Rethinking Nationality in the Context of Globalization

Abstract

Globalization poses a significant challenge to the nation as a social form and consequently to theories that rely on nationality as a conceptual category. This article reviews a range of approaches to the conceptualization of nationality within mass communication, media theory, and cultural studies: mainstream nation-based theories, critical nation-based theories, relational theories, globalization theories, and contextualist theories. An analytical strategy is then proposed within which nationality is conceptualized as one particular logic among others that organize economic, political, technological, and cultural territories and flows. Processes of globalization are widely believed to be altering the forms and dynamics of human social relations and to challenge, especially, that central modern social form, the nation-state. However, theories of globalization are often predicated on the nation-state as an ontological ground or as a key unit of analysis. In other words, our thinking about globalization is shaped, at a fundamental level, by one of the most contested concepts in our analytical repertoire. Globalization therefore also constitutes a considerable challenge to social theory itself, requiring us to rethink the role played by nationality in our conceptual frameworks. Communication technologies, practices, and structures, which are fundamental to social organization itself, play a central role in globalization. Telecommunication infrastructures and information networks undergird global finance, production, and trade; global news media play a key role in international politics; and global advertising, news, and entertainment seem to have significant, if still widely debated, effects on popular culture around the world. Globalization therefore poses especially pressing questions to communication theory. 1 Communication theory, like social theory more broadly, has been shaped at a fundamental level by the conceptual frame of the nation. The nation has been understood—implicitly, and sometimes explicitly— as the container of society; as a consequence, it has often served as a container of our thought. If global, regional, and transnational processes are constituting a new social, economic, and technological landscape—