The Formation of Political Traditions and National symbols in Nineteenth-Century Latin AmericaNelson González OrtegaPages 59-72 | Published online: 19 Apr 2017

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actThe interpretation of national symbols, as socio-cultural practices that produce and disseminate ideology, change constantly throughout historical periods and within cultural areas. This article focuses on the origin and spread of national symbols and nationalism in nineteenth-century Colombia. It examines Colombian national symbols such as the coat of arms, the flag and the national anthem in order to determine how these national symbols were used in the early nineteenth century by a Colombian nationalist elite, composed of ‘official intellectuals’ to construct a ‘patria cultural’. The article seeks to demonstrate that the national symbols produced and institutionalized in nineteenth-century Colombia were European imitations of French and German nationalist models and, therefore, were the results of the affiliation of Colombian republican intellectuals to the European liberal national project of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article concludes that the construction of the nineteenth-century ‘patria cultural’ has ever since prevented the emergence of an organic and more democratic modern nation state in Colombia.

Keywords: Colombia, national symbols, coat of arms, flag, national anthem

Introduction: Colombia’s state building and the formation of national symbols

In the newly established Latin American republics that emerged after the wars of independence from Spain (1810–1824), the republican state was maintained by the rich and educated Creoles (criollos) who acquired political and intellectual leadership, thanks to Independence. The criollos replaced the Spanish imperial officials in the spheres of military, economic and cultural power. However, they did not manage to integrate into the new republican nation state large numbers of peasants, poor city-dwellers, Indians, Afro-Colombians and mulattos from diverse regions of the country who had participated in the wars of independence of the new República de

Colombia. This failed integration was due to the lack of political vision and/or of ideological conviction for grounding a truly democratic nation state.

Indeed, in Colombia, the formation of the official State and national culture began after the country’s independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, and was achieved mainly by the transfer of a nationalist ideology to civil society through five major means of transmission: written discourse (i.e. official history and literature), oral discourse (i.e. oral and written official patriotic speeches), iconographic discourse (i.e. the flag and the coat of arms), musical discourse (i.e. the national anthem) and architectural discourse (i.e. State buildings, plazas, theatres, statues).11. In addition, there had been other practices employed by the Colombian nineteenth-century nationalist elites to spread official images of the nation, such as, the creation of a national day, official patriotic speeches, the publication of officially authorized history and geography textbooks for elementary schools, maps produced by State mapping agencies, national libraries and museums created to organize and represent the Colombian cultural past as understood by a Colombian elite of official intellectuals.View all notes

The present study of the origin and spread of national symbols and nationalism in nineteenth- century Colombia is necessarily limited to the study of the nineteenth-century republican period. I will not examine here the role played by all the agents or the official and popular discourses produced and reproduced within State and public institutions by a Colombian nationalist elite in order to instil in ‘peasants-would-be-citizens’ fundamental united narratives of a common origin, a similar religion and language, and territorial boundaries. The aim and scope of this article is the study of Colombian national symbols such as the coat of arms and the flag. Furthermore, it will examine the lyrics of the Colombian national anthem in order to determine why these national symbols were used in the early nineteenth century by a Colombian nationalist elite, composed of ‘official intellectuals’22. Writing in the early 1970s about Latin America’s ‘official intellectuals’, Antonio Gramsci acknowledges that: ‘No vast category of traditional intellectuals exist on Central or South America […] what in fact we find at the root of the development of these countries is the pattern of Spanish and Portuguese civilization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, characterized by the effects of Counter reformation and military parasitism: The change-resistant crystallizations which survive to this day in these countries are the clergy and a military caste, two categories of traditional intellectuals fossilised in a form inherited from the European mother country. […] the majority of intellectuals are of the rural type, and, since the latifundium is dominant, with a lot of property in the hands of the Church, these intellectuals are linked with the clergy and big landowners. […] It can be said that in these regions of the American continent there still exist a situation […] in which the secular and bourgeois elements have not yet reached the stage of being able to subordinate clerical and militaristic influence and interests to the secular politics of the modern State’ (1971Gramsci, A. 1971. The Intellectuals. In: Q.Hoarey and G. Nowell Smith, trans. and eds., Selections from Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 3–23. [Google Scholar], 22).View all notes to construct a ‘patria cultural’.33. ‘A distinction has been made between “cultural nation” (a community united by language or religion or mythology or other cultural bonds) and “political nation” (a community which in addition to cultural bonds also possesses a legal state structure).’ (Seton-Watson, 1997Seton-Watson, H. 1997. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, CO: Westview. [Google

Scholar]: 4) However, in the present study I have adopted the concept of ‘patria cultural’ to explain the historical fact that the nation-state, as a cultural and political entity that would unite most Colombians under a common sense of national identity, did not begin to emerge among Colombians until the early twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, Colombia was governed by a nationalist elite concerned in producing and reproducing symbols of nation and nationalism, as the ones studied here, in order to instil among Colombians a strong sentiment of official patriotism.View all notes The existence of this nineteenth-century patriotic nation has ever since prevented the emergence of an organic and more democratic modern nation state in Colombia.

