CONTENTS Introduction 1 The Stars and the Stripes 2 The Union and the Jack 3 The Cross and the Crusades 4 Colours of Arabia 5 Flags of Fear 6 East of Eden 7 Flags of Freedom 8 Flags of Revolution 9 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Bibliography Acknowledgements Index INTRODUCTION ‘I am no more than what you believe me to be and I am all that you believe I can be.’ The American flag ‘in conversation’ with US Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane (Flag Day, 1914) O N THE DAY OF 9/11, AFTER THE FLAMES HAD DIED DOWN and the dust had mostly settled, three FDNY firefighters clambered onto the still-smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York City and raised the Stars and Stripes. The event was not planned, there were no official photographers; the three men just felt that amid such death and destruction they should do ‘something good’. A local newspaper photographer called Tom Franklin captured the moment. Later he commented that his picture ‘said something to me about the strength of the American people’. How could a piece of coloured cloth say something so profound that the photo was reproduced not only across the USA but in newspapers around the world? The flag’s meaning comes from the emotion it inspires. ‘Old Glory’, as the Americans know it, speaks to them in ways that a non- American simply cannot share; but we can understand this, because many of us will have similar feelings about our own symbols of nationhood and belonging. You may have overtly positive, or indeed negative, opinions as to what you think your flag stands for, but the fact remains: that simple piece of cloth is the embodiment of the nation. A country’s history, geography, people and values – all are symbolized in the cloth, its shape and the colours in which it is printed. It is invested with meaning, even if the meaning is different for different people. Each of the world’s flags is simultaneously unique and similar. They all say something – sometimes perhaps too much. That was the case in October 2014 when the Serbian national football team hosted Albania at the Partizan Stadium in Belgrade. It was Albania’s first visit to the Serbian capital since 1967. The intervening years had witnessed the Yugoslav Civil War, including the conflict with the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. That ended in 1999 with the de facto partition of Serbia, following a three- month NATO bombing of Serb forces, towns and cities. Then, in 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared itself an independent state. The move was supported by Albania and recognized by many countries – notably, Spain was one that did not. It understood that the sight of the Kosovar flag flying above the capital of an independent Kosovo might galvanize the Catalonian independence movement. Fast-forward six years and tensions between Serbia and Kosovo, and by extension Albania, were still high. In the certain knowledge that they would be attacked, away fans had not been allowed to attend. It was a slow-paced game, albeit with a highly charged atmosphere, punctuated by loud chants of ‘Kill the Albanians’ ringing out from the stands. Shortly before half time, fans and then some players began to notice that a remote-controlled drone was approaching slowly out of the night sky towards the halfway line on the pitch. It was later discovered to have been piloted by a thirty-three-year-old Albanian nationalist called Ismail Morinaj, who was hiding in a tower of the nearby Church of the Holy Archangel Gabriel, from where he could see the pitch. As the drone came lower, a stunned silence began to descend around the stadium and then, as it hovered near to the centre circle, there was a sudden explosion of outrage. It was carrying an Albanian flag. This wasn’t merely the flag of the country, which alone would likely have caused problems. This flag bore the double-headed Albanian black eagle, the faces of two Albanian independence heroes from the early twentieth century and a map of ‘Greater Albania’, incorporating parts of Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Montenegro. It was emblazoned with the word ‘autochthonous’, a reference to ‘indigenous’ populations. The message was that the Albanians, who consider themselves to be of ancient Illyrian origin from the fourth century BCE, were the real people of the region – and the Slavs, who only arrived in the sixth century CE, were not. A Serbian defender, Stefan Mitrović, reached up and grabbed the flag. He later said he began folding it up ‘as calmly as possible in order to give it to the fourth official’ so that the game could continue. Two Albanian players snatched it from him, and that was that. Several players began fighting with each other, then a Serbian fan emerged from the stands and hit the Albanian captain over the head with a plastic chair. As more Serbs poured onto the pitch, the Serb team came to their senses and tried to protect the Albanian players as they ran for the tunnel, the match abandoned. Missiles rained down on them as the riot police fought fans in the stands. The political fallout was dramatic. The Serbian police searched the Albanian team’s dressing room and then accused the brother-in-law of the Albanian prime minister of operating the drone from the stands. The media in both countries went into nationalistic overdrive; Serbia’s foreign minister, Ivica Dačić, said his country had been ‘provoked’ and that ‘if someone from Serbia had unveiled a flag of Greater Serbia in Tirana or Pristina, it would already be on the agenda of the UN Security Council’. A few days later the planned visit of the Albanian prime minister to Serbia, the first in almost seventy years, was cancelled. George Orwell’s aphorism that football is ‘war minus the shooting’ was proved right and, given the volatility in the Balkans, the mix of football, politics and a flag could even have led to a real conflict. Planting the US flag at the site of the Twin Towers did presage a war. Tom Franklin said that when he took his shot he had been aware of the similarities between it and another famous image from a previous conflict – the Second World War, when US Marines planted the American flag atop Iwo Jima. Many Americans will have recognized the symmetry immediately and appreciated that both moments captured a stirring mix of powerful emotions: sadness, courage, heroism, defiance, collective perseverance and endeavour. Both images, but perhaps more so the 9/11 photograph, also evoke the opening stanza of the American national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, particularly its final lines: O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? At a moment of profound shock for the American people, the sight of their flag yet waving was, for many, reassuring. That the stars of the fifty states were held aloft by men in uniform may have spoken to the streak of militarism that tinges American culture, but to see the red, white and blue amid the awful grey devastation of Ground Zero will also have helped many ordinary citizens to cope with the other deeply disturbing images emerging from New York City that autumn day. * * * Where did these national symbols, to which we are so attached, come from? Flags are a relatively recent phenomenon in mankind’s