The Role Of The Media In Rise And Fall Of The Nation State

1. 1
THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA IN THE RISE
AND DEMISE OF NATION-STATES
An Essay Paper on fall 2008 Course:
Globalization, Culture and the Role f the Media
By
AUSTEN UCHE UWOSOMAH
Department of Information and Media Studies
Aarhus University, Denmark
CONTENTS
I Introduction
The Nation-State
The Media
How the Media Rise Cultures of Nation-
States
Media Role in Demise of national culture
Conclusion
References

2. 2
Introduction.
The world is now at the point where interaction between local, national and global
interest is increasing in crescendo. Customary enclaves like cultures, communities,
nations or even territories that previously restricted the transplanetary flow of
diverse social exchanges has become permeable. Thanks to the New World Order
which through wide spread liberal politics and improved communication
technology, provided enabling grounds for gross mobility of people and rapid flow
of information in a way that has never been.
This article tends toward theoretical and analytical discussions on the role the
media has played in the rise and demise of the nation-state. I will present my
arguments in two veins. Firstly, I will argue in terms of the ‘rise’ that the media, in
particular the transnational media, has extended the notion of national
consciousness, nationalism and patriotism to national culture to migrants outside
their homeland. Secondly, I will argue in terms of the ‘demise’ that the
transnational media in so doing, has offered a disordering to conventional national
cultures in nation-states.
Within these contexts, I will focus on the ways in which transnational media are
employed by nation-states and deployed by diasporic citizens. Analyses of Turkish
migrants in Diaspora will be used as case study to illustrate the dynamics that stem
from connecting deterritorialized populations. The article will highlight the
influential role of the media in the transmission cultural contents abroad. More
specifically, my focus will be on how the dissemination of national cultures to
migrant nationals abroad via transnational media of satellite television (Sat TV) is
influencing (rising) and affecting (demising) the cultural order of nation-states.
However, since my scope is restricted to select readings, it is pertinent that I
provide descriptions of the ‘nation-state’ and the ‘media’ in the context of the

3. 3
readings from which my presentation will be made. Subsequently, my presentation
will be guided by the definitions I will recapitulate from the readings.
The Nation-State.
‘Nation’ and ‘state’ put together create an ambivalency of a complex word which
demands for clear-cut explanation of the construct. While the nation dwells on
people or race, the state centers on political definition and sovereignty. In a
broader vein, a nation fits a description of people bounded together because they
share similar sentiments regarding cultural artifacts such as religion, history,
custom or even territory. While the state describes a political entity demarcated
from other states with a well defined governmental structure that has ability and
effectiveness to provide the fundamental political goods associated with statehood.
To crystallize the foregoing, Anderson (1983:6), gives the definition of nation as
“an imagined political community…” with suggestions that the nation is imagined
as “both inherently limited and sovereign”. First, he describes the nation as
imagined because members of the nation to a large extent imagine their existence
in their minds irrespective of whether they meet with one another in lifetime.
Second, he says the nation is imagined as limited because members of nation are
often confined to finite borders. Third, that the nation is imagined as sovereign
because it has to be politically emancipated. And fourth, the nation is imagined as
a community because there exist among members a spirit of oneness and
comradeship.
Anderson further suffices all these imaginings to stem from devotion to the
interests or culture of the nation by its members (whether far or near) which he
says are outcome of national consciousness. National consciousness therefore
makes national societies or imagined communities of nation-states have it as
priority to conscientize members to remain in solidarity with nationalistic values.

4. 4
To achieve this, Verhulst (1999:30-31) says “Diasporic groups are now with the
tools of developing communications technology, working to maintain their
identities, whether they are defined by religious fervour, ethnic pride, economic
ambition or historic places of origin by establishing supportive or interactive
communities…”. As a corollary, communications media are developed and used
to hold sway the behavior of the nationals for “…a more immediate…more intense
and more effective form of transnational bonding” (Ibid.).
The Media.
The media in the context of this article as earlier stated is the transnational media.
Though there exist a plethora of media that are able to cut across national borders,
I shall limit my selection to the printed and electronic mass media of newspapers
and satellite television. The evolution of mass media began with revolution in
print technology which enabled the mass printing of communicable messages into
textual materials.
The Bible and Quran are two textual mass produced and circulated media that
wield enormous influence on those who share similar sentiments in terms of socio-
religious belief. These books helped to form people into imagined communities
irrespective of whether they were within or beyond a territory. However, since the
sacred writs could only bond people together more from sentiments of religion
than of sentiments of national consciousness, it is preferable to focus on the
newspaper which served veritable for anchoring nationalism and patriotism among
nationals.
Anderson (Ibid: 24-25,) recounts that along side the novel, the newspaper
provided the technical means for re-presenting the kind of imagined community
that is like the nation. Why newspapers are being mass produced and circulated
nation wide is because they “serve modern man as substitute for morning prayer…