State national symbols in Europe and Latin America: an uneven history

The interpretations of both history and one of its components, national symbols, as socio-cultural practices that produce and spread ideology, change constantly throughout historical periods and within cultural areas (Hodge & Kress, 1988Hodge, R. & Kress, G. 1988. “Apendix. Key Concepts in Social Semiotics.” In Social Semiotics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 261–268. [Google Scholar]: VIII, 163, 264–67). This key concept of social semiotics conceives the message-symbols conveyed by icons as social products that are marked by a specific ‘ideological dominant region’ of a given époque (Althusser, 1971Althusser, L. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation). In: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster. London: New Left Books, pp. 121–173. [Google Scholar]: 31–74). Namely, social semiotics focuses on the study of the relationships that exist between ideology and diverse agents and instances (sender, message, receiver, State institutions, geographical space, historical epochs) involved in transmitting a message-symbol (Hodge & Kress, 1988Hodge, R. & Kress, G. 1988. “Apendix. Key Concepts in Social Semiotics.” In Social Semiotics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 261–268. [Google Scholar]: VIII, 163, 264–67; Althusser, 1972Althusser, L. 1972. Practiques artistiques et luttes de classes III. Cinétique, 15: 31–74. [Google Scholar]: 121–73). Therefore, the concept of ‘ideology’ is employed here following Louis Althusser and Alun Munslow’s interpretations. Althusser conceives ideology as a series of paradigms that human beings enact in their individual, social, political, ethical and religious behaviour. Ideology, explains Althusser, also means that individuals living in a given historical epoch are influenced by a set of values and social, political and religious beliefs that inform the ‘dominant ideological region’. For instance, from Althusser’s perspective, the Middle Ages’ dominant ideological region is a religious one (1972Althusser, L. 1972. Practiques artistiques et luttes de classes III. Cinétique, 15: 31–74. [Google Scholar]; 1971Althusser, L. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation). In: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster. London: New Left Books, pp. 121–173. [Google Scholar]). Munslow specifies that ideology:

[I]s a coherent set of socially produced ideas that [lends itself to creating] a group consciousness. Ideology is time- and place-specific [...] Ideology must saturate society and be transmitted by various social and institutional mechanisms like the

media, Church, education and the law. In the view of some commentators, ideology is to be found in all social artifacts like narrative structures (including written history), social codes of behavior and patterns of beliefs. Ideology, according to Marxian theory, reflects and maintains the authority of the dominant social class by deliberately obscuring the reality of economic exploitation (1997: 184Munslow, A. 1997. Deconstructing History. London and New York: Routledge.10.4324/9780203287675[Crossref], [Google Scholar]).

The dynamic construction by social semiotics of historiography, as ideologically determined by time and place, provides adequate analytical tools to examine the rhetorical and iconographic forms used by a Colombian republican nationalist elite to create national identity symbols in order to legitimize an official model of a nation state among peasants who would eventually become citizens. Hence, the central objective of this article is to relate a comparative and historical approach to a social semiotics scheme to examine, firstly, the origin and establishment of national symbols in France (i.e. coat of arms) and in Germany (i.e. the national anthem) and, afterwards, study its imitations by a Colombian nationalist elite. By so doing, I attempt to uncover Colombia’s cultural dependency. As Gabriella Elgenius, a researcher of national symbols in European countries has put it: ‘Controlling national symbols is a means of managing the past and has become a consideration for elites as one way of maintaining social order’ (2011: 63Elgenius, G. 2011. Symbols of Nations and Nationalisms. Celebrating Nationhood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]).44. However, the reader should not forget that: 'National flags and national days are created for a number of reasons and not by elites only, but once established they are deliberately formalized and perceived as central to nation formation' (Elgenius, 2011Elgenius, G. 2011. Symbols of Nations and Nationalisms. Celebrating Nationhood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]: 18).View all notes

The temporal disparity which has existed between Europe’s historical times and the historical times of Colombian and Latin American countries, with regard to the emergence of the modern State is explained by the historian Beatriz González Stephan, as follows:

A diferencia de lo que sucedió en Francia, Inglaterra y los Estados Unidos, donde el Estado nacional moderno se erigió sobre la base de una revolución burguesa, que tuvo la capacidad de crear la red de un mercado interno y el desarrollo de una industria nacional como factores decisivos para la integración de todas las clases sociales [...], las revoluciones de independencia en la América Latina sólo lograron una transformación parcial de sus realidades [...] En este sentido, la Independencia no significó el triunfo de la burguesía, es decir, de las fuerzas históricamente más progresistas, sino que, pasado el momento de efervescencia bélica, fue la aristocracia terrateniente la que controló la organización del nuevo Estado. Esto determinó en mayor o menor grado la vía conservadora de constitución de las naciones latinoamericanas (1987González Stephan, B. 1987. La historiografía literaria del liberalismo hispano-americano del siglo XIX. La Habana: Casa de las Américas. [Google Scholar]: 28).

These uneven historical, political and cultural hegemonic relations between the West and Latin America have to be examined first in order to place within a global context the subsequent study of the emergence of national symbols and political traditions in Colombia in the nineteenth century.

The colonized nation

From a transnational perspective the temporal disparity created by the different historical times of Europe (eighteenth century) and Colombia (nineteenth century), regarding the formation of their official national cultures, confirms, but not justifies, Colombia’s political and cultural colonial dependency. This kind of alienation from their own culture shows clearly the Colombian republican nationalist elite’s subaltern cultural dependency upon the powerful European centre.

