850 or the
Anomaly of the Cold War,” in Washington and Beyond: Public Diplomacy and U.S.
778 J. GIENOW-HECHT

Foreign Relations: Towards an International History, ed. Kenneth Osgood and Brian
Etheridge (Leiden, 2010), 29–56.
48. Ibid.
49. Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda,
1918-1939 (Cambridge, 1981), 103–14, quote 104, passim.
50. Sabine Behrenbeck, “‘Der Führer’. Die Einführung eines politischen Markenartikels,”
in Gerald Diesener and Rainer Gries, eds., Propaganda in Deutschland. Zur Geschichte
der politischen Massenbeeinflussung im 20. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt, 1996); Wolfgang
Schieder, “Audienz bei Mussolini. Zur symbolischen Politik faschistischer
Diktaturherrschaft 1923-1943,” in Italien, Blicke: Neue Perspektiven der italienischen
Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Petra Terhoeven (Göttingen, 2010),
107–32.
51. Carolin Fischer and Jessica Gienow-Hecht, “Was ist und wozu braucht man ‘Nation
Branding’? Versuch eines neuen Zugriffs auf Macht und Kultur in den internationalen
Beziehungen am Beispiel der spanischen Diktatur,” in International History in Theory
and Practice: Traditions and Perspectives, ed. Barbara Haider-Wilson, Wolfgang
Mueller, and William D. Godsey (Vienna, 2016); Neil Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain
to America: Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power
(London, 2014).
52. Cited in Kurt Düwell, “Die Gründung der kulturpolitischen Abteilung im Auswärtigen
Amt 1919/20 als Neuansatz,” in Deutsche Auswärtige Kulturpolitik seit 1871, ed. Kurt
Düwell and Werner Link (Cologne, 1981), 51.
53. Ian Tyrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective, Second
Edition (London, 2015).
54. Thanks to Friedrich Kießling from Katholische Universität Eichstätt for this
information.
55. Richard Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (NY,
1990).
56. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century
Europe (Cambridge, 2005), 4–5, 196–205, 208–14, 217.
57. Wally Olins, On Brand (London, 2003), 58–59.
58. Ilaria Scaglia, “Branding Internationalism: Displaying Art and International
Cooperation in the Interwar Period”, in Nation Branding, ed. Viktorin et al., 101–23.
59. Kühschelm, ‘Moralizing Appeal’.
60. Nick Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American
Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (NY, 2008).
61. Wendy Wall, Inventing the ‘American Way’: The Politics of Consensus from the New
Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (NY, 2008), 163–277.
62. Elena Korowin, Der Russen-Boom – Sowjetische Ausstellungen als Mittel der Diplomatie
in der BRD (Cologne, 2015).
63. Michael Krenn, “The Art of Branding: Rethinking Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold
War,” in Nation Branding, ed. Viktorin et al., 149–72.
64. Belmonte, Selling the American Way.
65. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (NY, 2003).
66. Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “‘Always Blame the Americans’: Anti-Americanism in
Europe in the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (2006):
1067–91.
67. Nick Cull, The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency: American
Public Diplomacy, 1989-2001 (London, 2012), 121–78.
 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT 779

68. To this end, Anholt has launched the ‘Good Country Index’ to measure such con-
tributions across six different categories. The resulting tab has uplifted countries such
as the Netherlands – now placing second – but seriously downgraded former top
runners such as the United States – now fortieth. ‘The Good Country’: [Link]
[Link]. See also Nick Cull, ‘Nation Brands and Branding: The Metaphor Run
Amok’, in idem., Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Age of
Social Media (Cambridge, NY, 2018), Chapter 7.
69. More than once – and again, the British case is a good example – competing admin-
istrations have successfully pursued similar strategies in managing the image of their
country. James Pamment, British Public Diplomacy and Soft Power: Diplomatic
Influence and the Digital Revolution (London, 2016) points out that the current
conservative government in Britain has embraced both the GREAT campaign as well
as multilateral activities based on dialogue and listening.
70. Aronczyk, Branding the Nation, 64–65.
71. For example, the analysis of the relationship between contemporary discourses of
Brand Africa with pan-African discourses of the decolonisation movement in
Christopher S. Browning and Antonio Ferraz de Oliveira, “Reading Brand Africa
Geopolitically: Nation Branding, Subaltern Geopolitics and the Persistence of
Politics,” Geopolitics 22, no. 3 (2016): 640–64. See also Ahmet Bayraktar and Can
Uslay, eds., Global Place Branding Campaigns across Cities, Regions, and Nations
(Hershey, PA, 2017).
72. J.P.A. Coopmans, “Het Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (1581) en de Declaration of
Independence (1776),” Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der
Nederlanden 98 (1983): 540–67.
73. Ceri Sullivan, “Milton and the Beginning of Civil Service,” in idem., Literature in the
Public Service. Sublime Bureaucracy (Houndmills, 2013), 20–64.
74. Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, eds., Nationalizing Empires (Budapest, 2015).
75. Temporal, Branding for the Public Sector, 22.
76. Baum, Wizard of Oz, 199.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Jessica Gienow-Hecht is a historian for international and North American history and Chair
of the Department of History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American History,
Freie Universität Berlin. She has taught courses at the universities of Virginia, Bielefeld,
Halle-Wittenberg, Harvard, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Cologne, the Hertie School of Governance
(Berlin), Doshisha University (Kyoto), and Sciences Po (Paris). Her first book, Transmission
Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955
(1999), was co-awarded the Stuart Bernath Prize and the Myrna Bernath Prize. Her second
book, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850-1920 (2009,
2012) has won the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. Gienow-Hecht’s most recent
research and publications focus on music, technology, and visions of humanity.