‘Carbon footprint nationalism’: re-conceptualizing Finnish nationalism and national pride through climate change discourse

ABSTRACT

During recent years media discussion over the gravity of climate change has increased rapidly. One of the most used bywords has been ‘carbon footprint’, a concept with a moral appeal to global responsibility and a sense of global environmental togetherness. However, ‘carbon footprint responsibility’ cannot be separated from nationalistically loaded affects and their representations but instead it has effected new articulations that support state-centric ideologies, offering a fresh starting point for re-conceptualizing the theories of nationalism. This article analyses how the Finnish media constructs a contradictory discourse in which the moral debate over carbon footprint responsibility merges with nationalistically loaded argumentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Carbon footprint
• climate change
• nationalism
• national pride
• Finnish media

Introduction

The term ‘carbon footprint’ as a signifier of human environmental responsibly has become nearly ubiquitous during the past few years. The term is a common topic in various forms of media discussions, a strategic variable in political campaigns, a promotional label on everyday consumer products, a key theme through which the very meaning and logic of responsibility is taught to children in schools, and so on. According to Anita Girvan (2017), carbon footprint is a keyword of our time, a shifting metaphor which instead of being a singular expression referring to human will to reduce carbon emissions, is instead a range of expressions invested with multiple interests, affects and agendas. As a public discourse, the term ‘carbon footprint’ has a notable ethical overtone, entailing a moral demand that every human being should make right choices in personal customs and behaviour, and should eschew the wrong ones. From the geographical viewpoint the use of the term is interesting. While it is clear that carbon footprint discourse implies a sense of global responsibility and global togetherness, it is unclear whether it replaces other manners of understanding the sense of socio-spatial belonging such as nationalism? This article scrutinizes how the media discussion over carbon footprint responsibility is in fact closely linked to nationalistically loaded affects and representations, offering a fresh starting point for re-conceptualizing theories of nationalism, state-centric perceptions and nationalistic emotions. The focus is on the Finnish media’s treatment of the concept of carbon footprint, which merges the discourses of Finnish nationalism, national pride, climate change and carbon footprint responsibility together.

Although the theories of climate change were noticed in media in the 1970s, by and large the concepts of ‘climate change’ and ‘greenhouse effect’ were understood more as catchphrases of environmentalist ideology rather than as established scientific fact. Later on, social and political attitudes towards these phrases shifted. Climate change, for instance, has become a key object of geopolitics and functions as an organized assemblage of power/knowledge (Dittmer et al., 2011; see also Bruun & Medby, 2014). As the recent explosion of academic research on the Anthropocene has illustrated, consciousness concerning the gravity of climate change has increased rapidly. However, knowledge about climate change often derives solely from media discussions, not from the rapidly evolving research of climate scientists, which means that the media has a powerful role (and also responsibility) in terms of how wider consciousness about the topic is occasioned (Boykoff, 2007, 2011; Carvalho, 2007; Schmidt et al., 2013). In addition, it is also important to underscore that although the body of scientific research on climate change is extensive and rapidly evolving, there are multiple mechanisms, discourses and rationalities of how the changing climate and its scientific research becomes debated:

Climate change is not a neutral scientific script that lends authority to policy makers to establish governance interventions vis-à-vis a global climate polity. Rather climate change is always already a coproduced science-political hybrid and as such is enacted in particular ways by different assemblages of practices. (Randalls, 2014, p. 237)

The question of ‘who gets to speak about climate change?’ turns the environmental issue into a matter of culture politics in which the media has a key role in terms of deciding which voices are heard and which are silenced (see Boykoff, 2011). Nathanian Rich’s Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change (2019) describes in detail how in the 1980s the existing scientific evidence of global warming was blocked from media by the US business world and politicians. As discussed in this article, the question of ‘who gets to speak about climate change?’ is also connected to the role of modern nation states and nationalism. According to Brubaker (1996, p. 10), nation has been ‘so central, and protean, a category of modern political and cultural thought, discourse, and practice that it is hard indeed to imagine a world without nationalism’. The accelerated globalization of the past 20 years has often led to arguments about how nationalism is globally descendent, but simultaneously it has been underscored how ‘notions of national identities are still topical in recent scholarship at a time when processes of globalization appear to be undermining the nation-state and its territorial power’ (Rembold & Carrier, 2011, p. 361).