Notwithstanding, it is ultimately important, to raise one highly political question although it cannot be analysed in detail for lack of space: since the Spanish-Europeans settled in the American continent in the sixteenth century, geo-political, geo-economic and cultural asymmetrical power relations between the first world (the centre) and the third world (the periphery) have emerged there. However, these profound differences between ‘the West and the rest’ are not economically or morally sustainable if we want to live in one ‘single’ world which may contain all of us humans. Or rather, to express this argument from a de-colonial perspective: it should be demanded that politicians worldwide urgently seek a reconciliation between ‘European colonialism’ derived from modernity (i.e. the never fully obtained and the eventual ideals of la raison parfaite, l’égalité, la liberté et le progrès de l’humanité), but instead, le fait accompli of the eventual ecological destruction of the planet perpetrated mainly by the countries of Western and Eastern sphere of power and their multinational enterprises sustained by their avid consumer population) on the one hand and, on the other, ‘the coloniality of power’ suffered by the non-European countries — the imposed external or internal economic and cultural dependence from the West in the name of progress.55. Chatterjee criticizes European modernity, specifically, the French–Anglo-European liberal model of political development for being inappropriate for faithful implementation in the political societies of non-European countries: 'I think there has been a significant change in technologies and forms of government, resulting from the consolidation of mass democracy in large parts of the world during the twentieth century [...] [T]he old idea of popular sovereignty canonized by the French Revolution and a political and legal order based on equality and freedom is no longer appropriate for the organization of democratic demands. In these years new forms of democratic organization, often contradictory with the old principles of a [euro-occidental] civil liberal society are emerging. Although emerging, in a fragmentary and unstable way, it calls from us [non-Western scholars] new theoretical conceptions that are appropriate to describe the actual forms of popular politics in most of the world' (2007Chatterjee, P. 2007. La nación en tiempo heterogéneo y otros estudios subalternos. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. [Google Scholar]: 84–85).View all notes Enlightened modernity, that is, the kind of modernity derived from the French Enlightenment, closely linked since its origin to global capitalism, imposes on the rest of the world a local (Western) narrative as if it were a global (universal) narrative: ‘it is the narrative of capital [and of modernity] that can turn the violence of mercantilist trade, war, genocide, conquest and colonialism into a story of universal progress, development, modernization and freedom’ (Chatterjee, 2010Chatterjee, P. 2010. Empire and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press.10.7312/chat15220[Crossref], [Google Scholar]: 284–85).

Hence, non-Western development models aimed at the decolonization of peripheral countries should require, among other decisive actions, that third-world countries organize independent economies in order to engage themselves in producing autonomous, sustainable and innovative economic, ecological and cultural models of development that may lead to the creation of their own nation-building routes. These new routes would enable them to counteract the current uneven hegemonic relations of power that govern our world today.

France and Germany as models for the Colombian coat of arms and the national flag: a social semiotic analysis

The use of iconography, in the form of symbols and emblems, for transmitting national ideology was originally a European political practice used in the invention and institutionalization of national traditions. It is important here to single out the case of France because most of the official national symbolism associated with the French Revolution was imitated in Colombia and Latin America and is still in place there today, with no major modifications.66. Brazilian critic Antonio Candido reflects on the influence of France in Latin America, in these terms: 'What is the influence of France in Latin America? France was for us, on the one hand, a factor of alienation, and on the other, it was a factor of national construction' (quoted in Pizarro et al., 1987Pizarro, A. & Antonio Cándido. 1987. Hacia una historia de la literatura latinoamericana. México, D.F.: El Colegio de México/Universidad Simón Bolívar. [Google Scholar]: 73).View all notes

In France, the invention of basic national symbols (i.e., the flag, the coat of arms, the national anthem and the national day), as political traditions, played an important role in preserving the social and political order that emerged after the 1789 Revolution. Referring to the close relation between official national symbolism and the French Revolution, Hobsbawm explains that national symbols were a deliberate construction of the Socialists in the Third Republic who, taking advantage of the French government centralism, composed and distributed ‘folk’ manuals destined to turn peasants into Frenchmen and Frenchmen into good republicans (1988Hobsbawm, E. 1988. Mass-Producing traditions: Europe, 1870-1914. In: E. Hobsbawmand T. Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, pp. 263–307. [Google Scholar]: 271).

The French revolutionaries’ goal was to promote the abstract idea of a ‘cultural nation’, as a substitute for the real French nation, first between an economic minority of landlords and rich merchants and, later, among the masses. Following the model established in the creation and implementation of French national symbolism, Colombian and Latin American intellectuals and politicians began to create their respective national traditions, immediately after the independence of their countries (1810–24). They did this to reinforce, through the spread of icons and emblems, the idea of a national identity that did not exist at that time.

In France, following the Revolution, a popular conscience of national origin that was strengthened by the official implementation of national symbols emerged in most of

the common people. However, in nineteenth-century Colombia, national sentiment emerged only among a minority of official intellectuals and it did not involve the masses; hence the national symbols only brought together a nationalist elite. In economic terms, in nineteenth-century France, the economic liberal model (laissez-faire politique) was implemented more coherently. Therefore, the institutional reforms made by the French bourgeoisie benefited a large number of people. In Colombia, however, real economic development did not occur, and neither did a political opening that included ordinary people. The political leaders, imbued with liberal theories of Independence stimulated the incongruent material progress of large cities: by doing so they masked the precarious economic situation in which the country was immersed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, in the years of transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Colombia was ‘an essentially rural country, with a population of three million inhabitants, and in a difficult economic situation’ (Ocampo López, 1984Ocampo López, C.J. 1984. Historia básica de Colombia. Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. [Google Scholar]: 259).77. The political instability that occurred in Colombia during the nineteenth century is evidenced by the following historical data: six national Constitutions (1832, 1843,1851, 1858, 1863 and 1886) were issued; 52 civil wars occurred, and Colombia was one of the Latin American countries where more presidential elections took placed (Ocampo López, 1984Ocampo López, C.J. 1984. Historia básica de Colombia. Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. [Google Scholar]: 257–58).View all notes

Consequently, in Colombia, the flag and the coat of arms were the main icons that were used as emblems by State officials and institutions to spread national ideology. The State use of icons as the Colombian coat of arms can be explained fully through a socio-semiotic analysis which reveals Colombian geographical and historical data that interlink, retrospectively, the republican, the colonial and the classical Greek–Roman historical periods.

