TIKA's Soft Power: Nation Branding in Turkish Foreign Policy.

• Author: Akilli, Erman
• Position: ARTICLE

The Relationship between Nation Branding and Humanitarian Assistance

Nation branding is an important concept in today's world; it can be described as the increase in a country's positive recognizability in the world through the construction of attitudes and emotions towards that nation. As a consequence of globalization, all countries must compete with each other for the attention, respect, and trust of investors, tourists, consumers, donors, immigrants, media, and governments of other nations: a powerful and positive nation brand provides a crucial competitive advantage. It is essential for countries to understand how they are seen by publics around the world, and how their achievements and failures, their assets and their liabilities, their people and their products are reflected in their brand image.

Branding is not just a singular image or characteristic that helps distinguish one product from others. It is a process which creates a meaningful whole with physical, nonphysical, and psychological or sociological aspects. (1) In general, branding is essential across a large spectrum of the economy, finance, marketing and trading, and it is fast becoming a key instrument in social science and in the fields of International Relations and Politics.

According to Anholt, nation branding refers to a country's efforts to establish harmonious relations by attending to new trends and practicing innovation to improve its reputation. (2) Szondi draws our attention to clear categories of nation branding that may be observed in the economic, commercial, and political disposition of a country as it works to publicize itself both domestically and abroad. (3) Nation branding supports countries in increasing their prestige; it provides a sense of pride and advantage to a country's citizens and canalizes them to withstand national and global competitiveness. (4) "The aim is to create a clear, simple, differentiating idea built around emotional qualities which can be symbolized both verbally and visually and understood by diverse audiences in a variety of situations. To work effectively, nation branding must embrace political, cultural, business and sport activities." (5)

Nation branding has been classified on the basis of the literature into three categories: product-based, national-based and cultural-based. (6) In other words, nation branding reveals the multiple national features which belong only to the nation. (7) Dinnie highlights that nation branding does not merely promote a country's touristic opportunities, stimulate domestic and foreign trade and investments, and attract international students for education as part of its economic targets; it also tries to increase the value of a country's chief monetary unit and consolidate its political stability. Together, these efforts lead to increasing a country's international trustworthiness and national reputation, and providing stronger international partnerships that in turn help nation building. (8) Today, countries use branding to explain themselves to the world in many ways. They generally use simple and clear images, slogans and marketing techniques as it can be seen from Figure 1.

These images reveal the nation branding strategies of the countries represented here. While some states highlight their flag colors, in other words, their national or political identity, countries such as Maldives and Greece highlight their identity as tourism destinations. While countries are representing themselves with images and slogans, they tend to emphasize their famous features from social organizations to tourism destinations.

Turkey's slogan, 'Discover the Potential,' has not become as famous as Holland's tulip, or 'I Love New York.' Turkey's prominence derives from such factors as its foreign policy and its leadership claim in the region, which are harder to crystallize into a single image or slogan. Yet, not all branding is about visual image. In his analysis of nation branding, Fan identifies four essential characteristics: public diplomacy, tourism, country of origin and national identity. (10) Humanitarian assistance, one form of public diplomacy, matters a lot. In this paper, the main focus will be on the role of national identity in nation branding, and the function of humanitarian assistance in understanding nation branding.

In 2004, Georgescu et al. published a paper in which they describe national identity as multi-dimensional--in other words, a term that cannot be reduced to a simple definition. Moreover, they argue, the nature of national identity can change over time. (11) "An 'identity' is not a thing, it is a description of ways of speaking about self and the community, yourself and your community and accordingly, it does not develop in a social void, but in relation to manifest forms of existence; 'identity is a form of life.'" (12) In a comprehensive study on this subject, Dinnie reports that national identity plays a pivotal role in nation branding. Strong national identity leads to strong nation branding campaigns because famous or high capacity companies or brands are not enough by themselves. Language, literature, sport activities, cultural events and political approaches contribute to the constitution of national identity, and create the nation brand value of the country. (13)

At first view, "brand'' may be seen as a problematic concept in relation to humanitarian assistance, because the word evokes notions of marketing and trade. So, using the term 'branding' in relation to humanitarian assistance seems strange at first. Yet, it makes sense when we recognize that humanitarian assistance aims at moral duty, and at the same time, generates an image of a helpful and generous country in the mind of the public. When aid programs are managed logically, recipient countries develop positive dialogues and relations with the donor country, and the donor country's image and reputation are affected positively in the eyes of the local, and sometimes global public, and gain the interest of foreign investors and corporations.

Brand Power at Work in Humanitarian Aid: Syrian Refugees in Turkey

The Syrian civil war began in 2011 and is still ongoing. It started with protests against Bashar al-Assad's government in Deraa, and evolved into a widespread civil war in which more than 480,000 people have died. (14) The Syrian refugee crisis has tested many countries, and the attitudes and behaviors of both hosting and transit countries have come under scrutiny, revealing a full spectrum of feelings from hatred to sympathy. For instance, in 2016 a Slovakian soldier shot a Syrian boy while he was trying to enter Slovakia from the Hungarian border. The Independent reported, "It is outrageous that Slovak authorities are shooting at innocent people fleeing war." (15) On the other hand, in 2015 a photographer captured a photo near the German-Danish border, which went viral with such responses as, 'heartbreaking news' or 'touching;' as a result, Denmark captured hearts with this spontaneous scene. In short, the sum of the images which are formed in people's mind give us a sense of the relationship between 'nation branding' and humanitarian aid (or its opposite).

According to the December 2017 statistics of the UN Refugee Agency, 5,468,281 people have fled from Syria since the outbreak of civil war. 341,268 of them have been registered by the Turkish Government since 2011. 459,134 people are living in refugee camps in neighboring countries, and more than half of them are living in Turkish Refugee camps. (16) At the end of the 7 (th) year of the war, the Syrians have become the largest population of forced migration in the world and most of them are hosted in Turkey. (17)

The Syrian refugee crisis marks a turning point in Turkish foreign and domestic policies in the context of its humanitarian assistance policy and its effects on politics. Nonetheless, it is crucial to stress that in recent years there have been a tremendous number of critics of humanitarian assistance in the literature, who argue that this type of aid can be disastrous as it can create dependency for the receiving countries. However, these critiques and the debate surrounding the topic are for another study's subject. In this paper, we attempt to clarify how Turkey has shaped its foreign policy in response to the Syrian refugee crisis and to examine what kind of nation brand value the country has created through the humanitarian assistance it has provided in response to this crisis.

Turkish Humanitarian Aid in Numbers

In 2016, more than 65.5 million people were displaced, both internally and internationally. Turkey hosted 4.2...