In this article carbon footprint is approached, not as a scientific fact, but rather as a socio-political discourse. The article analyses how the Finnish media constructs a contradictory narrative in which the moral debate over carbon footprint responsibility merges with nationalistically loaded argumentation. Nationalism takes many forms within different contexts but here nationalism is approached particularly in terms of national pride. Through the critical discourse analysis of 121 digital newspaper articles, published in the leading Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat between 31 October 2018 and 31 January 2020, the article discusses how the Finnish media constructs and sustains a logic of thinking in which carbon footprint responsibility is merged together with the state-centric perceptions and nationalistic ideologies. The analysis is conducted in three partly over-lapping sections: the work discusses firstly how a new form of national pride is established when the myth of ancient Finnish national roots is linked with the contemporary discussion over climate change; secondly, how banal nationalism functions as a contextual media framework within which the discussion regarding carbon footprint responsibility is debated; and thirdly, how othering discourses function as a mechanism through which carbon footprint responsibility converges with the senses of national responsibility and national pride. The article illustrates how the discourses of carbon footprint and nationalism become intriguingly entwined and thus contributes both to socio-political studies of climate change and human geographical studies of nationalism.

Climate change, nationalism and national pride

In contemporary cross-disciplinary discussion, the relationship of climate change and nationalism has been approached from three viewpoints. First, in the so-called ‘realist perspective’ nation-states are considered as institutional forces that cannot be transcended in international climate agreements (see Lieven, 2020). A central factor behind this is the Paris Agreement, which was signed by 195 countries in 2016. According to the UNFCCC, the aim of the Paris Agreement is to

strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Additionally, the agreement aims to strengthen the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change.

Given the irreconcilable differences between the economic goals of different countries, the climate agreement was considered a surprising success among academics (see Dimitrov, 2016). The most progressive element in the Paris Agreement was considered to be that it acknowledges the primacy of domestic politics in climate change by ‘allowing countries to set their own level of ambition for climate change mitigation’ (Falkner, 2016, p. 1107). For instance, the chair of the Finnish Climate Change Panel, Markku Ollikainen (2017) estimated that in Finland the goals will be relatively easy to reach and, in fact, the increased demand for green bioenergy would benefit the Finnish economy, since forestry has long been a major contributor to the economic wellbeing of Finland. What the Paris Agreement also meant was that a new form of media debate was born, one in which national responses to climate change are discussed by comparing our responses to their responses and thus establishing othering, nationalistically loaded argumentations regarding ‘how responsible we are’. Instead of underscoring the gravity of climate change crisis as a global issue, climate change discourse, perhaps surprisingly, moved towards arguments which either implicitly or explicitly pushes forward new discourses supporting nationalistically charged ideologies. What Lieven (2020) in his book Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case (2020) suggests is that, although climate change threatens the vital interests of nation-states, nationalism can and should be harnessed in the fight against climate change.

The second viewpoint on the relationship between climate change and nationalism is connected with the idea of risk society, a concept used by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. According to Beck (2016), climate change has already changed our way of being in the world and the way we think about the world. The key lines in modern world map are not traditional nation-state boundaries but elevations above sea level. In this respect, nationalism is not considered fertile ideological ground for modern society to be organized. Recent calls for a new global responsibility and re-defined subjectivity have motivated arguments in which Benedict Anderson’s (1991) classic conceptualization of national belonging in terms of an imagined community has been contested. Beck (2011), among others, has suggested that within the context of global risks such as climate change, the concept of ‘imagined community’ should avoid native–foreign conceptualizations in favour of ‘imagined cosmopolitan communities’. Where Anderson (1991) conceives nationalism as a cultural artefact that is based on the myth of a common historical past, Beck (2011, p. 1356) perceives climate change in terms of Europeanization, a process along which nation-states become trans-national states. While Beck acknowledges that making categorical distinctions between national and cosmopolitan is problematic when exploring global risks, and that cosmopolitization is not the ‘dichotomous other’ of nationalism, his main argument sustains that cosmopolitan communities are not territorial (2011, p. 1355).

The third viewpoint seeks to find some balance between nationalism and cosmopolitanism by scrutinizing how nations, nationalism and national narratives have been mobilized to make sense of the changing climate (Conversi, 2020). This discussion is often labelled under umbrella terms such as ‘resource nationalism’ and ‘green nationalism’, underscoring how the role of ‘traditional’ nationalism in contemporary climate change policies is still undetermined. According to Conversi (2020, p. 634),

while we are still waiting for the rise of a new green nationalism that is capable of transcending the previous limits of ecologism and environmentalism, we are left to deal with the ghost of something we thought we had left behind two centuries ago. Nationalism may have been an appropriate ideology until the late 20th century, but it is becoming increasingly unfit for the new world that is unfolding.

Although the moral understandings of carbon footprint responsibility are seemingly difficult to reconcile with the general logics of nationalistic ideologies, some cross-disciplinary studies have noted how environmentalism and nationalism can function as inter-connected discourses. For instance in Iceland, enviro-politics has a long history as a key element of the romantic nationalist aesthetic (Dibben, 2009). Nationalistic arguments have been used in newspaper debates in order to accentuate the global role and responsibility of Iceland in environmental matters, at the same time evidencing what Jóhannesson (2005) calls ‘a peculiar “marriage” of nationalism and internationalism’ (p. 506). In similar manner, it has been argued that the English-language mass media in India has re-framed the ‘climate change story’ for the reading public, at both international and sub-national scales, ‘around a nationalistic argument of “us” versus “them”, at the expense of other key issues in the debate’ (Billett, 2010, p. 14).