From a semiotic perspective, the Colombian coat of arms fits into the category of icon (Greimas and Courtés, 1979Greimas, A.J. & Courtés, J. 1979. Semiotics and Language, An Analytical Dictionary, trans, L. Crist. et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar]; Greimas, 1987Greimas, A.J. 1987. On Meaning, Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]; Hodge and Kress, 1988Hodge, R. & Kress, G. 1988. “Apendix. Key Concepts in Social Semiotics.” In Social Semiotics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 261–268. [Google Scholar]), and as such, can be semiotically defined as: ‘something which exhibits the same quality or the same configuration of qualities that the object denoted’ (Ducrot and Todorov, 1972Ducrot, O. & Todorov, T. 1972. Diccionario enciclopédico de las ciencias del lenguaje. México: Siglo XXI. [Google Scholar]: 115).88. In my diagrammatic analysis of the Colombian coat of arms, I include not only the theoretical postulates of social semiotics cited above, but have also adopted, with certain modifications, the semiotic scheme developed by Enrique Ballón Aguirre (1973Ballón Aguirre, E. 1973. El icono de la historia del Perú. Textual, Revista del Instituto Nacional de Cultura (diciembre): 70–76. [Google Scholar]).View all notes The description of the objects and images included in the Colombian coat of arms gives at first an impression of a ‘complete external structure’ portraying single and interdependent images and objects like a bird, fruits, a hat and two vessels. However, if a social semiotic analysis is applied to the ‘reading’ of these outstanding image-objects in the Colombian coat of arms, they reveal an ‘interrelated internal

structure’ that, through the combination of a vertical (paradigmatic structure) and a horizontal (syntagmatic structure) reading direction, produce and reproduce potential meanings of nationhood and national belongings. Indeed, a social semiotic reading, departing firstly from bottom to top, will reveal a paradigm that can be organized by semes (minimal units of meaning) that by virtue of their own combination, form lexemes (lexical morfemes), and these lexemes, in their turn, are grouped both in sememes (group of semes) and semic axes (points of intersection of various relationships established within the semiotic and semantic levels). Such semic axes do articulate semic categories (basic structures that organize the different types of relationship). Finally, these semic categories form both the metasemes (the sole combinations of contextual semes) and a complete semic universe (the totality of meanings represented in the coat of arms that existed before its fragmented representation). The semic universe encompasses together all the systems that carry significance (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1 The Coat of Arms of Colombia.

Notes: As this semiotic terminology is inevitably abstract unless incorporated into the study of a specific concrete icon, I am including bellow the Colombian coat of arms (Figure 1) followed by a diagram (Figure 2) that will facilitate the semiotic reading of the type of ideology that hides behind the national coat of arms and the Colombian flag.

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Figure 2 Colombia’s national emblems: a socio-semiotic reading.

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Within the semiotic interpretation there are two levels of meaning which can be distinguished but not separated: one syntagmatic or associative level (corresponding to the horizontal arrangement of reading units or ‘lexias’) and the other a paradigmatic or metonymic level (equivalent to the process of selection and condensing — the part for the whole).99. The concepts derived from Saussure’s binary structures ‘syntagmatic level’ and ‘associative level’ are called, respectively, by Ballón Aguirre, ‘Denotative level of identification’ and ‘Connotative level of performance.’ Also departing from Saussure, social semiotics posit that if it is true that within a sign a series of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships that contribute to the formation and reproduction of signifiers and signifiants which appear in the message (set of signs) and, by extension, in the written or iconographic text (set of message) there can also be distinguished two levels of similar significance: the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic ones. Thus, the syntagmatic structure is formed by a combination of signs (syntagm) which may converge semantic sense (meaning) in a given time and space, while the paradigmatic structure consists of a selection and organization of signifiers (paradigm), whose active performance or passiveness depends on the act of selection within the paradigmatic structure (Hodge and Kress, 1988Hodge, R. & Kress, G. 1988. “Apendix. Key Concepts in Social Semiotics.” In Social Semiotics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 261–268. [Google Scholar]: 262).View all notes The syntagmatic level, corresponding to the level of denotation-identification, appears when the lexias establish a relationship by which they communicate horizontally by virtue of the continuity that the denoted objects and discourses are subjected to.

These lexias form a lexicon that stems and points to a set of sociocultural practices and strategies of interpretation. The paradigmatic connotation-interpretation level occurs when a given lexia puts into movement different lexias, allowing a simultaneous view of the complete macro structure and the different ways their elements interconnect to achieve signification. Social semiotics does not give priority to any of these two levels (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) of reading/interpretation,

but rather treats them integrally as dynamic sets that constitute systems which (re)produce incessantly convergent levels of meaning (readings).

On the syntagmatic structure, as shown in Figure 2, the semic universe represented by Colombia’s coat of arms presupposes the existence of a contextual seme (geography and history) in which ‘Colombian culture’ is inserted. This metaseme links different geographical and historical periods (republican–Colombia, colonial–Spain and antiguity–Greek–Roman) organized retrospectively, by means of a syntagmatic relation. The semic axes represent the emblems, symbols and indices from each geographical space and historical period. The emblems are organized into sememes (coat of arms and flag) that acquire, in their turn, new semantic qualities through their interaction with lexemes and semes. 

If the reader follows a horizontal direction (the syntagmatic structure) of the sememe, Colombia’s coat of arms, a perceptual identification of the visual images will appear: a bird, a cornucopia of fruit, a Granada fruit, a cap, and two warships sailing on two oceans separated by an isthmus. Additionally, the memorable phrase or ‘enunciative syntagm’: ‘Libertad y Orden’ (Liberty and Order) appears.

Although the image-objects and the written statements that appear in Colombia’s coat of arms are arranged vertically (from top down), they denote horizontally (from left to right) the following national discourses: the bird refers to the condor of the Andes; the cornucopia points to the natural abundance and the animal and mineral richness of the Colombian territory; the Granada fruit indicates the ancient name of the country as well as the founder of the Kingdom of New Granada, the Spanish Conquistador, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (1506–1579); the hat or the Greek cap of liberty symbolizes the soldiers who fought for freedom; and the isthmus and the two vessels refer to the Isthmus of Panama and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.1010. Despite its Hellenistic origin as representing the eastern Mitrism, the Phrygian hat is a very well-known symbol of French republicanism. In the famous Delacroix painting La Liberté Guidant le peuple (1830), the revolutionary young girl (a reminder of Joan of Arc?) who appears in the foreground wearing the Phrygian hat personifies the New French Republic. The Phrygian hat appears in the coat of arms of other countries of the continent, such as Haiti and in the emblem of the US Senate. Therefore, the Phrygian hat not only refers to the soldiers who fought for independence, but it was also used to reinforce the European republican ideology of French origin that was imitated in Latin America by its nationalist elites.View all notesThe inscription ‘Liberty and Order’ is a signifier itself. Thus, it is usually interpreted literally.

