Bulletin n. 2/2007
October 2007
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Hughes Emma
    Dissolving the nation: Self-deception and symbolic inversion in the GM debate
    in Environmental Politics , Volume 16, Number 2, April ,  2007 ,  318-336
    This contribution examines print media coverage of the cultivation and consumption of genetically modified (GM) crops in the UK press. It draws on arguments from Beck and Bauman to consider how the GM debate undertakes the discursive regeneration of security, purity, order and certainty through the invocation of the modernist categories of nation and boundary. A combination of in-depth textual analysis of national newspaper coverage and interviews with key media sources was used to explore how discourses of nation are promoted by different actors, and how the UK press then mediate these different viewpoints according to their own news values and reportage categories. In particular the contribution explores how the symbolic power invested in the concept of nation is an example of individual and societal self-deception; for in the globalised world we now inhabit, new technologies like genetic modification cannot be controlled by old frontiers like nation.
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