Flags Made in China
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Heard in Spanish, in Madrid:
‘The Chinese will cash in.’
‘With what?’
‘With flags.’
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I arrive in Madrid on the morning of the 28 October 2017, just a day after the Catalan Republic was declared on the stairway of the Catalan parliament. Paseo del Prado is a stream of Spanish flags heading for the demonstration that has been organised in the Plaza de Colón. On the balconies here there are as many, or even more, of these flags as there are starred and striped pro-independence estelades in the villages and towns of Catalonia. We’ve long been accustomed to flags in Catalonia. Beflagged balconies and demonstrations are part of a new landscape, but also one that links us with not-so-distant stories and memories. My friends in Madrid, however, are startled, edgy and scared. ‘It’s all full of flags.’ Needless to say, they’re referring to Spanish flags, from both before and after the promulgation of the 1978 Constitution. They’d never seen it used as a protest flag. At most, it had been used as an official flag or by a football team. But this is the first time it has appeared politicised, in the anonymity of the street.
When I was a child, we used to hang the Catalan flag from our balcony every year on the 11 September, the National Day of Catalonia. Afterwards, my mother used to cut it in half so my sister and I could wear it as a cape at demonstrations. It was a length of cotton cloth, bought in a haberdashery, and it faded. Time had its way with it. Later, there were pro-independence stickers we collected for afternoons after school when we wandered round the streets of the Eixample neighbourhood with our friends. That was in the 1980s when we were about twelve or thirteen. In those days, you were inde or fatxa, kumba or pijo, pro-independence or fascist, hippie or posh. Sometimes we used to go to the office of the independentist political party Estat Català in a building on the corner of Carrer del Bruc and Carrer de la Diputació to get stuff that we used to cover our folders. No one ever asked us where this material came from, neither at school nor at home, and no one told us the history of Estat Català. We didn’t talk about it either. As a mother and a teacher, I’m now surprised by this attitude. The situation during the recently launched Transition was quite overwhelming, but we were getting slogans and symbols out of context, and we didn’t know the history of the organisations we were starting to mix with, albeit in such a childish way. We simply continued, in our own radicalised version of what our families had stood for and held on to first during the Civil War, and then throughout the Franco dictatorship. Rather than speaking of a future, the flag – whether it was the official Catalan flag, la senyera, with its four horizontal red stripes on a yellow background, or l’estelada – pointed back to a past that was still painful, and it both signalled and encroached on the eagerness to create an appearance of a modernising ‘normality’ which the new Spanish democracy, including the Catalan Generalitat, headed by Jordi Pujol, was trying to achieve. Even today, well into the twenty first century, there are intellectuals who write that the Catalan language was not prohibited but, rather, under official protection. Yet our parents couldn’t help us do our homework because they couldn’t write the language we spoke, the Catalan that was now being studied once again, just as our grandparents had studied it after it was standardised in the early twentieth century. Even now, my partner, who became a parent relatively late in life, is in a comparable situation vis-à-vis our children. The mutilation was suffered, and is still suffered today behind closed doors, even while, in its waning years, the Franco dictatorship had begun allowing not only publication of works in Catalan but also literary awards. Language, culture and education are not matters of mere public display. They are the living fabric of social, personal and intimate bonds, and the violence inflicted on them for decades had turned everyday life into a space of radicalism.
There’s something I don’t find convincing in the discourse of certain positions, both liberal and left, which reject all flags as being one and the same.
Little by little, the apparent ‘normality’ advanced in the form of pacts and concessions. Studying in Catalan ceased to be a victory – albeit a lame victory – and institutional life was acquiring all the usual vices seen anywhere else, local power gradually established its authority, and flags, now they were official, lost their aura of resistance. I’ve not carried one since then, not even in the last ten years when its combative reappearance has taken on new meaning of which we are yet to see the final consequences. The independence movement kept organising from student circles to local clubs and broad political organisations. It mobilised large, harshly repressed demonstrations like that of 1992 coinciding with the Barcelona Olympic Games. Many grassroots, pro-independence supporters and anticapitalist groups actively participated in the social, local and global struggles of the following decades. From the late 1990s to the 15M anti-austerity movement of May 2011, however, people didn’t carry the national flag and only occasionally waved an estelada.