To understand how nationalism is mobilized to make sense of climate change (Conversi, 2020), or the other way around, how media discourses on climate change are mobilized to make sense of nationalism, a more nuanced conception of nationalism and emotions is needed. As the following analysis illustrates, people’s emotional attachment to their nation as a community is difficult to contest through the ideologies of environmentalism and globalism, no matter how strongly or repeatedly the moral appeal to urgent global responsibility is mediated. This is connected to the highly nuanced and multivalent nature of nationalism. Nationalism can refer to patriarchal celebration of the state and right-wing political ideologies, but also to unconscious everyday habits or various forms of emotional senses of belonging as a sense of national pride. National pride refers first and foremost to an emotional bond to a state, a wider emotional category containing several other affects such as love of country and patriotism (Waitt et al., 2007, p. 252). National pride is a positive affect that

the public feels towards their country, resulting from their national identity. It is both the pride or sense of esteem that a person has for one’s nation and the pride or self-esteem that a person derives from one’s national identity. (Smith & Kim, 2006, p. 127)

This is connected to the much-used metaphor ‘nation as home’ (read more in, e.g. Caluya, 2011) but also to concerns about what others think about us, as ‘most want their nation to be admired and are enthused by the transmission of esteem’ (Wood, 2014, p. 111). Correspondingly, Antonsich makes a categorical separation between national pride and national attachment by arguing that pride is more dependent on contextual events, whereas ‘attachment seems to resonate more with the notion of (national) identity, which is less conditioned by contingent events, since it serves to define “who I am”’ (2009, p. 290). In this article the difference between the categories of national pride and national attachment is understood to be not so straightforward because, firstly, the definition of ‘who I am’ (national identity) is often impossible to separate from the content of national pride, and secondly, it is debatable how appropriate it would be to treat climate change as a ‘contingent event’.

Although national pride is linked with everyday nationalism and an emotional sense that, in contrast with state-driven nationalist discourses, becomes established in face-to-face experiences ‘from below’ (see Antonsich, 2018), the media plays a central role in terms of how national pride, as a discursive heritage, is constructed and maintained. For Anderson, newspaper-reading represented a daily ceremony that is replicated simultaneously by thousands of other readers (1991, p. 35), thus constructing a community through repeated imaginations. Although the media landscape has changed drastically since the first edition of Anderson’s Imagined Community was published in 1983, newspapers still occupy a central institutional role in terms of how particular information as well as opinions take shape and are legitimized as part of our shared consciousness. Today, social media plays an important role in terms of how political discourses are maintained and reproduced, but it is nevertheless common that the information launched through social media is either produced by or filtered through conventional media platforms.

Newspapers have long represented a good example of what Michael Billig’s (1995) much-used concept ‘banal nationalism’ means in practice, playing a major role in the daily reproduction of nationhood, while the nation in itself is an important component a news discourse formation (Higgins, 2004; Yumul & Özkirimli, 2000). By that way the reproduction of national identity becomes a form of life (Billig, 1995, p. 68). Although green activism has often been seen as an imagined global community of its own (see for example, Hackenberg & Benequista, 2001), this article illustrates how contemporary ‘flagging’ of green ideals functions simultaneously and in an inseparable manner as ‘flagging’ of the state, pushing nationalism and national pride into action in a new context.

Nature in the Finnish identity

The nature in Finland offers many natural remedies. Whether you are visiting us in the summer, making a winter trip to see the Northern Lights, or in Finland just for the weekend, the exquisite beauty of Finnish nature will lure you in no time. (The Official Travel Guide of Finland — VisitFinland.com)

According to Antonsich (2009, p. 288), Finland was ranked, together with Greece, Ireland and Portugal, amongst the top countries in terms of national pride and national attachment. Although measuring national pride quantitatively may be debatable, Antonsich illustrates interestingly how the senses and conceptions of nationalism vary between states and how pride, as a constituent of national identity, is not automatically embedded in nationalistic ideologies as such. When studying national pride and national attachment, it is essential to bear in mind that each country has its own unique socio-cultural history upon which national self-image, identity as well as stereotypes are based. While the notions of ‘Between East and West’, ‘Neither West nor East’, and ‘North’ are perceived as geopolitical mappings that forge a Finnish national identity (Antonsich, 2005), peripheral landscapes, lake-and-forest scenes and the human–nature relationship in general are also conceived of as central elements in terms of how geography shapes the ways of envisioning Finnish national identity (Kaplan & Herb, 2011). When Finland was striving for independence during the late nineteenth century, landscape paintings of forests and lakes were crucial tools for achieving social integration as part of the (imagined) nation’s shared memories, ideas and feelings (Paasi, 1997, p. 41).

