Marketing
strategies are definitely stepping onto next level with nation-states that are formally
trademarking themselves; states as products. Will there be a market where
to buy nation-states in the upcoming future? Because as we see through
cultural ethno-consumption we can already “buy” ourselves a membership into one culture
that is not our origin. Belonging can be based on a choice and not on inherited blood. If
countries are being made fun of as “re-naming them after a takeover joint
venture by a private equity firm,” and presidents are compared to chief
executives of companies and not even nations, then entering into a global market
of states is not a fiction but a prediction.
Liberal worldview distinguishes
clearly the domain of the economy and the domain of politics. Today’s
neoliberal space, where domain of nation-state with its politics becomes a
branded product itself, makes the distinguished lines definitely ambiguous. Having
in mind that, while playing in the business, state still has a privileged role
of licensing it and setting the rules of the business game. In all that,
government actually becomes business; and its good governance is measured in
terms of asset management. Emphasis is not anymore on the wealth of citizens
but on national brand, which has to be deployed to maximum effect.
Neoliberal
voluntarism is as deeply inscribed in the entrepreneurial subject as is
business. It is intended to engender a sense of “grassroots endeavor” in the
“service delivery” sector, so that volunteers might do the kinds of things that
the state once did—and that citizens once expected it to do in return for their
taxes—in efficient, cost- effective ways.
Corporate
Social Responsibility is a welfare state in a new “deckung”, where social
responsibility that in the rise of welfare state was a responsibility of a
state, is becoming a responsibility of a Third Sector, a non-profit sector,
where labor is conducted voluntarily – either by youth helping physically or
mentally ill; by humanitarian or relief workers helping in war zones or by natural catastrophes or by family members helping
elderly etc. Work that serves a moral purpose.
Funny,
huh, how a nation-state and its nationals have switched somehow their roles. State,
one that should carry a moral purpose in front of its citizens, is becoming a highly
branded profit-seeking corporation and the inhabitants, the ones who were once
mainly working to earn their living, are expected to fulfill more their moral
duty by volunteering to help the ones in need.