On the 26 February 1997 a group of activists hung a squatter flag – black with a circle diagonally crossed by a jagged white lightning bolt – between the official flags of the Barcelona City Council. It was a flag but not a flag. Rather, it was placed there to represent liberated spaces. Symbolically, for a few minutes, the Barcelona City Council became a liberated space. Likewise, during the 15M protests, the Greek, Icelandic and Egyptian flags were flown to express allegiance with the mass movements against those governments and against the Troika. The satirical and dissenting use of symbols predominated in those times. More than flags, what came to the fore were what we might call ‘logos’, even though this was the time of the success of Naomi Klein’s No Logo. One only needs to think of the antiwar movement logo with a bomb and the circle-backslash prohibition symbol, or the anti-austerity sign with scissors similarly struck through. These are images that came together with the struggles of the time and, in their functions, they are closer to the anarchist ‘A’ and the squatter lightning bolt than they are to the imaginary of the flag. In our specific case, we also saw the success of the Diner Gratis (Free Money) logo. The use of colours for struggles also spread with the logos. Joining the green, purple and red of the more classical social movements were more colours, now used by campaigns that appeared after 15M: white for healthcare, yellow for education, maroon for young people who emigrated to seek work abroad, and so on. More recently, political struggles have come to be displayed in the colour of ribbons which had hitherto been accepted as expressions of solidarity (red for AIDS, pink for breast cancer, et cetera). In Catalonia, the imprisonment of the government ministers Jordi Sánchez and Jordi Cuixart in the autumn of 2017 turned yellow ribbons into an act of transgression and disobedience, penalised with fines and repression.
Around 2012, although they had begun to appear before then, the flags came back, a lot of flags in streets, on balconies, at demonstrations, at entrances to towns and on mountain ridges. The discussion has been open since then. What do the flags express? What do they cover up? What kinds of groups do they speak of today? And in what sense do they speak of us? Like many of my companions, I feel we can’t carry flags anymore because they’re a fallen symbol, a hacked code, and they present an alien imaginary. I remain true to the words of the song ‘Sta. Alegria’ from the La Troba Kung-Fú album Santalegria: ‘For a homeland I want friends / and clothes drying on the line for a flag / with the message this sends, “I live here today”.’ Nevertheless, there’s something I don’t find convincing in the discourse of certain positions, both liberal and left, which reject all flags as being one and the same, and despise them as a mere manifestation of alienated and manipulated people. I think that the power recently acquired by flags in several different contexts, in Catalonia and Spain evidently, but also in countries like France, to go no further, obliges us to wonder about their functioning and effectiveness. We’d believed that, in a globalised world, flags were a relic of the past, a more or less inert symbol of a previous arrangement taking the form of states and nations, a decorative element for international summits and sporting events but no longer in any way capable of politicising people or bringing them together. In these times of global unrest, transnational precariousness, planetary consumption and environmental danger for the human species as a whole, flags are reappearing in Europe. They never left places like the United States or many other formerly colonised countries. Why?
Among many possible explanations for this return of the flags, there are three hypotheses that have been repeated in recent years: reaction, manipulation and involution. The most basic explanation, reaction, would see a reactive dynamic in the reappearance of the flags. For example, the Catalan independence movement would be explained as a reaction to a crisis, to the incompetence of the political system and to a stolen future that is blamed on Madrid and its centralist powers. Likewise, Spanish flags would be a reaction to the offensive of Catalan nationalism. In the case of France, the disputed tricolour, which has flooded the country from right to left, and which all political groups from the National Front to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise want to take as their own heritage, would be a reaction against the stars of the European flag. Indeed, there was even a proposal to remove it from the National Assembly. In this reading, the war of the flags would be a reactive dynamic in times marked by an absence of purposeful and creative political proposals and new spaces of coexistence.