5. 5
each communicant is aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated
simultaneously by thousand (or millions) of others of whose existence he is
confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion” (Nairn, 1977:24).
What this means is that the newspaper which is a product of print-capitalism made
it possible for rapidly growing number of people to think about themselves, and to
relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways (Anderson, 36-37).
But then, newspapers are not very veritable for transnational cultural purveying.
Reason, they only got patronage from people who could read. This was a major
setback for the medium. Besides, it was not easy ferrying hard copies to far
reaching countries particularly those that were demarcated by large expanse of sea
water. However, with the coming of the Internet and the concomitant media
convergence on it, the problem of ferrying hard copies across borders was solved
as readers were able to read online. Nonetheless, the problem of literacy (including
computer literacy) as prerequisite for patronage has remained. Perhaps this
problem is solved by the electronic audio-visual media particularly of the satellite
television which is the media in focus here.
“Satellite broadcasting today is the “medium that shapes and controls the scale and
form of human association and action” (McLuhan, 1967:8). This is because
consumption of satellite television channels influences and promotes new and
unprecedented state of being. “We can glean clearer insight into the message of
the medium … the message of a particular medium is the change or invention of
scales or patterns that it introduces into human life…”(Ibid: 9).
Robins (2003: 189) explains in other words what McLuhan is describing when he
recounted the arguments of certain German conservative sociologists and political
scientists who opined “that transnational television was, in fact, a significant
cultural and political threat” to German culture. The reason was because they

6. 6
observed that Turkish migrants in Germany, due to watching Turkish satellite
television, were “becoming progressively dissociated from social life of everyday
German society”. Consequently, “satellite broadcasting was held to be a threat to
the …unity and integrity of the German culture” (Ibid: 190).
The Role of the Media in Transnational Cultural Purveying.
The convergence of media on the Internet has built up new virtual geographies
that offer migrants a new kind of experience. All the models of news setting (beat)
and reporting, cultural formation and identity and politics, “are mediated by one or
another of the media, from the epistolary technology of letters, telephone, fax, and
email to the audiovisual media of photos, mp3, films and videos, to print,
electronic, and cyberspace journalism” (Naficy, 1993 : 4).
The new transnational media order has merged social spheres and severed the
traditional links between physical places and social meanings. Meyrowitz (1986)
says they have created “placeless cultures which offer Diasporas around the world
new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and
communities”. Therefore, through the proliferation of transnational visual media,
what has now become crucial for the recipient audiences is the need to be above
ignorance of their community of origin and to become exposed with cultural roots
from their homeland. “The agenda here is all about the protection of national
community - about sustaining the integrity of the imagined community” (Robins,
Ibid: 190).
Supporting the foregoing, Robins (Ibid: 192) reiterates Benedict Anderson’s
characterization of “national cultures as imagined communities” which are
“bonded discursively by a sense of deep … imagined common origin and a
mythical past”. Robins, with inferences from Verhulst (Ibid), further argues that
“the imaginations of deterritorialized people, even when scattered through

7. 7
different lands, may be marked correspondingly by absentee patriotism and long-
distance nationalism” if “diasporic groups are… with the tools of developing
communication technology…to maintain their identities…”. Thus the
globalization of the satellite television has helped to sustain rise of local or
national culture in the global scenario.
On the other hand, Aksoy and Robins (2003:4-5,36) argue that transnational media
consumption promotes de-ethnicization and frees the migrant from the pincers of a
‘frozen image’ of the homeland. They suggest that the practice of satellite
television viewing, places migrants in an “ironic stance to cultures”, and far from
reinforcing long distance national identities it fosters an experience of “moving
beyond the frame of national society”. Their argument is based on the assumption
that “what is conceived in terms of deterritorialization of migrant cultures is
related to the emergence of new hybrid identities and new cosmopolitan
possibilities” (Robins, Ibid:192) for the migrant communities.
How the Media Rise Cultures of Nation-States.
It is pertinent at this juncture to present the first line of my argument regarding
how the transnational media from homeland have favored rise of the nation-states.
All transnational media seek to ingrained the feeling of long-distance patriotism to
respective migrants of their imagined communities. This spectacular of course, is
the bedrock of an initiative to catapult national cultural identity even to the lost
sheep. The transnational media may thus be described as the voice of the shepherd
crying out to get the attention of the strayed sheep (migrant) in the wilderness
(foreign land).
Earlier studies on globalization of national cultures by transnational media
portrayed globalization as the suppressing of national cultures by the Western
culture- what was referred to as: ‘cultural imperialism’. Western culture,

