overview

This page considers national symbols and free speech, including flag burning and restrictions on defacement of images of the head of state.

It covers -

• introduction
• national symbols
• metaphors to die for?
• appropriation and anxiety
• studies

It supplements discussion elsewhere on this site regarding censorship and sedition in the online and offline environments.

     introduction

Attacks on national symbols or embodiments of 'national honour' are a feature of politics and media attention in advanced and emerging economies.

Such attacks may be tolerated, or even welcomed, as a manifestation of free speech that is associated with national law and global human rights agreements such as the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights (ICCPR). 'Insults' to national honour or to the 'national community' may instead be treated as civil or criminal offences. Authorities in some nations take a dark view of disrespect for their flags and other symbols but endorse, even actively organise, burning of the flags of their enemies.

Max Weber commented that all politics is symbolic, with images, location, personages and words often having significance that is not apparent to an independent observer. It is thus unsurprising that political expression has encompassed -

• the burning of flags
• soiling or defacement of flags
• defacement of insignia on buildings
• destruction or defacement of official portraits and photographs of heads of state or other dignitaries
• burning of effigies of dignitaries
• posters, pamphlets and other publications that satirise dignitaries or institutions, such as the armed forces and judicature, that are regarded as embodying the state

That expression may occur in public, for example at a street march or other political demonstration, or in private. Notions of national honour and of appropriate responses to perceived offences vary widely. As noted in discussion elsewhere on this site regarding censorship, defamation and sedition, some states have imprisoned citizens for "insults to national honour" that include -

• ribald songs about the physical attributes of the president's mistress (or merely that he has a mistress)
• depicting the head of state as a reptile or other creature
• using a printed speech to stuff holes in shoes
• noting the corruption or appalling human rights violations of a police force
• publishing truthful and accurate information about man-made disasters or merely inconvenient statistics
• using an article about the father of the country as toilet paper in an era of paper shortages.

     national symbols

National symbols are shibboleths - signifiers that mark membership of a community (and the exclusion, or inferior status, of others). As such they are frequently contested or appropriated by members of a nation. They are similarly challenged by those outside a nation (or by those, such as an ethnic/cultural minority, who would like to be outside the nation).

Ernst Renan's 1882 Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? characterised a nation as

a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarised however in the present by a tangible fact, namely consent - the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.

National symbols are totemic, redemptive and accessible. One reader of this page commented that portraits of Queen Victoria had - and were often meant to have - an iconic status in much of the British Empire. Australian jingo Pauline Hanson draped herself with the Australian flag. A member of Hamas might never come face to face with President George Bush - and certainly never be in a position to spit in the face of each and every US citizen - but is able to "spit in the face of America" by defiling that nation's totem.

In states such as the US and France the national flag may implicitly be the centre of the national religion, one that transcends class and creed. The symbol may be embedded in ritual and mythology - the Danish Dannebrog for example is supposed to have fallen from the sky in 1219, the US Stars & Stripes is wrapped in stories about Betsy Ross, the rockets' red glare, Fort Sumter (and John Wayne at Fort Apache) and the sands of Iwo Jimo.

     metaphors to die for

Michael Geisler characterised national symbols, such as the flag, as "metaphors to die for" ... and large numbers of people have indeed done so over the past century. It is precisely that status that makes disrespect - a contemporary iconoclasm - such a potent form of protest and resistance.

Observers have noted that some symbols are more potent than others - or merely more photogenic. Few demonstrators express themselves by burning stamps: flags make a better bonfire. Labelling a charred flag as art will provoke a predictable furore akin to immersing religious symbols in urine or other blasphemies, although open to criticism that

it's a cheap thrill, one that requires a box of matches and impudence rather than technical prowess or unique vision

Some symbols are more accessible than others: Iranian mobs can readily find the Great Satan's flag (or that of Iraq) and effigies of George Bush but finding a bald eagle for the barbeque is more difficult.

Few protestors burn works by Herman Melville, Charles Ives, Christina Stead, Patrick White or Albert Tucker - those works, albeit as representative as a flag - are not recognised signifiers with the mana of the Australian or US flags. (Exercises in libricide, in the removal of cultural treasures and in the desecration of national architectural monuments, war memorials or tombs have, of course, been recurrently used to humiliate enemies or strip them of a 'usable' past.) Disfiguring images of Elizabeth II or Prime Ministers seems to have little power for western audiences weaned on blurry Warhol prints and Salvador Dali moustaches.

Sasha Weitman's 1973 Semiotica article 'National flags: a sociological overview' commented that the flag is so central to the idea of nationhood that it is almost difficult to conceptualize the existence of a nation without one. Unlike religious symbols, national symbols are often standard and most national flags look much the same. That standardisation means that flags in nationalist experience have role that is distinct from symbols of religious affiliation or voluntary organisations. A national community must have a flag because other nations have flags; an insecure community must presumably have an enemy and dishonour its enemy's flag.

     appropriation and anxiety

Michael Welch comments that

Exploring moral panic over flag desecration provides a unique opportunity to refine our understanding of adverse reactions to political dissent, especially toward protest considered so offensive that many people believe it ought to be treated as a crime.

Those reactions are evident in legislation against dishonouring the national flag and other symbols (eg in India) and more broadly in debate about responses to 'desecration' incidents in Australia, the US, New Zealand and other jurisdictions.

From an Australian perspective there is interest in observing online fora and media coverage about local flag burning incidents over the past five years, with many people assuming that flag burning per se is clearly illegal ... or that specific flag protection legislation is required. In the US there have been periodic attempts at the federal level to prohibit flag burning, despite recognition as free speech, and most states have flag desecration statutes. In Europe several nations prohibit mistreatment of the symbols of other countries but do not zealously protect their own symbols ... and perhaps as a result encounter few incidents.

For western audiences 'virtual flag burning' or other desecration of national symbols appears to have little impact, arguably through desensitisation (the web is replete with inept caricatures of authority figures, few of which have the wit and skill of a vignette by David Levine, and crude animations of incinerated flags) and because cremating a textile versions of 'stars & bars' is somehow different to hitting it with a digital spray can.

     studies

For orientation see Michael Welch's Flag burning: moral panic and the criminalization of protest (New York: Aldine de Gruyter 2000) and papers from the Flying the flag: Critical perspectives on symbolism and identity conference.

National studies are highlighted later in this note. They include works such as Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals & the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999) by Carolyn Marvin & David Ingle, Saving 'Old Glory': The History of the American Flag Desecration Controversy (Boulder: Westview Press 1995) by Robert Goldstein, Our Own Devices: National Symbols & Political Conflict in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 2005) by Ewan Morris, Clashing Symbols: A Report on the use of flags, Anthems & Other National Symbols in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies 2005) by Lucy Bryson & Clem McCartney and National Symbols, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National Narrative (Middlebury: Uni Press of New England 2005) edited by Michael Geisler.

Works on iconoclasm are noted in the Censorship & Free Speech guide elsewhere on this site. They include lain Besancon's The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2001) and Robert Bevan's The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion 2005).

For community see in particular Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso 1983), Ernest Gellner's Nations & Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 1983) and Eric Hobsbawm's Nations & Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1992).

Legislation and practice regarding 'insult' to 'national honour' is highlighted here.

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