The journal AIBR has just published a special issue with the title “Banderas nacionales, inestabilidad social y poder político” (in English, “National flags, social instability and political power”) coordinated by Luis Fernando Angosto (University of Sydney/Vistor Research Fellow at MIRCo in 2023).
The works included in this special issue began to germinate in discussions channelled into a conference held in Madrid in 2019. It is incidentally significant that it was this capital city that hosted those talks, for although none of our articles focuses exclusively on the Spanish case, it was precisely this case that prompted us to open a forum for debate on the uses and functions of national flags.
These flags have acquired much public prominence in Spain in recent years, becoming an indispensable marker of collective identification for some political parties and their sympathisers, while being systematically avoided by the leaders and sympathisers of others. Although the expressions of this phenomenon are well known, we thought in 2019 (and still think today) that they are rarely explained on an argumentative basis—despite the robustness of the judgements and emotions that often accompany any commentary on flags in the country.
Thus, reflecting on the Spanish case and more broadly on the recurrent increase in the display and manipulation of flags in the public sphere during periods of political instability, we began to pose a series of guiding questions: why does this phenomenon occur; how does it manifest itself in different societies; what can we learn about social dynamics, about culture and about individual and group behaviour from its study? These questions set out the theoretical horizons towards which the papers gathered here are oriented, and also underpinned some of the political concerns that the participants in the monograph continue to pursue to this day.
The papers in the special issue explore and theorise the uses and functions of national flags in Chile, Cuba, Spain, Venezuela and Australia (with a focus on the Catalan diaspora in this country), and include the participation of Gonzalo Saavedra (Universidad Austral de Chile), Álvaro Bello (Universidad de la Frontera de Chile), Marina Gold (University of Zurich/Fundación Mundo Sano), Rubén Pérez Hidalgo and Luis Fernando Angosto (both from the University of Sydney). The comparative perspective of this special issue contributes to an analytical rethinking of both the Spanish case and, more broadly, the how, when and why of the use of national flags as a vehicle of communication and collective identification.