Although globalization, understood as various processes of political, economic and cultural integration on the global scale, has changed the role of Finnish identity (Häkli, 2005), a strong human–nature relationship still characterizes how many Finns conceive their national belonging (Laurén, 2011). It has been argued, for example, that the core–periphery relationship, negotiated in and through landscape depictions, played a central role in terms of how the state-idea was established among Finnish elite before independence. Particularly, nineteenth century visual depictions of nature were considered to represent the entire country and its national character (Jokela & Linkola, 2013). In similar fashion, in the construction of national narratives, collective memory and the nation’s self-image, ‘the nation’s roots in agriculture and forestry’ (Raento & Brunn, 2008, p. 70) has played a central role. As Periäinen (2006, p. 104) argues,

the Finnish cultural preference for rural over urban landscapes – and in some respect over urban culture – is born of a myth or modernist utopian ideal based on a long-standing agrarian tradition and Finnish attitudes to nature.

For a long time, not environmentalist values per se, but a strong human–nature relationship has played a key role in determining how Finland has been represented, being a major factor determining the ‘national character’ and one of the key elements in representations of national identity (Paasi, 1997, p. 41). Along with urbanization, themes of ‘pure nature’ and ‘traditional agriculture’ have turned into romanticized myths of ‘who we are’. Correspondingly, in both Scotland and Catalonia the human-nature relationship and romantic enchantment with the countryside have turned into myths and common clichés in nationalist discourses (Conversi & Friis Hau, 2021). It is obvious that the Finnish identity can also be contextualized from various other perspectives, for example by emphasizing the relevance of educational principles or military practices (Paasi, 1999). In addition, as Häkli argues (2008, p. 16), the Finnish identity ‘has been subject to unpredictable transformation, and as arising from different social bases and contexts, it has always contained various contested and contradictory elements’. Nevertheless, representations of nature have been a constant theme through which the myth of Finland’s cultural homogeneity has been established and maintained (Raento & Brunn, 2005). What is interesting, as discussed in the following, is how the theme of being environmentally friendly ‘by constitution’, has become a modern myth and a symbolic marker for Finnish national identity and sense of national pride.

Methodology: reading newspapers as carbon footprint nationalistic discourses

The methodology applied here relies on Fairclough’s (1992a, 1992b) notion of understanding society as a linguistically based process in which intertextual meanings of identities and their relationships are constructed and negotiated through the discursive practices of producing, mediating and consuming. The research material consists of newspaper articles published in Helsingin Sanomat, a major Finnish newspaper, founded in 1889. Although new media platforms and forums play a key role in terms of how people gather information, and although subscriptions numbers have decreased remarkably during the past 30 years, according to the Finnish Newspapers Association, 90% of Finnish people still read newspapers on weekly basis. According to the Finnish Newspapers Association (2020), 250 registered newspapers are regularly published, which is a high number in relation to the size of the Finnish population (5.5 million inhabitants).

Although carbon footprint nationalism is a discourse that penetrates throughout the contemporary Finnish media, Helsingin Sanomat was selected as a research material for three reasons. First, Helsingin Sanomat has a circulation of approximately 672,000 daily readers (media.sanoma.fi, 2019), being the most read newspaper in the Nordic countries. Second, Helsingin Sanomat is a politically independent news forum. Whereas other widespread newspapers, such as the second-most read newspaper in Finland, Maaseuden Tulevaisuus (in English: ‘the future of the countryside’), have clear political agendas within which all the news are contextualized, Helsingin Sanomat does not have particular political or ideological objectives that would bias the content of the studied articles. This does not mean that the articles published in Helsingin Sanomat would stand ‘politically neutral’, but rather that the paper offers a voice for different and also oppositional opinions. Third, Helsingin Sanomat has been awarded numerous times for the high quality of its critical journalism.

The analyzed research material consists of all the newspaper articles (including opinion pieces and feature articles), collected between 31 October 2018 and 31 January 2020, that contained the keyword hiilijalanjälki (‘carbon footprint’). It is important to underscore that the articles containing the keyword ‘carbon footprint’ (121 in total) represent just a tiny portion of the entire news discussion around the climate change topic and environmental issues more generally.

The reasoning for this time period relates to fact that climate change discourse occupied a central role as a dominant campaign topic in the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election, with different, opposing political strategies taken by different parties (Raunio, 2019); 31 October 2018 was the day when the parliamentary election season officially commenced. Subsequently, the public discussion around carbon footprint responsibility accelerated, turning into a key topic in various contexts, all around the media. The excerpts used in the following analysis stand for examples that illustrate how the modern media discourses of carbon footprint and nationalism become entwined.

