Page 172 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

NATION

A nation may be ethnic, but a state ought not to be. ‘Ethnic
cleansing’ is the latest technique for trying to make a state and a nation
coterminous. ‘Balkanisation’ is a term for the process of dissolution of
a state into (often warring) statelets based on ethnicity. Rwanda in
1994 showed what can happen when a state apparatus is used to impose
ethnic national ends. Many nation-states produce less bloody but
nevertheless real internal tensions by coupling the nation to the state.
For instance, despite the Indigenous nations living within it, and its
very diverse multicultural population, Australia’s official national icons,
myths and heroes are relentlessly white and Anglo-Celtic.
This may explain why important critics such as Paul Gilroy believe
that ‘nation’ is an irredeemable term and that nationalism is always
racist (Gilroy, 1987, 1993). In the context of black activism and the
dispersal of African and Afro-Caribbean people around the nations
bordering the Atlantic Ocean from South America to Scotland, such a
viewhas force.
Even so, there are nationalisms that work from socialist principles –
in Wales for instance. And some post-colonial or decolonising
countries have produced non-racist nationalisms that could be a
model for others – Singapore for one. Indigenous ethno-nationalisms
are ‘mixed’ in this context: they are emancipatory movements, but rely
on ethnic descent to identify those in need of emancipation, and are
not normally ‘independence movements’ as such. They seek
recognition of ethnic nationhood within a larger nation-state. Perhaps
they point the way towards nationalisms that can recognise race
without succumbing to racism.
Clearly ‘nation’ refers not to the external world of ‘facts’ but to a
symbolic referent – an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983),
which is maintained by a wide variety of discursive institutions,
ranging from national literatures and languages to national curricula in
education. There are of course national inflections in all areas of
economic, political, cultural and discursive life; but certain institutions
play a more prominent and routine role in creating and sustaining an
evolving referent for the concept and its subjects. Among the more
important of these are the media.
Participation in the nation is ‘imagined’ because no one can know
more than an infinitesimal number of the other citizens of their nation,
but it is a ‘community’ because everyone has complete confidence in
the simultaneous co-existence of all the others. This sense of
community is built and sustained by the quotidian rhythms of print
and electronic media output, along with periodic national ceremonies
which are themselves communicated through the media.

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