8. 8
particularly of the United States was popularized by the American transnational
visual media which dominated the global until other nations were able to come up
with their media. With the emergence of transnational media from other nations, it
became possible to break the monopoly of cultural imperialism which America
had enjoyed for decades.
Iwabuchi (2002: 554 – 555) supports that, transnational media globalization has
generated the de-centering of Western (U.S.) cultural hegemony. Non- Western
players now actively collaborate in the production and circulation of global media
commodities …Furthermore, the predominance of Western (U.S.) culture has been
seriously challenged by the intensification of intraregional cultural flows and
connections in the non-West. Transnational media from other nations proliferated
with a different agenda and changed the rule of the game.
Unlike the American transnational media which sought to brainwash the global
populace with her culture, the upcoming transnational media from other nations
targeted their media messages at national communities in Diaspora. This
calculated strategy from other transnational media created a new order in the
globalization of media and culture. The migrants or diasporic communities were
simply the pivot around which the transnational media revolve their messages.
Perhaps that is why the transnational media are being referred to by contemporary
media and cultural researchers as ‘diasporic media’.
The crux of the diasporic media is “associated with the advent of global networks
with new and productive patterns of cultural flow across global space” (Robins,
Ibid). Diasporic media around the world are perhaps the best examples of the
revolutionary approach to globalization for reason that they build bridges between
the local, national and the global in a way that is now conditioning daily lives of
the Diasporas.

9. 9
Appadurai (2004: 4) recognizes the significance of the interface between
transnational media connects with the migrant populations and the role it plays in
the contemporary global era. With contemporary global flows of mass-mediated
global imagery and discourses, “a new order of instability in the production of
modern subjectivities” is invented.
For example, possible now that “Turkish migrant workers in Denmark are able to
watch Turkish films on TRT-INT satellite TV from Ankara in their Danish homes;
Brazilians in San Francisco are able to see national football tournaments through
TV GLOBO satellite feeds from Brasilia, and Hispanos scattered all over Latin
America are able to watch TELEVISIA; cable TV from Mexico, as Iraqi residents
in New York were able to catch glimpse of the invasion of their homeland by the
U S Army on AL JAZEERA TV. All the foregoing are reflections of how moving
images from the so-called diasporic media meet deterritorialized viewers.
The above situation in turn, functions to produce and sustain the evolution of new
diasporic public spheres that transcend the scope of conventional nation-state.
“The role of the media in articulating the dispersed members of the nation to the
centers of symbolic power is crucial here” (Morley, 2000:107). What this
emphasizes is that, the media capitalizes on the consequences of national
identification very well to sway the people of ‘its nation’ to being part and parcel
of ‘the nation’ distance not minding. The glaring effect of this is that diasporic
members stampede to seek affinity with their respective nation-states because ‘the
media’ seems to have some kind of absolute force to not only rousing patriotic
nationalism, but sometimes nostalgia as well.
Diasporic communities all over the world are now connected one way or another
to their national imagined communities. The cable satellite TV has done

10. 10
immensely good job of that and where the cable TV has not reached the Internet
has covered. Most people in the Diaspora who have the literary and computer
literacy to use the Internet daily surf the medium for diasporic WebPages that give
news from back home. But it was the satellite TV that did the magic more than the
Internet. The example given by Robins on his interview with Zeynep, the Turkish
woman in Britain documented Zeynep as saying:
“No one knew what the culture of Turkey was, no one heard any news from
Turkey… I didn’t know my identity. I couldn’t know what Turkish meant…. I
didn’t know who I was until this TV thing came along… it has brought so much
with it!”
Indeed as it did for Zeynep, so did it for other diasporic members of imagined
communities.
It is no longer farfetched nowadays to find migrants in foreign host lands
fostering the cultures of their own imagined national communities instead of that
of the national communities where they reside. In Denmark for instance, I have
seen a number of veiled Muslim Turkish women shopping in City Vest, a big
Danish shopping mall in Brabrand. I know Denmark is not a Muslim nation yet
lots of veiled woman are seen in this public place. For these veiled women, they
represent their imagined national religious culture. For me a Christian African
studying in Denmark, they represent part of the tourist attraction I see in Denmark.
But I wonder how the Danes see them.
My argument from the foregoing is that while this is a plus or ‘rise’ for the
cultures of the imagined nation-states of the Muslim women, conversely, I think it
is a minus or ‘demise’ for the culture of the nation-state where they are domiciled.
This is vivid example that the media, in particular the transnational media, has
extended the notion of national consciousness and patriotism to national cultural
identity to its nationals offshore