All the images in the coat of arms, perceived separately or alone, as proposed by Saussure, are signifies(words) that connote individual and concrete signifiants (objects). However, the same image-objects organized in a syntagmatic sequence, by virtue of their continuity, give rise to a directed communication; a ‘directed history’ that creates ‘sense’ and ‘ideology’. Thus, as Nietzsche has observed: ‘Facts are not created by themselves alone. People always have to start by introducing a sense [of interpretation] in order to create a fact’ (quoted in Barthes, 1967Barthes, R. 1967. Le discours de l’histoire. Information sur les sciences sociales, 6 (4): 65–75.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]: 73).

The type of ideology that is created and transmitted by the Colombian coat of arm’s image-objects is a European republican ideology; its production and reception context is the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Colombian culture; the transmitter is the ‘official intellectual’, and the receptor, is the average Colombian person whose sense of national history has been informed and shaped by State institutions and by officially authorized high school history manuals.

Likewise, the Colombian national flag, derived from ‘the horizontal tricolours established in Germany’ (Elgenius, 2011Elgenius, G. 2011. Symbols of Nations and Nationalisms. Celebrating Nationhood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]: 87),1111. ‘The national flag appears as a symbol for mass participating nations that emerged with new notions of citizenship and “oneness” after the course of 1789. […]’ First in Europe, and afterwards in all other countries of the world: ‘Flags have remained successful political symbols because they authenticate boundaries between those who belong and those who do not. […] National flags, much like national anthems, provide, a form to national self-celebration, wave or sing the nation into action and move history into the present’ (Elgenius, 2011Elgenius, G. 2011. Symbols of Nations and Nationalisms. Celebrating Nationhood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]: 3, 27).View all notes interpreted as a (concrete) object, refers to the following national identity (abstract) symbols (see Figure 2): The yellow colour symbolizes Colombia’s gold (the never-found El Dorado); the blue colour, the sky and the oceans; and the red colour, the blood spilled by the revolutionary heroes during the early nineteenth-century Independence war.1212. Dousdebés (1937Dousdebés, P.J. 1937. Las insignias de Colombia. Boletín de historia y antigüedades(agosto): 449–483.Dousdebés, P.J. 1949. La bandera y el escudo nacionales. Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades, 36: 71–81. : 1949Dousdebés, P.J. 1949. La bandera y el escudo nacionales. Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades, 36: 71–81. [Google Scholar]) studies the historical evolution of the Colombian coat of arms and the flag from Spanish colonial times up to the twentieth century. He transcribes decrees in which the Colombian government establishes the size, layout and precise tones of the colours of both the flag and the national coat of arms, that Colombian cultural institutions (ministries and embassies) and military (infantry, marine and especially aviation) must use in official acts or when celebrating national holidays.View all notes

From the Colombian nationalist elite’s ideological perspective, a syntagmatic structure or a reading (from left to right) of the semes configured in the above-mentioned lexemes that appear both in the Colombian coat of arms and flag merges into a metonymical structure (from top to bottom) of moving images, producing the following ideological analogies:

• COLOMBIA’S COAT OF ARMS: a metonymic relationship.(1) Bird → condor → American fauna; → American flora and an abundant

cornucopia = AMERICANISMO1313. It should be noted that originally the colonial coat of arms of New Granada (today’s Bogotá) displayed a black eagle, which was a symbol of freedom in ancient Roman heraldry. The black eagle was replaced in the early years of the Republic by a condor, an Andean bird representative of the new notion of AMERICANISMO. For an overview of the historical evolution of Colombian nationalist symbols, see Dousdebés (1937Dousdebés, P.J. 1937. Las insignias de Colombia. Boletín de historia y antigüedades (agosto): 449–483. [Google Scholar]).View all notes

(2) Granada → Spanish city where Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, the founder of Colombia’s capital was born. (New) Granada = HISPANISMO.

(3) The Phrygian hat → an image of freedom both for the liberated slaves of Rome and for the French Republicans = REPUBLICANISMO.

(4) The two vessels, the isthmus and the two oceans → the Isthmus of Panama and the oceans, Atlantic and Pacific, adjacent to Colombia’s coasts → territorial unit = NACIONALISMO.

• COLOMBIA’S FLAG: a metonymic relationship.(1) The tricolour1414. 'The many tricolours became symbols of revolutions and

change, the many post-imperial heraldic flags staked out claims for nationhood […] Nation-making relies on the standardization of cultural expressions associated with the status of independent states' (Elgenius, 2011Elgenius, G. 2011. Symbols of Nations and Nationalisms. Celebrating Nationhood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]: 24).View all notes yellow, blue and red → heraldry originated in Hamburg, Germany = COSMOPOLITISMO.