There is no state that is not nationalist in as much as, if it is to exist, it must invent a people, the indisputable conditions of its unity and the means to defend this unity.
The second hypothesis, which postulates manipulation, focuses on the interests of the ruling classes, their political parties and their strategies for rechannelling mass action and the people’s vote. From this standpoint, the flag would be a simple, emotional and unifying resource put to use by some parties with various aims, among them: redirecting the unrest after 15M and the crisis, in which they had been identified as being among the culprits and subjected to radical questioning; covering up or relativising reports on corruption and its consequences; and finally, holding out a promise and having an enemy as a basis from which to consolidate power and create the illusion of a shared horizon. Those who present this hypothesis speak of how the political system and the respective bourgeoisies ‘mess with’ the flag to conceal crimes and injustice and to mobilise the masses that have been politically neutralised by the idea of national unity.
Finally, the third hypothesis analyses the widespread protest-driven appearance of flags in terms of involution in the political frameworks of liberal and culturally diverse democracies. This understanding presents democratic citizenship deriving from individual-based rule of law in opposition to nationalism, populism, patriotism and, in the final analysis, xenophobia. In the book La gran regressió, for which I was one of several international authors, some writers argue that western countries are suffering a return to political situations that are more reminiscent of the 1930s than an expression of the global turn of the early twenty-first century. Flags in the street would then evoke a dangerous past, that of fascism and wars between nations, against which the European Union had attempted to build a historical and institutional bulwark. ‘Nationalism is war’, said Manuel Valls, the French politician of Catalan origin, who was active in the campaign for elections to the parliament of Catalonia which were held on the 21 December 2017. Have we come to the end of the European experiment? Are Brexit, the French far right and far left, or the Catalan independence movement just different faces of the failure of the European political project, diverse expressions of the same exclusionary nationalism?
All three hypotheses present some degree of truth. In today’s European politics, there are plenty of doses of visceral reaction, fuelled by fear and by crisis. One of the strategies of the elite is manipulation of national symbols. And there are elements of involution in terms of political geographies imagined in other times, based on transnational solidarity and worldwide mass resistance. The problem shared by the three hypotheses, however, is that they fail to recognise the national problem in itself, thus disallowing the national dimension that intersects with many collective struggles and forms of resistance that aren’t reducible to nationalism. This disavowal comes from various traditions, ranging from liberalism and neoliberalism to the internationalist, cosmopolitan and global left. Seen from all these positions, the national question can only be the product of deception, of cultural sleight of hand or of an emotional substratum that does not grasp the truth of social and political relations. For some, society can only be a set of individuals and their set of relations through exchange in markets that are more or less regulated by the state. For others, society is a set of social classes, their inequality, and their antagonism. Making citizenship abstract or reducing matters to social class means that, from these positions, there is nothing more to say. The question, then, is whether we too fall into the trap of abstraction and also of belittling flags. But are flags all the same? Do they all say the same thing, in every place and at all times?
Speaking during the Catalunya en Comú (Commons) electoral campaign in the snap election of the 21 December 2017 imposed by the Spanish government invoking Article 155 of the Constitution – a device of ‘federal coercion’ used to force autonomous communities to comply with Spanish law – Owen Jones warned that flags should not distract us from our struggles. This was the campaign in which Manuel Valls also spoke. From opposing political and ideological positions, and despite Jones’s explicit defence of the Catalan independence referendum that had been held in October, the two visiting speakers agreed on the urgent need to steer clear of flags, the former from a stance of socialist anti-nationalism, and the latter from that of liberal anti-nationalism. These positions coincide not only in criticising and warning of the dangers of nationalism (which they share with several other political standpoints), but they also agree not to question the current map of states and their fundamental political condition. Their views, from the left and right of the political spectrum, are those of nationalism that is ignorant of itself, or ‘banal nationalism’, as theorist Michael Billig calls it. It is banal not because it is innocuous, but because it is conflated with a naturalness in which there is no need to take a stance or to declare any kind of political intention. One is French because one was born French, British because one was born British and Spanish because one was born Spanish. This is natural, or at least it is deemed natural from the supposedly non-nationalist arrogance of banal nationalists, who question the flags of others but not their own borders, condemn the protests of others but not their own privileges and despise the identity of others for fear of losing their own.