11. 11
Media Role in Demise of National Culture.
Having provided the foregoing grounds for my first argument which support that
transnational media has effected rise in the awareness of national cultural identity
to its nationals offshore, I will now proceed to argue that in the same way, the
transnational media by so doing has offered a disordering to conventional national
cultures in nation-states whose primary order is to assume united national culture
and identity.
The production of a universally homogenous consumer culture – ‘globalization’
renders national and natural borders obsolete. Ohmae, (1996 : 18) claims that
though globalization leaves us with a global logic which functions in “dissolving
the fabric holding nation-states together” (Ibid), it has been a key component of
promoting homogenization of cultures in some ways and cultural diversity in
some other ways.
“While this shift in theorizing globalization has been an ongoing process for at
least two decades, the conceptualization of globalization as a threat to the
conventional nation-state does not seem to have changed. Some theorists have
opined globalization announces the demise of the nation-state, the rise of Western
cultural imperialism and the replacement of national culture with the global”
(Karanfil, 2004).
But today, scholars are talking of a different kind of globalization which is the
notion of cultural diversity as opposed to cultural imperialism. “The ‘threat’ is not
expressed so much as cultural imperialism or western cultural domination: rather,
it has gradually been replaced by ethnic, religious conflict and a threat to the
conventional nation states and national consciousnesses whose primary reference
is to a unified, monolithic national culture and identity” (Ibid).

12. 12
Transnational media flows are situated at the centre of these claims. The
transnational media offers an unprecedented disordering of conventional national,
ethnic, religious identifications. My contention is that this disordering, hammers
on the cultural artifacts of any nation-state they come across. They produce first
culture diversity, and then ‘cultures clash’ in the host nation. Perhaps this was the
anxiety of German culture monitors of the 90s who associated satellite
broadcasting as threat to the unity and integrity of the German culture.
The reasons were because first, Germany had the largest Turkish population of
migrants in Europe. Second, they observed that Turkish migrants had resorted to
watching Turkish satellite TV channels exclusively and due to watching these
channels, they were recoiling from social life of everyday German society. As a
consequence, W. Heitmeyer and Co. followed it up with one of the most alarmist
and pessimistic counsels. Among the points of discourse in their counsel, was the
issue of ‘clash of civilization’. The German society was sensitized about “dangers
of cultural fragmentation and ghettoism, and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism,
and of…ethno-cultural confrontation and conflict” (Heitmeyer et al., 1997). These
scaremongering announced the consequence of the price Germany will pay if the
Turks were allowed to continue watching Turkish Sat TVs.
“The foregoing was “the cultural consequences of transnational television from
Turkey. The German society, believing the Turks were necessary under the sway
of their Turkish media thus needed to be defended against an imagined cultural
invasion or from alien culture that the German cultural monitors assumed.
.
The foregoing makes it seem obvious that the Turkish media was more blamed for
the culture threat than the presence of the Turkeys in Germany. This is so because,
worries of cultural invasion did not take front line in Germany until it was

13. 13
observed that the transnational media of Sat TVs were changing the cultural
behavior of Turkish auslanders in Germany.
Howbeit, the problems of ethnicity, race and religious differentiation still exist
even among bonafide nationals in nation-states. Perhaps this is why some national
policy seeks to implement social policies of ‘unity in diversity’ to unify the
national culture. And when migrants come in, other policy of ‘integration and
assimilation’ is put forward to integrate them into the cultural ambit of the nation.
It is therefore not the interest of cultural policy makers to have migrants upsetting
the national cultural identity of its national space.
No medium preceding satellite television has been as influential in encouraging
the migrants to forge new mental spaces for themselves. The consumption of
satellite television channels from Turkey has influenced and promoted new ways
of being, new connections to the homeland and disconnections from the host land.
Transnational media particularly of the Sat TV offer the essential platform for this
disconnections and disengagement from the cultural affinity to the host land. The
diasporic subjects forge cultural specimens which build on diverse hybridity and
possibly, they try to make them manifest in their new national spaces. In this
sense, “transnational media consumption produces transcultural spaces that are
negotiated and experienced in everyday life to meet immediate and mediated
experience in local, national and transnational spaces” (Karanfil, Ibid).
Castles and Miller (2003: 33) reiterate that the tension between the local and the
global “can lead to the emergence of countercultures and political radicalization”.
In a sense, “this process of transculturalization which evolves outside the
traditional boundaries of the codes of production of the nation-state can be
understood as a critique or disordering of the national

