How useful is it to explain the emergence and reproduction of nationalism

and national politics by emphasising the role of the media.

The media has played, and continues to play, a vital role in determining
the distribution and widespread awareness of a nation and its politics. To
understand the emergence of nationalism and the continuous
reproduction of it, we must first understand what has had the ability to
conceptualise the idea of a national community to the citizens of a
sovereign state. The media has accelerated the growth of nationalism,
through national communication and political influence of an imagined
community, as Anderson (1983) suggests; ...even the smallest nation will
never know their fellow members, hear of them, or meet them. It is the
aptitude of the media to disperse this nationalist behaviour that has
allowed for national governments to gain credibility and influence their
citizens (Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2006). Nationalism itself was
first used by Johan Gottfried Herder during the late 1770s. According to
Benedict Anderson (1983), three components caused the evolution of
nationalism: capitalism, print technology, and the use of vernacular
language. Initially this essay will discuss the importance and usefulness of
the media over time, starting with print technology. This essay will then
discuss Billigs (1995) notion of banal nationalism and how, in part
through the media, it has instilled an inescapable tendency to be part of
peoples everyday lives. This essay will then go on to discuss the media,
as a vessel for nationalist ideology, and how it may begin to outgrow the
boundaries of territorial states with phenomena such as social media and
international uprising.
The media encompasses a vast array of different tools that can influence
peoples decisions and, with regards to nationalism, their sense of
belonging, identity, and their decisions in national politics. The emergence
of the medias influence on nationalism began with the printing press in
Europe in 1450 by Johannes Gutenburg, what was to follow eventually
became known as the Gutenburg Revolution; the inevitable surge of
nationalism from print technology and its ability to distribute information

on a national scale (McLuhan, 1962). The usage of European vernacular

language eventually broke free from the pan-European printing of Latin,
which in a sense created invisible barriers and territories between nations,
and a sense of homogeneity within nations (Steinberg, 1996). Eisenstein
(1979) and McLuhan (1962), and their extensive literature on print
technology and nationalism, both agree that print technology within
societies that required distinct grammar, vocabulary and spelling
inevitably led to nationhood, because the citizens were all receiving
analogous information from their specific vernacular. Gellner (2006)
emphasises the restrictions of the printing press. He suggests that
nationalism has been born from a sense of isolation and distance from
other cultures through lack of communication and understanding.
Another, more contemporary example of the use of language and the
media to reproduce nationalism is the Welsh vernacular. The Welsh
language is a traditional language, with little use in Wales today. However,
as language has been used before to establish nations with the printing
press, in 1982 Wales used the medium of television to evoke a sense of
community and nationalism, by establishing the S4C Welsh-language
television service (Aitchison & Carter, 2000). The Welsh nationalist
movement was transformed after this. As more Welsh people were
exposed to their national language, Wales voted Yes in a 1997 referenda
to begin an elected assembly known as the National Assembly for Wales
(Fevre, 1999). This occasion highlights the usefulness of the media to
communicate nationalism to Welsh citizens. However, this may have been
due to a deeper sense of nationalism, uprooted by the idea of
dependency, or the theory of the Celtic fringe suggested by Hechter
(1999) in his book Internal Colonialism. England is essentially the core of
Britains economy and politics, which naturally leads to a sense of
dependence from the other periphery states of Great Britain: Scotland,
Northern Ireland, and Wales (Hechter, 1999). Instead of the media
attention of the Welsh vernacular broadcasted by S4C, it may have been a
deeper sense of dependency from Wales that caused the nation to
establish the National Assembly, an attempt to attain greater control over

their nation in a way that was closer to home without the reliance of
English-based governance.
Newspapers are another fundamental source for news in the media. At
one time, people were interested more with the goings on of their town or
village. As time progressed, with the nationalisation and prioritisation of
national news, the nations people became interested in the wider society
in which they lived (Hobsbawm, 1983). Billigs (1995) theory of banal
nationalism suggests, that with the continuous use of pronouns to
describe the nation, The community would begin to shape itself, through
national newspapers and their syntax use in headlines; such as our
nation, we as a nation, and referring to other nations as them and
they etc. This has over time become the norm, as Britain is continuously
referred to as our nation in various forms of British media, thus becoming
banal.
The BNP use many of these pronouns to define our nation in their
campaigning (Banks & Gingrich, 2006). The repetitive use of pronouns in
this case reinforces Andersons (1983) argument of the imagined
communities, suggesting we belong to a nation which is ours, yet, as
Banks (2006) suggests, realistically it is a movement to manipulate the
masses to vote for BNP in national politics. Eric Hobsbawm, in his book
Inventing Traditions, suggests that nations with a romantic view of their
past are retrospective inventions. Essentially they are recreating,
through the media, an interpretation of Britains history which is incorrect,
describing the nation as a green and pleasant land during the 20th
century, when it was in some ways the opposite with much
industrialisation and urbanisation (Hobsbawm, 1983).
John Breulliys (1983) theory of nationalism, defined in his book
Nationalism and the State as the interests and values of a nation take
priority over all other interests and values, works in tandem with the
example of Fox News and their banal nationalistic broadcasting methods
in the USA during the war in Iraq (Artz & Kamalipour, 2005). Adel Iskandar
(2002) coined the phrase contextual objectivity as a critique for Fox