Analysis: national pride and carbon footprint responsibility

As climate change has become a more topical issue and discourse in the global media, environmentalism is no longer an agenda for particular political groups, but instead a topic that everyone is morally obliged to be concerned about. Although various forms of climate change denial and scepticism are still relatively common, in the media and public discussions climate change has become a hegemonic discourse indicating a shared concern about alarming environmental changes. In a corresponding manner, the discourse of nationalism does not require a nationalistic movement to articulate its ideologies, since in a state-centric society nationalistic rationalisations are self-evident. The way in which the Finnish media merge the discourses of carbon footprint responsibility together with the discourses of national pride and nationalism is contextualized within three partly overlapping classic frameworks for understanding the social construction of nationalism: first, how the myths of ancient roots construct the Finnish national identity, second, how nationalistic ideologies become mediated through the representations of banal performances, and third, how the construction of the national ‘we’ is embedded within the construction of carbon footprint responsibility discourse.

A myth of ancient roots

Geography shapes national identity in several different ways (Kaplan & Herb, 2011) and in the case of Finland, the stereotypical conception of living in an isolated wilderness has been an essential element in the construction of national identity, and in the notion of what constitutes a proper Finnish citizen, as Periäinen (2006, p. 104) formulates it. Closeness to nature is generalized as a national characteristic that, in an imagined manner, connects people and, along with changes in the general atmosphere surrounding environmental issues, transforms nature into a topic for a new type of national pride. Whereas the main criticism among scholars of Anthropogenic climate change is directed at the history of industrialization, in the Finnish media the nation’s industry is represented as environmentally responsible and, in fact, doing more good than harm in terms of climate change:

In Finland we have hundreds of thousands of wooden buildings which have for decades – or even for centuries – functioned as carbon sinks. And wood is increasingly used for building all the time. (…) We have a long tradition of building from wood: we have wooden houses, log cabins, storage sheds and all sorts of wooden buildings. (Kettunen, 2 November 2018, p. 57)

There are thousands of tree-planters in Finland who have a negative carbon footprint. Even a moderate number of planted trees removes more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than what a planter consumes coal, oil and natural gas during his lifetime. (…) There are approximately 7 billion planted trees in Finnish forests and 120 million new trees are planted every year. (Kauppi, 3 January 2019, p. 46)

It is true that forestry has played a major role in Finnish economic development and that it has a long history, but defining its environmentally positive impacts as an attribute of ‘who we are’ and ‘how we are’ entwines the sense of national pride and environmental awareness, creating a myth in which an imagined national history is aligned with contemporary enviro-political moralities. In the context of nationalism, a myth refers to depoliticized speech which does not define or deny things, but rather

it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. (Barthes, 1973, p. 143)

‘We have a long tradition of building from wood’ is an example of speech that naturalizes the conception of Finns as responsible citizens by conflating the myth of Finnish national roots in nature with the current global demands concerning environmentalism. It is obvious that the voices behind these arguments are motivated to speak in favour of Finnish forestry and that their version of ‘we Finns’ is not shared by all the readers. The question ‘whose imagined community’ is highly relevant (see Chatterjee, 1991), and thus it is essential to underscore the institutional role of newspapers as gatekeepers in terms of how a hegemonic version of nationalism becomes defined and also in terms of which voices are silenced. Newspaper-reading functions as a daily routine that sustains the sense of shared community, but also as an institutional firewall that makes myths reliable, in this case purifying the myth of ‘environmentally responsible Finn’.

In the key arguments of Anthropogenic climate change theory, based on the criticism of industrialization, ‘going back to roots’ is an idiom with a strong symbolic reference to ‘doing good’. In this context, representing the tradition of hunting as part of the national heritage exemplifies how the myths of ancient roots reinforces a discourse in which national identity is inseparably linked with carbon footprint responsibility:

When hunting game, no production plants, feed crops or antibiotics are used. The carbon footprint is small. That is why game is eaten also by some people who for ethical or environmental reasons have stopped eating meat. (…) Especially in the countryside, hunting is a tradition that is passed down from father to son, binding generations and improving the food supply of families. (El Kamel, 8 August 2019, p. 58)

The previous article does not claim that hunting would be a national pastime in modern urbanized Finland, but instead builds a vague link between the traditional Finnish lifestyle, the continuity of generations and carbon footprint responsibility. The article does not claim that this is what ‘we’ are, but instead where ‘our’ roots are. By romanticizing the traditional countryside lifestyle and making hunting and eating game a moral virtue, the article establishes a new form of national pride, one which does not necessarily align with the self-conceptions of all the readers as such but nevertheless establishes a new myth, based on old myths, of a national community with environmentally responsible roots.