history. Standards and symbols painted on cloth predate flags and were used by the ancient Egyptians, the Assyrians and the Romans, but it was the invention of silk by the Chinese that allowed flags as we know them today to flourish and spread. Traditional cloth was too heavy to be held aloft, unfurled and fluttering in the wind, especially if painted; silk was much lighter and meant that banners could, for example, accompany armies onto battlefields. The new fabric and custom spread along the Silk Route. The Arabs were the first to adopt it and the Europeans followed suit, having come into contact with them during the Crusades. It was likely these military campaigns, and the large Western armies involved, that confirmed the use of symbols of heraldry and armorial markings to help identify the participants. These heraldic bearings came to be linked with rank and lineage, particularly for royal dynasties, and this is one of the reasons why European flags evolved from being associated with battlefield standards and maritime signals to becoming symbols of the nation state. Every nation is now represented by a flag, testament to Europe’s influence on the modern world as its empires expanded and ideas spread around the globe. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe told the designer of the Venezuelan flag, Francisco de Miranda: ‘A country starts out from a name and a flag, and it then becomes them, just as a man fulfils his destiny.’ What does it mean to try to encapsulate a nation in a flag? It means trying to unite a population behind a homogeneous set of ideals, aims, history and beliefs – an almost impossible task. But when passions are aroused, when the banner of an enemy is flying high, that’s when people flock to their own symbol. Flags have much to do with our traditional tribal tendencies and notions of identity – the idea of ‘us versus them’. Much of the symbolism in flag design is based on that concept of conflict and opposition – as seen in the common theme of red for the blood of the people, for example. But in a modern world striving to reduce conflict and promote a greater sense of unity, peace and equality, where population movements have blurred those lines between ‘us and them’, what role do flags now play? What is clear is that these symbols can still wield a great deal of power, communicating ideas quickly and drawing strongly on emotions. There are now more nation states than ever before, but non-state actors also use flags as a kind of visual soundbite to convey concepts ranging from the banality of cheap commercial goods to the depravity of religious and racial violence. This is something we’ve continually witnessed in recent history, from Hitler and the Nazi swastika – an image which even today evokes a powerful reaction – to the emergence of Islamic State (IS) and its emphasis on religious or prophetic symbols that can grab attention and, sometimes, garner support. This book could have told hundreds more stories, for example that of each of the 193 nation states, but that would have turned it into a reference work, and a very, very thick one at that. Instead, the stories recounted are those of some of the major national flags; some of the more obscure ones; and some that simply have the most interesting histories. In most cases the original meanings of the patterns, colours and symbols are important, but sometimes, for some people, those meanings have morphed into something else, and that is what the flag stands for now. The meaning is in the eye of the beholder. We open with what is probably the most recognizable flag in the world: the Stars and Stripes, a visual representation that captures the American dream. Deeply revered by the vast majority of the population, it is the strongest example of how a symbol can come to define and unite a country. From the world’s current empire we move to one of the past: the influence of the Union Jack extended to the furthest reaches of the globe, the flag representing the united front of a vast empire, but beneath the surface strong national identities persisted within the British Isles, and they haven’t gone away. The flag of the European Union also struggles to unify; in a continent with deeply rooted identities many Europeans are more attached to their national flags than ever. While some of these flags are based on Christian imagery, over the years the religious associations have mostly faded. Not so in the Arab nations to the south: their flags often feature powerful Islamic symbols and ideas that speak to the population. The symbolism is strong, but the nation states are weaker. The future may yet bring further change to the forms of these nations and their flags. A possible catalyst for this is the various terror cells operating in the region; the actions and influence of these organizations, ever present on our screens, are important to understand. Groups such as IS also use religious symbolism to great effect, instilling fear and creating global recognition. Moving eastwards across Asia, we find an array of flags that reflect the sweeping movements of ideas, peoples and religions, in the twentieth century and well before. Many of these modern nation states have reached back to the roots of their ancient civilizations for their flags, often in response to a turning point in their history, in a fusion of old and new. In Africa, by contrast, we see the colours of a very modern conception of the continent, one that has thrown off the shackles of colonialism and faces the twenty-first century with increasing self-awareness. Latin America’s revolutionaries kept closer cultural ties to the colonizers who shaped our world, and many of the continent’s flags reflect the ideals of the nineteenth-century nation-builders. Flags are powerful symbols, and there are plenty of other organizations that have used them to great effect – they may embody messages of fear, peace or solidarity, for example, becoming internationally recognizable in the shifting landscapes of identity and meaning. We wave flags, we burn them, they fly outside parliaments and palaces, homes and showrooms. They represent the politics of high power and the power of the mob. Many have hidden histories that inform the present. We appear to be in the midst of a resurgence of identity politics at the local, regional, national, ethnic and religious levels. Power shifts, old certainties fall away and at such times people reach for familiar symbols as ideological anchors in a turbulent, changing world. The reality of a nation does not necessarily live up to the ideals embodied in its flag; nevertheless the flag can, as Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane ‘quoted’ the Stars and Stripes as saying, be ‘all that you believe I can be’. This is the emotion-charged emblem that is a flag. It has the power to evoke and embody sentiments so strong that sometimes people will even follow their coloured cloth into gunfire and die for what it symbolizes. CHAPTER 1 THE STARS AND THE STRIPES ‘There is not a thread in it but scorns self-indulgence, weakness and rapacity.’ Charles Evans Hughes, US Secretary of State 1921–5 Supporters of the banned organization Jamaat-ud-Dawa burn the Stars and Stripes in Quetta, Pakistan, in May 2016, protesting against a US drone strike on Pakistani soil.