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Romance Studies

ISSN: 0263-9904 (Print) 1745-8153 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yros20

The Formation of Political Traditions and National


symbols in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Nelson Gonzlez Ortega

To cite this article: Nelson Gonzlez Ortega (2017) The Formation of Political Traditions and
National symbols in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Romance Studies, 35:1, 59-72, DOI:
10.1080/02639904.2017.1306334

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2017.1306334

Published online: 19 Apr 2017.

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Romance Studies, Vol. 35No. 1, February, 2017, 5972

The Formation of Political Traditions and


National Symbols in Nineteenth-Century
Latin America
Nelson Gonzlez Ortega
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Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages,University


of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

The 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: Colombias state building and the formation of national


symbols
In the newly established Latin American republics that emerged after the wars of inde-
pendence from Spain (18101824), 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

2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group DOI10.1080/02639904.2017.1306334


60N. GONZLEZ ORTEGA

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 Repblica 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 countrys 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 archi-
tectural discourse (i.e. State buildings, plazas, theatres, statues).1
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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 intellectuals2 to construct a patria cultural.3 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, 1988: VIII, 163, 26467).
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 poque (Althusser, 1971: 3174). 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, 1988: VIII, 163, 26467; Althusser,
1972: 12173). Therefore, the concept of ideology is employed here following Louis
Althusser and Alun Munslows 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 Althussers
perspective, the Middle Ages dominant ideological region is a religious one (1972; 1971).
Munslow specifies that ideology:
The Formation of Political Traditions and National Symbols 61

[I]s a coherent set of socially produced ideas that [lends itself to creating] a group conscious-
ness. 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 narra-
tive 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: 184).
The dynamic construction by social semiotics of historiography, as ideologically deter-
mined 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
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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 Colombias cultural
dependency. As Gabriella Elgenius, a researcher of national symbols in European coun-
tries 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: 63).4
The temporal disparity which has existed between Europes historical times and the his-
torical times of Colombian and Latin American countries, with regard to the emergence
of the modern State is explained by the historian Beatriz Gonzlez Stephan, as follows:
A diferencia de lo que sucedi en Francia, Inglaterra y los Estados Unidos, donde el Estado
nacional moderno se erigi sobre la base de una revolucin burguesa, que tuvo la capaci-
dad de crear la red de un mercado interno y el desarrollo de una industria nacional como
factores decisivos para la integracin de todas las clases sociales [...], las revoluciones de
independencia en la Amrica Latina slo lograron una transformacin parcial de sus reali-
dades [...] En este sentido, la Independencia no signific el triunfo de la burguesa, es decir,
de las fuerzas histricamente ms progresistas, sino que, pasado el momento de efervescencia
blica, fue la aristocracia terrateniente la que control la organizacin del nuevo Estado.
Esto determin en mayor o menor grado la va conservadora de constitucin de las naciones
latinoamericanas (1987: 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, Colombias
political and cultural colonial dependency. This kind of alienation from their own culture
shows clearly the Colombian republican nationalist elites subaltern cultural dependency
upon the powerful European centre.
62N. GONZLEZ ORTEGA
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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.

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,
lgalit, la libert et le progrs de lhumanit), but instead, le fait accompli of the even-
tual 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.5 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, 2010: 28485).
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EMBLEMS

Antiquity

birth

FIGURE 2 Colombias national emblems: a socio-semiotic reading.


The Formation of Political Traditions and National Symbols
63
64N. GONZLEZ ORTEGA

Hence, non-Western development models aimed at the decolonization of peripheral


countries should require, among other decisive actions, that third-world countries organ-
ize 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
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ideology was originally a European political practice used in the invention and institu-
tionalization 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.6
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 (1988: 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 estab-
lished 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 (181024). 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
The Formation of Political Traditions and National Symbols 65

twentieth century, Colombia was an essentially rural country, with a population of three
million inhabitants, and in a difficult economic situation (Ocampo Lpez, 1984: 259).7
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, retro-
spectively, the republican, the colonial and the classical GreekRoman historical periods.
From a semiotic perspective, the Colombian coat of arms fits into the category of
icon (Greimas and Courts, 1979; Greimas, 1987; Hodge and Kress, 1988), 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, 1972: 115).8
The description of the objects and images included in the Colombian coat of arms gives
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at first an impression of a complete external structure portraying single and interde-


