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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
Article views: 14
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.
[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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EMBLEMS
Antiquity
birth
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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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
(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.
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.
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