(2) The iconographies of Amerindians and Afro-Colombians are conspicuously absent from both the Colombian coat of arms and the flag. However, by their very absence, these ethnic iconographies evoke, EUROCENTRISMO and PRO-HISPANISMO.1515. Dousdebés admits that he modelled the Colombian flag on the tricolour that was used as standard by Hamburg's Burghers (Bourgois) Guard (1937Dousdebés, P.J. 1937. Las insignias de Colombia. Boletín de historia y antigüedades (agosto): 449–483. [Google Scholar], 462).View all notes

The social-semiotic analysis of the Colombian coat of arms and flag that I have elaborated shows that these two main national emblems represent Colombian geography and history, as they were understood by the official nineteenth-century republican intellectuals: thus, they viewed Colombian history and geography in three interrelated ways: as a moral lesson; as a part of the European republican culture; and as a product of the political independence of (Latin) America and Colombia from Spain. The very fact that the message/discourse derived from a social-semiotic reading of both Colombia’s coat of arms and the national flag, refers to the ideologemes (the smallest units of speech that articulate ideology)1616. The term ideologeme, is analogous to the concept of phoneme: it denotes the smallest units of speech (i.e. an exclamation, a word, phrase, sentence) or of a text that can articulate markedly ideological contents. Ideologeme is a term used by Bakhtin in his studies of narrative works (1970 and 1978) to designate those words and expressions which present specific stylistic and contextual marks that are related to a particular environment, profession, world vision or ideology (Estébanez Calderón, 1996Estébanes Calderón, D. 1996. Diccionario de términos literarios. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. [Google Scholar]).View all notes of EUROCENTRISMO, COLONIALISMO, HISPANISMO, AMERICANISMO, and REPUBLICANISMO, confirms, from a social-semiotics perspective, that these key historical concepts that have formed the ideological basis of the national cultural identity of Colombians instilled in peasants and citizens by official nationalist elites since their emergence in the early nineteenth century.

Ancient Greek legends as a model for Colombia’s national anthem

Colombia’s national anthem is another official discourse employed by republican intellectuals to strengthen the institutionalization and popularization of national identity among Colombians. The national anthem evokes, through the pervasive effects of lyrics, the heroic military actions played by national heroes (i.e. Simon Bolívar, Antonio Nariño and Antonio Ricaurte) in Latin America’s wars of independence. The Colombian national anthem was written in 1887 by the president-poet of Colombia, Rafael Núñez, to commemorate the ‘complete independence’ of Cartagena (Henao/Arrubla, 1911Henao, J.M. & Arrubla, G. 1911. Historia de Colombia. Bogotá: Imprenta Salesiana. [Google Scholar]: 626). It consists of one chorus, eleven stanzas and forty-four verses.

Table

CSV Display Table

A narrative analysis of this fragment of Colombia’s national anthem reveals that Rafael Núñez used certain images (‘centaurs’, ‘cyclops’, ‘epic’, ‘Thermopylae’ from Greek mythology, epic and history in order to transform into classic heroes the (Latin) American ‘libertadores’, Bolívar and Ricaurte: their military campaigns are equated with epic feats recorded in the Odyssey and in other historical texts of ancient Greece. In the verses 33–36 and 41–44, the composer compares Antonio Ricaurte’s death at the Battle of San Mateo with Leonidas’ death at the Battle of Thermopylae (continental Greece 480 BC). By linking Greek mythology and history with the formation of the Colombian nation, and the European epic with the period of Independence, the president-poet Núñez reinforces, through the national anthem’s lyrics, the prevailing Europeanized official national ideology articulated in Colombia’s historiographical discourse.

Cultural dependency in Colombia’s national symbols

The categories included in or excluded from the Colombia’s official national discourse articulated in the coat of arms, the flag and the national anthem were by no means accidental. They were the result of the affiliation of Colombian republican intellectuals to the European liberal national project of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The imitation of the European national discourses by Colombian and Latin American nationalist elites was characterized by overestimating the Spanish and European culture and by underestimating the indigenous and Afro-Colombian. Therefore, from a republican ideological perspective, the history of Colombia would originate predominantly in the Independence period and, to a lesser extent, in the Conquest and in colonial times, but not in the indigenous pre-Columbian period. Thus, nineteenth-century republican intellectuals who pursued the construction of a national identity among Colombians have imperfectly imitated European cultural models, especially those from France and Germany, when creating the national emblems, and the Greek model, when composing the national anthem.

The act of social communication unleashed by the official articulation and reception of nationalist elites’ patriotic discourses, intended to create a national identity among the citizens of any nation, is explained by Hobsbawm, as follows:

[T]he consequent inventions of ‘political’ traditions was more conscious and deliberate, since it was largely undertaken by institutions with political purposes in mind. Yet we may as well note immediately that conscious inventions succeeded mainly in proportion to its success in broadcasting on a wavelength to which the public was ready to tune in. Official new public holidays, ceremonies, heroes or symbols, which commanded the growing armies of the state’s employees and the growing captive public of schoolchildren, might still fail to mobilize the citizen volunteers if they lacked genuine popular resonance (1988Hobsbawm, E. 1988. Mass-Producing traditions: Europe, 1870-1914. In: E. Hobsbawmand T. Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, pp. 263–307. [Google Scholar]: 263–64).

In the case of Colombia’s nation-building process, it is true that official republican intellectuals deliberately created the national emblems, the national anthem and official patriotic ceremonies in order to create and spread political traditions of nationalism. However, the fact remains that these official ceremonies, held to commemorate war heroes by deploying national emblems, would not have been sufficient in themselves to mobilize either a minority of eighteenth-century Colombian literate citizens or a majority of illiterate peasants if the official nationalist ideology conveyed by the national emblems had lacked wide popular support among the inhabitants of major cities

From a national perspective, the argument raised and discussed in this study can be summed up thus: the lack of a social and political unity in Colombia during the nineteenth century led the republican nationalist elite (composed of official intellectuals) to build a ‘patria cultural’ or a ‘patriotic culture’ by devoting themselves to the construction of a single homogenous and glorious national past embellished by national symbols, rather than laying the foundations for the emergence of a truly democratic society. By doing so, the republican nationalist elite fell into the fallacy of believing that the establishment and dissemination of diverse European nationalist symbols (i.e. the national emblems and the national anthem) in the newly established Republic of Colombia would produce among Colombians who were illiterate at the time the personal and collective conscience of having achieved both successful national unity and advanced industrial progress, comparable to those obtained by contemporary European countries.