pendent 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 bot-
tom 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).
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).9 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 inte-
grally 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 Colombias coat of arms presupposes the existence of a contextual seme (geography
66N. GONZLEZ ORTEGA

and history) in which Colombian culture is inserted. This metaseme links different
geographical and historical periods (republicanColombia, colonialSpain and anti-
guityGreekRoman) 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,
Colombias 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.
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Although the image-objects and the written statements that appear in Colombias
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 Jimnez de Quesada (15061579); 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.10 The 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, 1967: 73).
The type of ideology that is created and transmitted by the Colombian coat of arms
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 estab-
lished in Germany (Elgenius, 2011: 87),11 interpreted as a (concrete) object, refers to
the following national identity (abstract) symbols (see Figure 2): The yellow colour
symbolizes Colombias 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.12
From the Colombian nationalist elites 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:
The Formation of Political Traditions and National Symbols 67

COLOMBIAS COAT OF ARMS: a metonymic relationship.


(1)Bird condor American fauna; American flora and an abundant cornucopia
= AMERICANISMO13
(2)Granada Spanish city where Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, the founder of
Colombias 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 Colombias coasts territorial
unit = NACIONALISMO.
COLOMBIAS FLAG: a metonymic relationship.
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(1)The tricolour14 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.15
The social-semiotic analysis of the Colombian coat of arms and flag that I have elab-
orated shows that these two main national emblems represent Colombian geography
and history, as they were understood by the official nineteenth-century republican intel-
lectuals: 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 Colombias coat
of arms and the national flag, refers to the ideologemes (the smallest units of speech
that articulate ideology)16 of EUROCENTRISMO, COLONIALISMO, HISPANISMO,
AMERICANISMO, and REPUBLICANISMO, confirms, from a social-semiotics per-
spective, 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 Colombias national anthem


Colombias national anthem is another official discourse employed by republican intel-
lectuals to strengthen the institutionalization and popularization of national identity
among Colombians. The national anthem evokes, through the pervasive effects of lyr-
ics, the heroic military actions played by national heroes (i.e. Simon Bolvar, Antonio
Nario and Antonio Ricaurte) in Latin Americas wars of independence. The Colombian
national anthem was written in 1887 by the president-poet of Colombia, Rafael Nez,
to commemorate the complete independence of Cartagena (Henao/Arrubla, 1911:
626). It consists of one chorus, eleven stanzas and forty-four verses.
68N. GONZLEZ ORTEGA

COLOMBIAS NATIONAL ANTHEM (a fragment)


Ces la horrible noche. (Stanza I, verse 1)
La libertad sublime[] (I, 2)
Independencia!, grita (II, 5)
el mundo americano. (II, 6)
Se baa en sangre de hroes (II, 7)
la tierra de Coln. [] (II, 8)
Bolvar cruza el Ande (VI, 21)
Que riegan dos ocanos, (VI, 22)
Espadas cual centellas (VI, 23)
Fulguran en Junn. (VI, 24)
Centauros indomables (VI, 25)
descienden a los llanos, (VI, 26)
y empieza a presentirse, (VI, 27)
de la epopeya el fin. [] (VI, 28)
La patria as se forma, (IX, 33)
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termpilas brotando; (IX, 34)


constelacin de cclopes (IX, 35)
su noche ilumin. [] (IX, 36)
Del hombre los derechos (XI, 37)
Nario predicando, (XI, 38)
el alma de la lucha (XI, 39)
proftico ense. (XI, 40)
Ricaurte en San Mateo, (XI, 41)
en tomos volando, (XI, 42)
Deber antes que vida, (XI, 43)
con llamas escribi. (XI, 44)

A narrative analysis of this fragment of Colombias national anthem reveals that


Rafael Nez used certain images (centaurs, cyclops, epic, Thermopylae from
Greek mythology, epic and history in order to transform into classic heroes the (Latin)
American libertadores, Bolvar 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 3336 and 4144, the composer compares Antonio Ricaurtes 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
Nez reinforces, through the national anthems lyrics, the prevailing Europeanized
official national ideology articulated in Colombias historiographical discourse.

