Products and the Construction of the Austrian Nation

As consumption is a practice with an important symbolic dimension, consumer goods serve as vehicles for establishing imagined communities of all sorts, one of them, and not the least important, being the nation. Generally it can be said that in societies of mass consumption communication about and through products participates in the construction of the national self. The proposed project understands nationalization as a discursive process relating symbolic meanings associated with consumer goods to national identity. This mode of nationalization generally involves just a few goods and fields of consumption and draws only on some (not all) aspects of a product or practice of consumption. The project will research on the Austrian case and ask the following central questions: How did the representation of consumer goods in the mass-media participate in the building of an Austrian identity and where did it transcend the boundaries of this imagined community and embed Austrian society in a "Western", ever more globalized consumer culture? To answer this principal question we will select several branded goods of Austrian and foreign (West German and US-American) provenance. It is planned that the following products will be investigated: Cars made by Steyr-Daimler-Puch, particularly the Puch 500 and the Mercedes/Puch G (since 1979) The Volkswagen beetle - the obvious counterpart of the efforts to create an Austrian people`s car and the BMW 700, which Austrian automobile enthusiasts consider to be based on the Denzel 600, a car built by the Viennese firm Denzel, an importer of BMW and a constructor of sports cars. Coffee by Julius Meinl, the Cirkel coffee produced by the consumer cooperations, and Jacobs coffee, that is bourgeois and social-democratic patriotism versus the German brand that overtook against its Austrian competitors. Almdudler lemonade as almost the only Austrian soft drink that has survived the competition of Coca-Cola and other US-soft drinks Coca-Cola and Fast Food by McDonalds as culinary challenges to the home country of the "Wiener Schnitzel" Mustard of Mautner-Markhof (Vienna) and Eduard Haas (Linz) because these two brands lend themselves to reflecting about the relationship between regionalization and nationalization. The project will reconstruct the advertising and journalistic communication about the products mentioned above. This will shed light on discursive processes that provided Austrian consumers with a means of identifying with the national community or distancing themselves from it.

How did the representation of consumer goods in print journalism and advertising participate in the building of an Austrian nation as an `imagined community`? To answer this question several brands, both Austrian and foreign, were chosen from two highly different product groups, motor-vehicles and food. Among the investigated vehicles were the Volkswagen beetle and the Steyr Puch 500, the Austrian claim to a people`s car from 1957; furthermore as part of a glimpse back into the interwar period, the Steyr 50, which was launched in 1936 as the Austrofascist competitor of the German Volkswagen project; and finally - although only vehicle parts - the Semperit tyres. Regarding food, research centred on Meinl coffee, Manner wafers, the Almdudler and its complex relation to Coca Cola as a symbol of the American Way of Life. Findings on individual products were complemented with observations on buy-Austrian campaigns which had their first run in the inter-war years and were resurrected in the 1950s. Companies have always been trying to tap into national sentiment as a marketing scheme. But by doing so they jump to possibilities afforded by the fact that the nation would remain an abstract and ineffective concept if not inserted into daily life. The staging of the nation in mass media texts about products is part of what can be called "banal nationalism" (Michael Billig). If we look at the up- and down-swings of nationalising rhetoric in Austrian product communication, an increase always ran parallel to political, cultural, and economic developments that put in question the previously established way of thinking about the country. In the 1950s Austria had just again been separated from Germany and hence the construction of a national identity centred on the new small Republic was an urgent necessity. Austrians had to persuade themselves that the allied victory had restored an Austrian state as the natural equivalent of a cultural and ethnic community of Austrians. Much of the needed national imagery had already been prepared by the `Ständestaat`. In the mass media there existed a marked disposition to relate the attributes attached to products to a national pattern: Is this Austrian, typically Austrian? Is it foreign, is it American and if this is so, what does it mean for Austria and Austrian culture? Nationalisation stayed important in the 1960s, but gradually decreased. In the late 1970s product communication was again becoming more nationally minded. The post-war boom was then drawing to a close. Austria could put off economic troubles for a while and people liked to think of their country as an island of the blessed, but the crisis eventually reached Austria in the early 1980s. In late spring 1978 the organisation "Made in Austria" was founded, which aimed at persuading Austrians to prefer Austrian products. So yet another cycle of nationalisation began in the late 1970s and faded away in the second half of the 1980s. When Austria became a member of the European Union, this prompted renewed insistence on the national origin of products and the associated national values. Austrians voted for the entry into the Union but soon became Euro- sceptics. In 1996 Almdudler ran a TV-spot that showed Adam and Eve in paradise opening a fridge. They discover that it does not contain Almdudler and decide to leave. Naked before they now wear the traditional Austrian leather pants. The last and currently on-going wave of nationalising product communication has begun with the global economic crisis since 2008. Even a quintessentially American brand like McDonalds ran a campaign that revealed pommes frites as the well fried offspring of an Austrian potato, wearing a traditional hat.