Discussion and conclusion

A nineteenth-century Colombian republican nationalist elite composed of ‘official intellectuals’ has formed and used politically the country’s national emblems and anthem to create their official version of national identity. By doing so, these nationalist elites have engaged in converting ‘the abstract past of the nation’ into ‘an embellished national political past’ in order to create, by imposition or by conviction among common people, patriotic political traditions to celebrate nationhood. While this kind of official nationalism led to the formation of a ‘patria cultural’, it did not

promote the emergence of a genuine democratic modern nation-state in nineteenth-century Colombia.

The national symbols produced and institutionalized in nineteenth-century Colombia were European imitations, especially of French and German nationalist models. The formation of Colombia’s national emblems as well as the way they were used politically by a republican nationalist elite to spread a patriotic nationalism is quite similar to the official inventions of political traditions that occurred in other Latin American countries: specifically, in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico.1717. Examining the role played by 'official intellectuals' in nation-state building in countries like Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico, Betancourt Mendieta declares that they created among themselves national networks by being employed by the State or by being leaders of State cultural institutions, such as schools, museums, presidential archives, national libraries. This kind of official affiliation with the State provided them and their writings with considerable power and authority as founders of the nation in their own countries (2007Betancourt Mendieta, A. 2007. Historia y Nación. Medellín: La Carreta Editores. [Google Scholar]: 48).View all notes Therefore, this analysis of the formation of Colombia’s national symbols and the spread of official nationalism can be considered as a case study that demonstrates the invention of political traditions in Latin America as a whole.

The current North Atlantic aspiration to unchallenged military, economic and cultural hegemony over most of the nations of the world, in the name of progress and modern Western democratic values, will have to be modified if the true aim of the North Atlantic nations is to promote and nurture democratic principles worldwide. In order to help construct a heterogeneous, decolonized and democratic order for all the inhabitants of our world, non-Western nations have to be allowed by both hegemonic national elites and transnational powers to pursue their own models for achieving national and regional development so that they can resist Euro-Occidental economic and cultural neocolonialism in the form of incongruent and peripheral globalization. Ultimately, the challenge that Western and non-Western nations alike now face and will face in the near future seems to be to accept and encourage multilateral models of socioeconomic and cultural development and to resist the ambition of any nation or group of nations to impose its unilateral developmental model on the will of the majority of the heterogeneous peoples and cultures of the world.

Notes on contributor

Correspondence to: nelson.gonzalez-ortega@ilos.uio.no

Notes1. In addition, there had been other practices employed by the Colombian nineteenth-century nationalist elites to spread official images of the nation, such as, the creation of a national day, official patriotic speeches, the publication of officially authorized history and geography textbooks for elementary schools, maps produced by State mapping agencies, national libraries and museums created to organize and represent the Colombian cultural past as understood by a Colombian elite of official intellectuals.

2. Writing in the early 1970s about Latin America’s ‘official intellectuals’, Antonio Gramsci acknowledges that: ‘No vast category of traditional intellectuals exist on Central or South America […] what in fact we find at the root of the development of these countries is the pattern of Spanish and Portuguese civilization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, characterized by the effects of Counter reformation and military parasitism: The change-resistant crystallizations which survive to this day in these countries are the clergy and a military caste, two categories of traditional intellectuals fossilised in a form inherited from the European mother country. […] the majority of intellectuals are of the rural type, and, since the latifundium is dominant, with a lot of property in the hands of the Church, these intellectuals are linked with the clergy and big landowners. […] It can be said that in these regions of the American continent there still exist a situation […] in which the secular and bourgeois elements have not yet reached the stage of being able to subordinate clerical and militaristic influence and interests to the secular politics of the modern State’ (1971Gramsci, A. 1971. The Intellectuals. In: Q.Hoarey and G. Nowell Smith, trans. and eds., Selections from Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 3–23. [Google Scholar], 22).

3. ‘A distinction has been made between “cultural nation” (a community united by language or religion or mythology or other cultural bonds) and “political nation” (a community which in addition to cultural bonds also possesses a legal state structure).’ (Seton-Watson, 1997Seton-Watson, H. 1997. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, CO: Westview. [Google Scholar]: 4) However, in the present study I have adopted the concept of ‘patria cultural’ to explain the historical fact that the nation-state, as a cultural and political entity that would unite most Colombians under a common sense of national identity, did not begin to emerge among Colombians until the early twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, Colombia was governed by a nationalist elite concerned in producing and reproducing symbols of nation and nationalism, as the ones studied here, in order to instil among Colombians a strong sentiment of official patriotism.

4. However, the reader should not forget that: 'National flags and national days are created for a number of reasons and not by elites only, but once established they are deliberately formalized and perceived as central to nation formation' (Elgenius, 2011Elgenius, G. 2011. Symbols of Nations and Nationalisms. Celebrating Nationhood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]: 18).

5. Chatterjee criticizes European modernity, specifically, the French–Anglo-European liberal model of political development for being inappropriate for faithful implementation in the political societies of non-European countries: 'I think there has been a significant change in technologies and forms of government, resulting from the consolidation of mass democracy in large parts of the world during the twentieth century [...] [T]he old idea of popular sovereignty canonized by the French Revolution and a political and legal order based on equality and freedom is no longer appropriate for the organization of democratic demands. In these years new forms of democratic organization, often contradictory with the old principles of a [euro-occidental] civil liberal society are emerging. Although emerging, in a fragmentary and unstable way, it calls from us [non-Western scholars] new theoretical conceptions that are appropriate to describe the actual forms of popular politics in most of the world' (2007Chatterjee, P. 2007. La nación en tiempo heterogéneo y

otros estudios subalternos. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. [Google Scholar]: 84–85).

6. Brazilian critic Antonio Candido reflects on the influence of France in Latin America, in these terms: 'What is the influence of France in Latin America? France was for us, on the one hand, a factor of alienation, and on the other, it was a factor of national construction' (quoted in Pizarro et al., 1987Pizarro, A. & Antonio Cándido. 1987. Hacia una historia de la literatura latinoamericana. México, D.F.: El Colegio de México/Universidad Simón Bolívar. [Google Scholar]: 73).

