Nationalism in official tourism websites of Balkan countries: a multimodal analysis
This paper investigates the official tourism websites for the Balkan countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Turkey to learn about their depiction of the nations for international tourism markets. The research combines Pauwels’ (2012) multimodal discourse analysis method designed for cultural websites with Smith’s (1998) six main institutional dimensions to seek out potential nationalistic patterns involving the state, territory, language, religion, history, and rites and ceremonies. The findings mostly involve verbal and visual signifiers that have a historical context to the nations such as antiquity, communism, Yugoslavia, religion, irredentism, the Ottoman Empire, and national identity. The findings illustrate that official tourism websites while being sensitive not to alienate international tourists, portray a sense of nationalism but do so in a different way, based upon the historical experiences and unique features of each country surveyed.