14. 14
culture of …” (Karanfil, Ibid) the host nations. I dare say here that this is the
benchmark for sufficing that transculturalization leads to the demising of cultural
values in nation-states. And of course, it does so with a helping hand from the
transnational media particularly of the Sat TVs.
Conclusion.
Kraidy (1972: 161) summed up the result of transnational cultural mixture whether
it be in form of homogenization, diversification, confrontation or fragmentation, as
a culture inter-network of “hybridity without guarantees”. Kraidy enthuses that the
recognition between and within ethnic, religious and linguistic communities…
allows for transcultural mixtures to take shape with sustained cultural exchanges.
The sustenance of cultural exchange has always been achieved more effectively by
the media. This is even so because not only that the media plays immense role in
purveying transcultural exchanges, it also creates platforms for influencing the
attitudes of recipients. The Satellite television is one medium that has done so very
well. With the availability of Sat TVs from Turkey, there has been shifts between
diverse multiple cultural spaces. In this regards, satellite television from Turkey
has transcended Turkey’s socio-cultural artifacts beyond Turkey’s national space.
This development has ensured the converging of transcultural subjects who select
from the media to produce and inhabit cultures of their own.
However, this experience offers disordering to pre-established configurations of
national cultural identity. In other words, a productive disordering of the national
culture of the host lands where migrants sojourn. The cultural shortcomings
caused by the migrants in their host lands, has forged demise in the cultural
integrity of the host lands. The overlapping outcome of this contingency has
mainly resulted in the fostering of hybrid aculturalization in the nation-states.

15. 15
With support from Kraidy, my conclusion here suggests that these hybrid
identifications that transcend national references need to be conceptualized in
desirable formations. “It is through these re-descriptions that social exchange can
be achieved in a cultural politics of identity.
Therefore, the emphasis that contemporary transcultural media networks of
satellite TVs are the catalysts for the rise and demise of the cultural identities of
nation-states remains fundamental in my presentation. It is stark fact that the
messages from the media, particularly of Sat TVs provide the resources for
hybridization of cultural identities in nation-states.
By employing global communication technologies such as Sat TVs, migrants in
Diaspora will continue to engage in a constant zest to invent and reinvent cultural
artifacts in glorification of their homeland. It is through these inventions that
cultural formation emerges to disorder the cultures of their host nation-states. The
Germans cultural monitors though not in error once blamed the media more than
the migrants for this. Nonetheless, I conclude by inferring that the role the media
plays in the rise or demise of nation-states’ cultures is a necessary evil. This is
because globalization itself is an output of an orderly and disorderly matter of
cultural hybridity. It is categorical that whatever it foreruns can only manifest via
orderliness and disorderliness.

16. 16
References
Anderson, Benedict (1991{1983}). Imagined Communities, London: Verso
Appadurai, A. (2004). Grassroots Globalisation and the Research Imagination.
Public Culture, 12(1), 1-19.
Castles, S., and Miller, M. J. (2003). ‘The Age of Migration: International
Population Movements in the Modern World’. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heitmeyer, W., Schroder, H., and Miller, J (1997) Desintergration und
islamischer Fundamentilism: Uber Lbenssituation, Alltagserfahrungen und ihre
Verarbeittalismus: Uber Leebenssutuation, Lichen in Deutscland” In Aus Politik
und Zeitgeschte, 7-8 Pontails, J B. Paris : Senil
Iwabuchi, K. (2002). ‘Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism’. Durham and London: Duke University.
Karanfil, Gökçen (2004) The Message of Transnational Media Changing Notions
of ‘Threat’ and Opportunities for Cultural Diversity, GMJ: Mediterranean Edition
3(1) Spring 2008 24
Kraidy, Marwan (1972). Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, Temple
University Press: Philadelphia.
Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No Sense of Place: The impact of Electronic Media on
Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University.
McLuhan, H. M. (1967). The medium is the Message. New York: Bantam.
Morley David (2000). Broadcasting and Construction of the National Family, In
Home Territories: Media, Mobility And Identity, Sage: London.
Naficy, H. (1993). The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los
Angles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Ohmae, K. (1996). The borderless World. New York: Harper.
Robins, Kelvin (2003. Beyond Imagined Community? Trans National Media and
Turkish immigrants in Europe in Harvard(Ed) media in a globallized Society
Museum Tusculanum press: Copenhagen.
Verhulst, Stefaan (1999) Diasporic and Transnational Communications:
Technologies, Policies and Regulation In Javnost/The Public, 6(1)