Flags of the World: A Colorful Journey Through Cultural Symbolism

Three flags, three completely different jobs. Afghanistan's records a hard century. Argentina's records the weather and a church. Albania's records one man's resistance to an empire. Taken together they show how little the format constrains what a flag can be about.

Color as the first argument

Flag color is conventional rather than decorative, and the conventions are strong enough that a reader can usually guess wrong in a predictable direction. Red on a flag often means blood shed for freedom, or bravery, or revolution. Blue can be peace, or the sky, or the sea. Green tends toward growth, fertility or prosperity.

The conventions are not universal, though. A color that reads as hope in one country reads as peace in another, and the difference is not arbitrary: it comes out of what happened there. Colors on flags work more like local idiom than like a shared alphabet.

Afghanistan

Black, red and green. Black for the period of foreign occupation, red for the struggle for independence, green for a hoped-for future and for agricultural prosperity. The emblem at the center includes a mosque, which anchors the design in religious and historical terms rather than political ones.

The flag reads as an account of the last century and a claim about the next one, with the first part much better documented than the second.

Argentina

Light blue and white, taken as the heavens and the clouds, and also as the colors of the Virgin Mary, which puts the country's Catholic history into the design without stating it.

The Sun of May in the center refers to the sun's appearance during a revolt against Spanish rule. Between the two readings, the flag manages to be about the sky, the church and a specific uprising at once.

Albania

Crimson red with a black double-headed eagle. Red for the blood of Albanian heroes; the eagle for independence and unity. The design traces back to Skanderbeg's resistance against the Ottomans, so the flag carries one particular fight rather than a general idea of national pride.

Flags as narrative

Look across enough flags and the pattern is that there is no pattern. The Union Jack and the Japanese Nisshoki are doing entirely different things with entirely different means, and both work.

Flags also change, and their meanings drift even when the design does not. What holds constant is the function: a piece of cloth that a large number of people agree stands for them.