Cultural dependency in Colombias national symbols


The categories included in or excluded from the Colombias 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 republi-
can 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
The Formation of Political Traditions and National Symbols 69

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
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of the states employees and the growing captive public of schoolchildren, might still fail
to mobilize the citizen volunteers if they lacked genuine popular resonance (1988: 26364).
In the case of Colombias 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 nine-
teenth 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 estab-
lishment 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 intel-
lectuals has formed and used politically the countrys 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 nation-
alism 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.
70N. GONZLEZ ORTEGA

The national symbols produced and institutionalized in nineteenth-century Colombia


were European imitations, especially of French and German nationalist models. The
formation of Colombias 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.17 Therefore, this analysis of the
formation of Colombias 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
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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 hetero-
geneous peoples and cultures of the world.

Notes
1 In addition, there had been other practices employed the hands of the Church, these intellectuals are linked
by the Colombian nineteenth-century nationalist elites with the clergy and big landowners. [] It can be
to spread official images of the nation, such as, the said that in these regions of the American continent
creation of a national day, official patriotic speeches, there still exist a situation [] in which the secular
the publication of officially authorized history and and bourgeois elements have not yet reached the stage
geography textbooks for elementary schools, maps of being able to subordinate clerical and militaristic
produced by State mapping agencies, national influence and interests to the secular politics of the
libraries and museums created to organize and modern State (1971, 22).
represent the Colombian cultural past as understood 3
A distinction has been made between cultural
by a Colombian elite of official intellectuals. nation (a community united by language or religion
2 Writing in the early 1970s about Latin Americas or mythology or other cultural bonds) and political
official intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci acknowledges nation (a community which in addition to cultural
that: No vast category of traditional intellectuals exist bonds also possesses a legal state structure). (Seton-
on Central or South America [] what in fact we find Watson, 1997: 4) However, in the present study I have
at the root of the development of these countries is adopted the concept of patria cultural to explain
the pattern of Spanish and Portuguese civilization of the historical fact that the nation-state, as a cultural
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, characterized and political entity that would unite most Colombians
by the effects of Counter reformation and military under a common sense of national identity, did not
parasitism: The change-resistant crystallizations begin to emerge among Colombians until the early
which survive to this day in these countries are twentieth century. During the nineteenth century,
the clergy and a military caste, two categories of Colombia was governed by a nationalist elite
traditional intellectuals fossilised in a form inherited concerned in producing and reproducing symbols of
from the European mother country. [] the majority nation and nationalism, as the ones studied here, in
of intellectuals are of the rural type, and, since the order to instil among Colombians a strong sentiment
latifundium is dominant, with a lot of property in of official patriotism.
The Formation of Political Traditions and National Symbols 71

4 However, the reader should not forget that: 'National of signs (syntagm) which may converge semantic
flags and national days are created for a number of sense (meaning) in a given time and space, while the
reasons and not by elites only, but once established paradigmatic structure consists of a selection and
they are deliberately formalized and perceived as organization of signifiers (paradigm), whose active
central to nation formation' (Elgenius, 2011: 18). performance or passiveness depends on the act of
5 Chatterjee criticizes European modernity, specifically, selection within the paradigmatic structure (Hodge
the FrenchAnglo-European liberal model of and Kress, 1988: 262).
10
political development for being inappropriate for Despite its Hellenistic origin as representing the

faithful implementation in the political societies eastern Mitrism, the Phrygian hat is a very well-
of non-European countries: 'I think there has been known symbol of French republicanism. In the famous
a significant change in technologies and forms of Delacroix painting La Libert Guidant le peuple
government, resulting from the consolidation of (1830), the revolutionary young girl (a reminder of
mass democracy in large parts of the world during Joan of Arc?) who appears in the foreground wearing
the twentieth century [...] [T]he old idea of popular the Phrygian hat personifies the New French Republic.
sovereignty canonized by the French Revolution and The Phrygian hat appears in the coat of arms of other
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a political and legal order based on equality and countries of the continent, such as Haiti and in the
freedom is no longer appropriate for the organization emblem of the US Senate. Therefore, the Phrygian
of democratic demands. In these years new forms hat not only refers to the soldiers who fought for
of democratic organization, often contradictory independence, but it was also used to reinforce the
with the old principles of a [euro-occidental] civil European republican ideology of French origin that
liberal society are emerging. Although emerging, in a was imitated in Latin America by its nationalist elites.
11
fragmentary and unstable way, it calls from us [non- The national flag appears as a symbol for mass