7. The political instability that occurred in Colombia during the nineteenth century is evidenced by the following historical data: six national Constitutions (1832, 1843,1851, 1858, 1863 and 1886) were issued; 52 civil wars occurred, and Colombia was one of the Latin American countries where more presidential elections took placed (Ocampo López, 1984Ocampo López, C.J. 1984. Historia básica de Colombia. Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. [Google Scholar]: 257–58).

8. In my diagrammatic analysis of the Colombian coat of arms, I include not only the theoretical postulates of social semiotics cited above, but have also adopted, with certain modifications, the semiotic scheme developed by Enrique Ballón Aguirre (1973Ballón Aguirre, E. 1973. El icono de la historia del Perú. Textual, Revista del Instituto Nacional de Cultura (diciembre): 70–76. [Google Scholar]).

9. The concepts derived from Saussure’s binary structures ‘syntagmatic level’ and ‘associative level’ are called, respectively, by Ballón Aguirre, ‘Denotative level of identification’ and ‘Connotative level of performance.’ Also departing from Saussure, social semiotics posit that if it is true that within a sign a series of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships that contribute to the formation and reproduction of signifiers and signifiantswhich appear in the message (set of signs) and, by extension, in the written or iconographic text (set of message) there can also be distinguished two levels of similar significance: the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic ones. Thus, the syntagmatic structure is formed by a combination of signs (syntagm) which may converge semantic sense (meaning) in a given time and space, while the paradigmatic structure consists of a selection and organization of signifiers (paradigm), whose active performance or passiveness depends on the act of selection within the paradigmatic structure (Hodge and Kress, 1988Hodge, R. & Kress, G. 1988. “Apendix. Key Concepts in Social Semiotics.” In Social Semiotics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 261–268. [Google Scholar]: 262).

10. Despite its Hellenistic origin as representing the eastern Mitrism, the Phrygian hat is a very well-known symbol of French republicanism. In the famous Delacroix painting La Liberté Guidant le peuple (1830), the revolutionary young girl (a reminder of Joan of Arc?) who appears in the foreground wearing the Phrygian hatpersonifies the New French Republic. The Phrygian hat appears in the coat of arms of other countries of the continent, such as Haiti and in the emblem of the US Senate. Therefore, the Phrygian hat not only refers to the soldiers who fought for independence, but it was also used to reinforce the European republican ideology of French origin that was imitated in Latin America by its nationalist elites.

11. ‘The national flag appears as a symbol for mass participating nations that emerged with new notions of citizenship and “oneness” after the course of 1789. […]’ First in Europe, and afterwards in all other countries of the world: ‘Flags have remained successful political symbols because they authenticate boundaries between those who belong and those who do not. […] National flags, much like national anthems, provide, a form to national self-celebration, wave or sing the nation into action and move history into the present’ (Elgenius, 2011Elgenius, G. 2011. Symbols of Nations and Nationalisms. Celebrating Nationhood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]: 3, 27).

12. Dousdebés (1937Dousdebés, P.J. 1937. Las insignias de Colombia. Boletín de historia y antigüedades(agosto): 449–483.Dousdebés, P.J. 1949. La bandera y el escudo nacionales. Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades, 36: 71–81. : 1949Dousdebés, P.J. 1949. La bandera y el escudo nacionales. Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades, 36: 71–81. [Google Scholar]) studies the historical evolution of the Colombian coat of arms and the flag from Spanish colonial times up to the twentieth century. He transcribes decrees in which the Colombian government establishes the size, layout and precise tones of the colours of both the flag and the national coat of arms, that Colombian cultural institutions (ministries and embassies) and military (infantry, marine and especially aviation) must use in official acts or when celebrating national holidays.

13. It should be noted that originally the colonial coat of arms of New Granada (today’s Bogotá) displayed a black eagle, which was a symbol of freedom in ancient Roman heraldry. The black eagle was replaced in the early years of the Republic by a condor, an Andean bird representative of the new notion of AMERICANISMO. For an overview of the historical evolution of Colombian nationalist symbols, see Dousdebés (1937Dousdebés, P.J. 1937. Las insignias de Colombia. Boletín de historia y antigüedades (agosto): 449–483. [Google Scholar]).

14. 'The many tricolours became symbols of revolutions and change, the many post-imperial heraldic flags staked out claims for nationhood […] Nation-making relies on the standardization of cultural expressions associated with the status of independent states' (Elgenius, 2011Elgenius, G. 2011. Symbols of Nations and Nationalisms. Celebrating Nationhood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]: 24).

15. Dousdebés admits that he modelled the Colombian flag on the tricolour that was used as standard by Hamburg's Burghers (Bourgois) Guard (1937Dousdebés, P.J. 1937. Las insignias de Colombia. Boletín de historia y antigüedades (agosto): 449–483. [Google Scholar], 462).

16. The term ideologeme, is analogous to the concept of phoneme: it denotes the smallest units of speech (i.e. an exclamation, a word, phrase, sentence) or of a text that can articulate markedly ideological contents. Ideologeme is a term used by Bakhtin in his studies of narrative works (1970 and 1978) to designate those words and expressions which present specific stylistic and contextual marks that are related to a particular environment, profession, world vision or ideology (Estébanez Calderón, 1996Estébanes Calderón, D. 1996. Diccionario de términos literarios. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. [Google Scholar]).

17. Examining the role played by 'official intellectuals' in nation-state building in countries like Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico, Betancourt Mendieta declares that they created among themselves national networks by being employed by the State or by being leaders of State cultural institutions, such as schools, museums, presidential archives, national libraries. This kind of official affiliation with the State provided them and their writings with considerable power and authority as founders of the nation in their own countries (2007Betancourt Mendieta, A. 2007. Historia y Nación. Medellín: La Carreta Editores. [Google Scholar]: 48).

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