Performing carbon footprint nationalism

As is well known, stereotypes play a major role in terms of how nations are imagined and national identities established. Although at a conceptual level they are separate from each other, spatial stereotypes and spatial self-images also intersect collaboratively in various ways, turning stereotypes into ‘what we are’ and what we are supposed to be proud of. Stereotypes attached to Finnishness, such as modesty (see more in Daun et al., 2001), resonate interestingly with the moral demands embedded in the concept of carbon footprint. An article discussing a mundane subject such as Christmas trees is a good example of how national pride becomes performed through banal everyday-practices, with the help of a national self-perception based on stabilized stereotypes. Quoting a research professor from the National Resources Institute of Finland, the newspaper article describes how ‘people in North America favour bushy Disney-style trees, which have a bigger environmental load than our simple ones’ (Vallinkoski, 18 December 2018, p. 29). A modest Finn purchases a modest tree as a ‘natural’ choice and the stereotype of modesty turns into a national virtue, a contrast to those values which the stereotypical conception of American consumption society represents. A comparable notation can be found in an article discussing the emissions caused by the global fashion industry in which Juha Koponen, the managing director of the online apparel thrift store Swap.com, comments on how attitudes on second-hand consumption have changed: ‘It is generally acceptable to purchase second-hand clothes, especially in Finland’ (Mikkonen, 18 February 2019, p. 21). The sentence-final parenthetical (probably unintentional) reference to a national(istic) context naturalizes a discourse in which carbon footprint responsibility is merged together with national identity and pride.

Cross-disciplinary study of banal nationalism is an extensive scholarly field in its own right, but what links the theories of banal nationalism and imagined communities is their constructivist approach to nationalism. By this means, ‘scholarly attention on “when” and “what” is a nation has been complemented by new scholarship on “how” is a nation, i.e. on its social reproduction’ (Antonsich, 2016, p. 40). Although Billig established the concept of banal nationalism as a counterpart to ‘hot’ nationalism, Paasi (2016) argues that hot nationalism can be an essential part of banal nationalism and that hot and banal nationalism often fuse. This was clearly noticeable in an article discussing the Finnish Independence Gala of 2018:

This year the theme of Independence Day is the environment, which in the Gala is visible in the flower arrangements as well as in the contents of the punch bowl. (…) Organic, locally produced and vegetarian food are available more than before. “Environment and nature are inseparable part of Finland and Finnishness. Climate change has the potential to make Finland unrecognizable in the future. The responsibility is on our hands”, President Niinistö expressed in early November when explaining the theme of the Gala. (Vuoripuro, 1 December 2018, p. 10)

In the Finnish Independence Gala leading politicians, celebrities, athletes and veterans of World War II, among others, are invited to the presidential palace to celebrate the country’s independence. The Gala is a nationalist performance telecasted on a yearly basis with an extensive number of viewers. According to Paasi (2016, p. 22), the Finnish Independence Gala is

a social process and set of practices/discourses that bring together an actual (or aspired) sovereignty, the history of a territory, as well as a selection of routinized habits, events, memories and also narratives and iconographies related to the purported national identity.

Combining climate friendly food with Finnishness, validated by quoting the president Sauli Niinistö, establishes a discourse in which environmentalism, moral responsibility, national sense of togetherness and hot/banal nationalism merge. As is evident from the previous examples, in several articles this morphed into both implicit and explicit arguments about how by taking care of our natural environment, the Finns are at the same time at the front line in taking care of the world. Whereas the Finnish forest industry was represented in a favourable light as a positive environmental actor, foreign banana, soy and cotton farming as well as Brazilian meat production constituted a symbolic framework for dystopian visions of climate change:

Soy, for example, is not a good alternative, since its cultivation destroys enormous areas of land in the Amazon. (Aalto, 8 April 2019, p. 6)

According to research, the carbon footprint of a bag made of cotton is heavy, because cotton production makes the ozone layer thinner and cotton products are manufactured under suspicious circumstances. (Rinne, 22 September 2019, p. 15)

The carbon footprint of the banana is ugly. Banana plantations despoil rain forests. On many tropical plantations salaries and working conditions are poor. The massive use of pesticides can rob the workers of their health. (Pasanen, 8 September 2019, p. 51)

All these excerpts are references to recent discussions concerning food consumption, in which it is underscored that citizens perform their nation through personal food choices. According to Ichijo and Ranta (2016, p. 8) ‘practising and asserting national identity through food means making choices and decisions that provide direct links to, among others, the nation’s perceived or imagined history, social traditions, culture and geography’. The condemnation of Brazilian food production is justifiable, depending as it does upon deforestation, nutrient pollution, biodiversity loss and displacement of local people (Zaks et al., 2009). When the news report about their ugly bananas is considered against the reports about our environmentally friendly tree plantations and game, an emotionally loaded juxtaposition between environmental ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ is established. Although the concept of banal nationalism acknowledges the emotional aspects of spatial belonging, Antonsich (2016, p. 40) underscores how banal nationalism holds onto a state-centric conception of nationhood. However, it would be misleading to argue that newspapers are systematically flagging the state and silencing any critical voices. In the analyzed material there were several writings that criticized how the consumption of Finnish products is not automatically the most environmentally friendly option:

One by one, objects become climate baddies and the target of scorn. In the Yle News election debate that role was taken by the Brazilian fillet steak, which has a manifold carbon footprint compared to a Finnish one. Wide South American forest areas have been cut or will be cut as pasture and feed for cattle. However, the comparison with Brazilian meat is clumsy. It is not the number one alternative to domestic beef. Our beef comes delivered mainly from Europe. The top countries are Germany and Denmark. German or Danish beef do not pollute the environment more than Finnish beef – probably less. (Ruukki, 28 March 2019, p. 4)

Personal food choices reflect how the nation is performed, but as illustrated here, opinions are far from fixed but instead characterized by disharmonies concerning whether we should be proud or ashamed of our industries and consumption habits. This has also meant that several food producers have been motivated to highlight environmental responsibility in their promotional campaigns. For example, environmentalist appeal and nationalistic appeal are combined in the advertisement of dairy products. As the leading Finnish manufacturer of dairy products Valio highlighted in 2019 regarding the results of a consumer survey, 52% of Finns consider milk a ‘national drink’ of Finland, underscoring how emotionally meaningful a product milk is for the Finns (Valio Oy, 2019). The topic of agriculture, both as a form of commercial industry and as byword for mythic national roots, was constantly present when discussing our environmental responsibility, a consumption habit that also needed to be defended:

“Finnish food culture relies on agricultural production and certain products are culturally important or valuable for the maintenance of livelihoods of families. This value cannot be ignored in when considering food choices”, she [Docent Maijaliisa Erkkola, of the Department of Food and Nutrition, University of Helsinki] adds. (Väntönen, 23 May 2019, p. 76)

As mentioned earlier, in national narratives, collective memory and a nation’s self-image, the nation’s roots in agriculture and forestry have all played central role. This way of posing the problem resonates with the question of how encountering the processes of global rescaling and deterritorialization have contested traditional understandings of Finnish national identity as a nested historical past (see Häkli, 2005). Although some newspaper articles take a critical view of how people in Finland have a biased image about the climate friendliness of Finnish meat products, the discussion itself relies on a juxtaposition of ‘our meat’ and ‘their meat’, a classic example of how the national ‘we’ is constructed through making a categorical separation against ‘the other’.

State-centric behaviour: ‘We’ and ‘them’

The dominant feature in the debate on carbon footprints is a geographical set-up in which the carbon footprint of Finnish people or Finland is compared with other countries. The way how the construction of ‘us’ is premised on excluding ‘them’ is occasionally problematized but never contested. The carbon footprint discussion sustains a logic of understanding environmental responsibility as a state-centric behaviour which defines not only ‘who’ but also ‘how’ the Finns, as responsible citizens, should be. In addition, representing all Finns as being somehow involved with agricultural production exemplifies how the socio-cultural processes of national identity construction serve the interests of limited groups. When the environmental impact of Finland is calculated by measuring national carbon emissions, not only is a state-centric perception of carbon footprint responsibility reinforced, but at the same time an environmental abstraction with a national identity, typically referenced as ‘an average Finn’, is created. Through the abstraction of ‘an average Finn’, with its mathematical value, each person is able to estimate one’s own environmental impact, but not within the context of the environmental or global scale, but of the national:

The carbon footprint of an average Finn is now 10,000 kilograms a year – climate warming-wise it is way too much. (Kallionpää, 19 January 2019, p. 92)

Climate change demands major changes from us. Consumption must be decreased, food choices changed and transportation done more by through muscle power. It is not easy. I have managed to halve my carbon footprint compared to an average Finn, but it takes much time and energy. (Kivi, 13 April 2019, p. 105)

Although ‘an average Finn’ stands as a mathematical indicator of national carbon emissions in a global context, the notion alludes to carbon footprint responsibility as a form of responsibility to the nation, not the globe. Saving the globe is not essential per se but becomes valuable only when the responsible behaviour works, for example, for the benefit of Finnish economy:

Over half of Finnish people consider the act of choosing to purchase a domestic product an environmental act. That’s what it often is, for several different reasons: the carbon footprint of a Finnish product is usually smaller than an imported one, domestic production provides employment in Finland and increases tax revenues. By buying domestic products, Finnish entrepreneurship is also supported. (Eljala, 14 December 2018, p. 5)

In the previous example, concerns about the condition of the global environment and the future of Finnish entrepreneurship merge in an almost extraordinary manner. This resonates with the concept of ‘resource nationalism’, a political logic in which a basic presumption is that citizens should benefit from the natural resources of the territorially-defined state (Koch & Perreault, 2019). In fact, the basic logic that buying an industrially produced consumer product is an environmental act as such is, from its premises, flawed. This topic has been continuously present in the Finnish media, with varying opinions and viewpoints, sometimes with more critical tones:

The climate impact of Finnish consumption is huge, manifold compared to Chinese and Indians. According to a recent report from the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, the gap between the Finnish way of life and global climate goals is massive. Fixing this requires radical changes in daily consumption customs. In order to reach the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, 75% of emissions caused by consumption should be cut within the next ten years. (Saavalainen, 17 May 2019, p. 12)

The news article questions the earlier discussed discourse of ‘a carbon footprint responsible Finn’, contesting the notion that Finns should be proud of themselves for being carbon responsible. Yet, at the same time, the article sustains a relatively fixed conception of Finland as a coherent community by stabilizing the concept of a ‘Finnish way of life’. In addition, instead of reflecting on the individual’s actions and environmental impacts within the global context, Finnish citizens are described as being morally responsible to the promises that their government has made. According to the previous extract, consumers, the Finns should make radical changes in their consumption habits so that Finland could reach the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and thus be esteemed for its achievement. If during the era of mass tourism the model of a good Finnish citizen was connected to the norms of how to behave when ‘elsewhere’ (Prokkola & Ridanpää, 2017), today the moral code for being a model citizen is entwined with carbon footprint tallies and wider discussions over environmental responsibility. Ultimately, the subject matter distils to a shared a shared sense of need and responsibility to belong to the nation, a tendency to avoid being what Brubaker (2017, p. 1192) calls an ‘internal outsider’, which interestingly not only constructs and sustains the conventional conception of ‘we’, but also establishes a completely new way of understanding environmentalism on more general level.

Conclusions: towards a climate-friendly sense of national pride

This article has illustrated how nationalism and carbon footprint responsibility become linked in multiple, often surprising ways in contemporary media representations. The concept of ‘carbon footprint’ has a notable moral overtone and it brings Anthropogenic climate change, both as a natural and socio-political discourse, emotionally closer to human beings, motivating people towards environmental thinking and responsible behaviour. The logic of carbon footprint responsibility has spread everywhere, but as this article has illustrated, at the same time it has established a new type of articulation that supports state-centric ideologies. In the case of Finland, the reproduction of national pride has been established through linking the myth of shared ‘ancient’ roots together with contemporary environmental discussions, here performed through several forms of contemporary banal nationalism, constructing a discourse of a carbon footprint responsible ‘we’ as something to be proud of.

During recent years it has been typical that the conception of environmental issues is adapted through the visualizations of nature documentaries in which ‘natural’ refers to imaginary landscapes where the absence of humans is a dominant feature (Robbins, 2011, p. 11). Such imagery dominated by penguins and polar bears may easily lead to conceptions that climate change is a peripheral and unavoidable process that happens beyond the human reach. From this perspective, the fact that the media merges carbon footprint responsibility with nationalistically loaded affects may have a positive impact in terms of bringing the topic itself closer to mundane human activities. When the media (indirectly) represents the sense of national togetherness as a motive for environmental thinking and behaviour, a new form of moral code is established, a code, in which being proud of your nationality goes in hand in hand with being carbon footprint responsible. By that means the media has a major social impact. However, it is essential to remember that, as Boykoff and Boykoff (2007, p. 1190) remind, mass-media coverage of climate change is not ‘a random amalgam of newspaper articles and television segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news packages’. The institutional construction of each news article is thus a complicated process containing many layers that remain beyond the ken of most readers.

The results of this analysis are interesting especially in terms of its findings regarding how new dimensions of socio-political thinking can be added to nationalistic imaginations. However, there are three points that need to be underscored when interpreting contemporary news discussions as an amalgam of environmental moralities and nationalistic ideologies: First, since all the states have their own unique political and socio-cultural histories of nationalism, the results found here are not adaptable to ongoing news debate in other states as such. Second, as is well known, nationalism is not a fixed discourse, but rather an ongoing social process during which some voices are silenced and others made hegemonic. This analysis used a leading national newspaper as research material, but if local or regional media representations had been included, it is possible that more nuanced cultural, social and political conceptions of climate change would have been found. Third, although carbon footprint nationalism is a discourse that broadly penetrates contemporary Finnish media, it is essential to underscore that nationalism is not a dominant discourse within the context of climate change debate but rather an embedded aspect that is surprisingly often unrecognized due to the self-evidence of state-centricity.

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Juha Ridanpää

Juha Ridanpää is a University lecturer in cultural geography at the University of Oulu. His research interests include popular geopolitics, narrative regions, postcolonial studies, ethnic minorities, geographical studies of humour and literary geography. His research materials and themes include northern art, political cartoons, minority languages, northern music, border films, film reviews and crisis events. Ridanpää works also as an editor in an interdisciplinary open-access e-journal Literary Geographies.