Western scholars] new theoretical conceptions that are participating nations that emerged with new notions
appropriate to describe the actual forms of popular of citizenship and oneness after the course of
politics in most of the world' (2007: 8485). 1789. [] First in Europe, and afterwards in all
6 Brazilian critic Antonio Candido reflects on the other countries of the world: Flags have remained
influence of France in Latin America, in these terms: successful political symbols because they authenticate
'What is the influence of France in Latin America? boundaries between those who belong and those
France was for us, on the one hand, a factor of who do not. [] National flags, much like national
alienation, and on the other, it was a factor of national anthems, provide, a form to national self-celebration,
construction' (quoted in Pizarro et al., 1987: 73). wave or sing the nation into action and move history
7 The political instability that occurred in Colombia into the present (Elgenius, 2011: 3, 27).
12
during the nineteenth century is evidenced by the Dousdebs (1937: 1949) studies the historical evolution
following historical data: six national Constitutions of the Colombian coat of arms and the flag from
(1832, 1843,1851, 1858, 1863 and 1886) were issued; Spanish colonial times up to the twentieth century.
52 civil wars occurred, and Colombia was one of the He transcribes decrees in which the Colombian
Latin American countries where more presidential government establishes the size, layout and precise
elections took placed (Ocampo Lpez, 1984: 25758). tones of the colours of both the flag and the national
8 In my diagrammatic analysis of the Colombian coat coat of arms, that Colombian cultural institutions
of arms, I include not only the theoretical postulates (ministries and embassies) and military (infantry,
of social semiotics cited above, but have also adopted, marine and especially aviation) must use in official
with certain modifications, the semiotic scheme acts or when celebrating national holidays.
13
developed by Enrique Balln Aguirre (1973). It should be noted that originally the colonial coat
9 The concepts derived from Saussures binary of arms of New Granada (todays Bogot) displayed
structures syntagmatic level and associative level a black eagle, which was a symbol of freedom in
are called, respectively, by Balln Aguirre, Denotative ancient Roman heraldry. The black eagle was replaced
level of identification and Connotative level of in the early years of the Republic by a condor, an
performance. Also departing from Saussure, social Andean bird representative of the new notion of
semiotics posit that if it is true that within a sign a AMERICANISMO. For an overview of the historical
series of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships evolution of Colombian nationalist symbols, see
that contribute to the formation and reproduction of Dousdebs (1937).
14
signifiers and signifiants which appear in the message 'The many tricolours became symbols of revolutions
(set of signs) and, by extension, in the written or and change, the many post-imperial heraldic flags
iconographic text (set of message) there can also be staked out claims for nationhood [] Nation-making
distinguished two levels of similar significance: the relies on the standardization of cultural expressions
syntagmatic and the paradigmatic ones. Thus, the associated with the status of independent states'
syntagmatic structure is formed by a combination (Elgenius, 2011: 24).
72N. GONZLEZ ORTEGA

15 17
 ousdebs admits that he modelled the Colombian
D  xamining the role played by 'official intellectuals'
E
flag on the tricolour that was used as standard by in nation-state building in countries like Argentina,
Hamburg's Burghers (Bourgois) Guard (1937, 462). Chile, Ecuador and Mexico, Betancourt Mendieta
16
The term ideologeme, is analogous to the concept declares that they created among themselves national
of phoneme: it denotes the smallest units of speech networks by being employed by the State or by being
(i.e. an exclamation, a word, phrase, sentence) or of a leaders of State cultural institutions, such as schools,
text that can articulate markedly ideological contents. museums, presidential archives, national libraries.
Ideologeme is a term used by Bakhtin in his studies of This kind of official affiliation with the State provided
narrative works (1970 and 1978) to designate those them and their writings with considerable power and
words and expressions which present specific stylistic authority as founders of the nation in their own
and contextual marks that are related to a particular countries (2007: 48).
environment, profession, world vision or ideology
(Estbanez Caldern, 1996).

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

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