Marshall Worth Dying For

The Power and Politics of Flags
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78396-282-2
Verlag: Elliott & Thompson
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

OUT APRIL 2025! The iconic bestseller Prisoners of Geography, updated with brand new content to reflect the changing global geopolitical landscape since it was first published 10 years ago. When you see your nation's flag fluttering in the breeze, what do you feel? For thousands of years flags have represented our hopes and dreams. We wave them. Burn them. March under their colours. And still, in the 21st century, we die for them. Flags fly at the UN, on the Arab street, from front porches in Texas. They represent the politics of high power as well as the politics of the mob. From the renewed sense of nationalism in China, to troubled identities in Europe and the USA, to the terrifying rise of Islamic State, the world is a confusing place right now and we need to understand the symbols, old and new, that people are rallying round. In nine chapters (covering the USA, UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, international flags and flags of terror), Tim Marshall draws on more than twenty-five years of global reporting experience to reveal the histories, the power and the politics of the symbols that unite us - and divide us.

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than 30 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from 40 countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He is the author of the No. 1 Sunday Times bestsellers Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics and The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World; the illustrated edition Prisoners of Geography: Our World Explained in Twelve Simple Maps, shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year; as well as Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls; Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags; and Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marshall, Tim

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

The American flag ‘in conversation’
with US Secretary of the Interior
Franklin K. Lane (Flag Day, 1914)

ON 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.

What is clear is that these symbols have as much significance as they ever did, and in some cases more. We are seeing a resurgence of nationalism, and with it a resurgence of national symbols. Around the turn of the twenty-first century it had become fashionable in some intellectual circles to argue that the nation state would wither away in the age of globalization. That view completely missed the strength of identity still present in each nation.

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 Mitrovic´, 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 Dac?ic´, 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:

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...