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Flag use by far-right demonstrators at the 2017 Unite the Right rally is similar to historical flag use in public demonstration by antidemocratic groups seeking to deprive others of equal democratic rights, such as the Nazi Party between 1920 and 1945 and American segregationists during the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-twentieth century. This sort of flag use brings democratic values such as free speech and equal protections into conflict. Since World War II, international democratic norms have shifted to emphasize human dignity and equality, even if it requires limitations on free speech. Germany’s constitutional order is designed to protect democracy from antidemocratic groups in part by criminalizing display of flags representing them. Meanwhile, free speech absolutism in the United States makes it exceedingly difficult to impose legal sanctions for flag use, allowing flags that are in fact hate speech to masquerade as protected political speech.

Both the flags of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China’s (ROC) have the colour red; however, red represents different meanings on both flags. The colour red on the ROC flag represents “fraternité” originated from the French Revolution. The colour red on the PRC flag is from the flag of The Soviet Union, which the colour red is originally the colour of the flag of La Commune de Paris. There have been many incidents involving the desecration, burning or damaging of the national flag of the Republic of China (ROC, 中華民國) over the years. In Taiwan, some people think that the ROC has ceased to exist since 1949, and that the ROC can no longer represent Taiwan and the KMT (the Nationalist Party, Kuomintang) is controlled by the PRC. They use flag desecration as a means to attack one China policy and the PRC. In this paper, I will explore the reason why the ROC national flag has been targeted in Taiwan, and question whether or not damaging the flag is really a meaningful and successful way to attack both the ROC and the PRC. Furthermore, I will explain how protesters attack the PRC by attacking the ROC flag by way of a discussion of the colour code of both national flags. In addition, I will discuss the meaning of the red on both flags, and I will also explain why an attack on the ROC flag, based on the colour of the ROC and PRC flags, is not a successful way to attack the PRC.

This essay endeavours to explore our time of ‘Law &…’ (and its stimulating boundary disputes) from the perspective which national flag narratives—and their typifying regimes, associated with plausible models or paradigms of nation—allow us to experience, whilst projected onto (or within) the Law’s (or a certain Law’s) identifying narratives. Even though concentrated on a specific exemplum—the one of the current Portuguese flag (which emerged out of the successful Republican revolution of 1910)—this proposal is less however a justification of a new, plausible, interdisciplinary trend (involving ethno-symbolic studies), than a consideration of the ‘Law’s place’ in our present-day practical-cultural context, whilst reflecting on the possibilities and limits of hetero-references in general and “Law &… movements” in particular.

As we advance into the twenty-first century, more and more of what has once been crucial to the functioning of a society, slides into oblivion. However, certain agents of the past, carriers of social memory, prevail. One such an agent is the flag. More than just a mere symbol, the flag bears an opulent amount of meaning, sometimes accumulated over the centuries, at other times acquired overnight, evoking either love and pride, fear and contempt, or just indifference. The purpose of this paper is to analyse flags as carriers of collective memories and of local and national identity, and to compare various legal provisions controlling and protecting them. In the first part of the paper, the author introduces the concept of collective memory, showing how flags—carriers of memory—are connected to it. The second part of the paper is devoted to the questions of identity and national identity, and the ways they intersect with collective memories and, ultimately, flags. In the third, main part of the paper, the author ventures to examine the role of flags in the contemporary society. Applying the findings of the previous two chapters to a number of mini-case studies (Poland, Brazil, Australia, Greece, USA, various former USSR territories, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Hungary, Cyprus and Canada), the author shows how different societies hold different attitudes towards flags and how, even in a digital society we currently live in, such a material thing as a flag is vital for the creation of a group’s identity, and can still evoke deep and often completely conflicting feelings, even leading to conflict.

The book deals with the identification of “identity” based on culturally specific color codes and images that conceal assumptions about members of a people comprising a nation, or a people within a nation. Flags narrate constructions of belonging that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people’s history. Bennet (2005) defines identity as “the imagined sameness of a person or social group at all times and in all circumstances”. While such likeness may be imagined or even perpetuated, the idea of sameness may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts and presents. Visually evocative and ideologically representative, flags are recognized symbols fusing color with meaning that prescribe a story of unity. Yet, through semiotic confrontation, there may be different paths leading to different truths and applications of significance. Knowing this and their function, the book investigates these transmitted values over time and space. Indeed, flags may have evolved in key historical periods, but contemporaneously transpire in a variety of ways. The book investigates these transmitted values: Which values are being transmitted? Have their colors evolved through space and time? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? What are their sources? What is the relationship between law and flags in their visual representations? What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation? Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory with flags, the book interrogates the complex color-coded sign system of particular flags and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time.

Accounts of the relationship between flags and the law have focused on a narrow strain of contentions drawn from debates about political expression. This essay seeks to bridge the gap between cultural studies’ insight into nationalism and its symbolics, and the flag’s legal status, to better understand the unique position occupied by national flags. Flag ‘waving’ has become more prevalent in many liberal democracies. In such societies, flags occupy not a religious role, but a quiet and quotidian place in what Billig terms ‘banal nationalism’. As a cipher for the whole, a particular flag’s design is relatively unimportant; what lends it power is a mix of the gravity bestowed by its official designation and the easy commodification lent by a flag’s easy reproducibility and portability. Unlike other state symbols such as the currency, coat of arms and honorifics, the state does not seek to monopolise the flag’s use, let alone define its meaning. An analysis of the laws in several countries governing flag designation, observance and ‘desecration’ reveals that the law accords the flag distinct status yet only equivocal protection. While the state may crave its citizens’ fealty, a flag is not a symbol of some distant governmentality. Rather, it is gifted to ‘the people’ and relies for its relevance on its organic proliferation. As both object and image, people attribute a power to the flag – a power they recognise over themselves and others with whom they share a body politic. A key source of this fetishisation is its official, legal designation. Though it embodies no particular values, a flag is valued, even fetishised, by flag-wavers and flag-burners alike.