From Nation State to Brand State. The Role of Public Diplomacy and Country Branding in the New Stage of the International Relations

The establishment of relationships between countries in a global era seems to require new strategies that, in some cases, transcend traditional state diplomacy. In this sense, public diplomacy has become a renewed strategy of transnational representativeness in which the country brand exerts an important role as mechanism for agglutinating and transmitting national identities. Thus, the new soft power of geographical representation seems to take place within the weakening of the state-nation and clearly benefits a new way of communicating the identity of a country which is closer to the intervention of different social agents than to the signing of international treaties, a competence traditionally reserved for governments. Based on a review of existing literature, this article presents the state of the art related to the new strategies of international representativeness that have been executed by countries and nations.