Flags don’t express the eternal identity of nations but the power relations upon which today’s nation states have been constructed and consolidated.
On the 27 February 2014, I participated in a conference titled ‘The New Abduction of Europe: Debt, War, Democratic Revolutions’ at the Reina Sofia National Art Centre in Madrid. Activists and thinkers from all over the continent had been invited to share and discuss the practical and theoretical geographies that had been woven into the continuity between the anti-globalisation movement, grassroots collective action after the 2008 crisis and the post-2011 struggles. The filmmaker Pere Portabella showed his film Informe general II. El nuevo rapto de Europa (General Report II. The New Abduction of Europe) at the conference. Suddenly, I heard words that struck me like no others: ‘You won’t understand Europe if you don’t understand that its history is that of nationalism.’ I cite them from memory. The words were spoken by an Indian political scientist, Ranabir Samaddar, director of the Calcutta Research Group. Europe not only invented nations and imposed them in state form on the rest of the world, but the basis of its power is nationalism. Even today, in the European Union as well. There is no state that is not nationalist in as much as, if it is to exist, it must invent a people, the indisputable conditions (territorial, legal, cultural, et cetera) of its unity and the means to defend this unity. Those who condemn nationalism, a position that I share, must be willing to take the ultimate consequences of their criticism, and also to accept that the conditions of existence that ensure the unity of their own states are also open to question.
The current state-based order is a historical invention, a contingent reality that is the fruit of pacts, wars, interests and invasions, and sustained on the basis of a triple illusion: unity of territory, unity of identity and unity of destiny. Similarly, flags are a historical invention that symbolise and represent this construction. Seen with some distance, they are puerile inventions, more evocative of roleplay games and squabbles between playground gangs than of true politics. If we take a closer look at them and make a historical and also contingent reading of them, flags don’t express the eternal identity of nations but the power relations upon which today’s nation states have been constructed and consolidated. These power relations are class relations but they are also linguistic, cultural, institutional, gendered, and more. Relations of domination and hence also unresolved stories of domination are inscribed on flags. Seen from this contentious historicity, not all flags are equal, and they don’t all say the same thing because they signal different positions within open conflicts. Whoever sustains that all flags are equal is, to give one example among many, obliterating the power relations that exist among human groups and their specific history. There is no such thing as a flag that is good or bad in itself, because a flag in itself is nothing. At most, flags mark conflicting positions which remind us that, nationally speaking, no state is neutral, and in certain situations of conflict between groups, what they do express is condemnation of the violence that victorious national identities conceal.
As long as these conflicts and this violence exist, the Chinese will keep cashing in on our flag wars. I would like a Barcelona where there is no ban on hanging clothes from balconies and where it is not mandatory to hang flags from official buildings, a city where colours have no homeland and where identities do not delimit nations. Creating this city does not mean demanding our own state, but unmasking every state as improper to the extent that it is based on expropriation of what is common to us all.
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Reproduced with permission from Ciutat Princesa by Marina Garcés (Galaxia Gutenberg S.L., Barcelona, 2018)
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Marina Garcés is a philosopher, professor and author of several books, including Un món comú, Ciutat Princesa, Escola d’aprenents, El temps de la promesa and La passió dels estranys. Una filosofia de l’amistat. She currently directs the master’s degree in Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She is engaged in collective projects of educational, cultural and social experimentation, as well as being a leading member of the critical thinking group ‘Espai in Blanc.’
Julie Wark is an Australian and Spanish citizen, translator and co-author of Indonesia, Law, Propaganda and Terror and Against Charity, and author of The Human Rights Manifesto. She is European correspondent for CounterPunch, and a human rights activist.
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