2025/10/29 by Juliet Johnson, Benjamin Forest · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #National Identity and Symbolism #Global Security and Public Health #European Union Policy and Governance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/24694452.2025.2569511
How and why did the European Union (EU) flag, once a banal marker of European integration and institutions in its member states, become such a politically charged symbol outside of the EU? We demonstrate how officials and publics can use such extraterritorial flags to signal aspiration toward, solidarity with, or rejection of the policies, values, and identities that the flags represent, and how this contrasts with banal extraterritorial use. Employing a systematic qualitative media analysis, we trace how the EU flag’s prominence in the 2004–2007 EU enlargements transformed it from a banal to an emotionally charged symbol of European identity, laying the groundwork for its aspirational extraterritorial use by governments, parties, and protestors in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. We argue that flying the EU flag together with national flags represented an affective assertion of national identity in these countries, with the EU flag transformed into a complementary rather than competing symbolic resource for nation-building. Officials and publics in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine used the EU flag to define distinct national identities, to assert common European identities, and as a tool in domestic political conflicts. Most important, the flag became a potent anti-Russian geopolitical symbol as Russia became increasingly authoritarian and aggressive. By flying the EU flag alongside their national ones, Georgians, Moldovans, and Ukrainians not only declared themselves to be fully European but also insisted that their “peripheral” societies would actively contest and construct European boundaries.