News coverage of the war. He implied that the coverage of the war
differed greatly between the USA and the rest of the world. Fox News had
the effect of internalizing news on a domestic level which eventually led to
the citizens of America and their nationalist opinions to differ from the rest
of the world; Iskandar (2002) refers to it as the Great American Bubble.
In much of the international press at the time of the war in Iraq, reports of
contrasting coverage proclaimed that the American and world publics
were watching two different wars, reflecting the polarization of public
opinion. Here Iskandar (2002) argues that the conceptual creation of two
worlds split through the opinion of the American public and the rest of the
world was not due to religious, economic or linguistic categories as seen
before in the emergence of nationalism, but through the media and in this
case FOX News. In contrast to Iskandars argument, others have
considered the reasons for a polarization of opinion was due to conflicting
religious beliefs between the majority evangelical Protestants in America
to the rest of the world (Froese & Mencken, 2009). President Bushs public
speeches, at the time, were arrayed with religious language as we
struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with
us (McCartney, 2004). This suggests nationalism is more deeply rooted
with differing beliefs between American citizens and terrorist groups like
Al Qaeda, as opposed to being purely influenced by news broadcasts
(Froese & Mencken, 2009).
America has used propaganda and the media in previous wars to illustrate
nationalism and national pride, arguably more effectively in this case. For
instance, the Captain America comics that were established in the year
leading up to the United States entering World War II. This influenced
young American readers in a way that elicited nationalism and a will to
fight for the USA, Because, like you, America will gain the strength and
the will to safeguard our shores (Jewett & Lawrence, 2003). Here, the
fictional Professor Reinstein is comparing Captain Americas strength and
bravery to that of the USA, making a childhood superhero reflect similar
qualities to that of the state would inevitably lead to young readers
wanting to serve their nation, noting the use of the pronoun our linking

to Billigs (1995) theory. Every quality of Captain America promotes the

country that he serves. From his appearance, to his supposed character of
bravery and servitude, Captain America was the perfect propaganda at
the time for an America on the dawn of war. This is a primary example of
how comics, as a powerful medium, were used to essentially force
nationalism upon the younger generations. Captain Americas Sentinels
of Liberty was the title of any young reader that was willing to pay 10
cents to sign an oath to assist Captain America and his war against spies
in the USA, they would also receive a badge recognising their dedication
to Captain America, in reality their dedication to the USA (Jewett &
Lawrence, 2003).
As popular media has recently developed into more varied and creative
forms, such as the social media phenomenon, nations have become less
influential in converging nationalist ideals to their people. Since the rise of
the internet in the early 1990s, the worlds networked population has now
grown from a few million people, to over a billion users (Shirky, 2011).
Social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed for a
global audience to interact without the boundaries of physical space for
information. An example of this is the Occupy movement that emerged
as protests against international social and economic inequality. It began
initially in Wall Street, New York in September 2011. Within 1 year the
protests spread to dozens of cities within every continent except
Antarctica (Thompson, 2011). The movement was partially inspired by the
Arab Spring in 2010 which spanned much of the Middle-East (Frayer,
2011). Nations such as China have feared the internets capabilities for
mass movements and have therefore limited its use to the public.
Whether or not this is morally just or socially illiberal, China as a nation
has greater control over the flow of information and essentially the
usefulness of their media in terms of nationalism (Harwit & Clark, 2001).
The media has come a long way in establishing and reproducing
nationalism and national politics. Its inception was in Europe with
Gutenburgs printing press, which led to the rise of the national

newspaper and the birth of a national sense of community, whether it is

imagined or not as Anderson suggests, it sculpted national territorial
boundaries and connected people indirectly (Anderson, 1983). This
eventually led to the use of the media as a tool for nationalist propaganda
in World War II with the example of Captain America (Jewett & Lawrence,
2003), and the Iraq invasion and Fox News formation of the Great
American Bubble of knowledge (Artz & Kamalipour, 2005). In effect, it is
vitally important in the development of a community to have a sense of
collective interests, ideals and a way to communicate these interests and
ideals effectively. Now that the media is growing larger than the nation
itself, its usefulness is deteriorating in terms of promoting nationalism and
national politics. To rectify the usage of the media with regard to the
nation, countries such as China have restricted and controlled the use of
the growing systems of media (Harwit & Clark, 2001). Whether it is
inevitable that nations will be unravelled by the very tool that was used to
create them is purely a question of how much control the media has over
the nation itself, and whether nationalism and national politics will adapt
to the new conditions under which the media now operates.

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