Most flags simplify. The flag of the Organization of American States does the opposite: on a royal blue field sits a white disc ringed in gold, and inside the disc are the actual national flags of all 35 member states, drawn in miniature on crossed golden staffs and arranged in a fanned arc. It may be the only flag of a major international organization that contains every one of its members' flags, which makes it less an emblem than a group photograph. Like any group photograph, it has to be retaken when the group changes.
A seal older than the organization
The OAS dates its own lineage to 1890, when the First International Conference of American States in Washington created the International Union of American Republics, which makes the OAS's bloodline the oldest of any regional organization in the world. That body's secretariat became the Pan American Union in 1910, housed in a purpose-built marble headquarters on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., where the OAS still sits.
The device of member flags grouped on staffs comes from that era. Similar insignia appeared on Pan American materials as early as 1909, and by the 1920s, under Director General Leo S. Rowe, the flags-on-staffs seal was printed on the Union's stationery. The idea suited the institution. The Pan American Union had no army, no parliament and little power; what it had was members, and its emblem simply displayed them.
In 1948, the Ninth International Conference of American States in Bogotá transformed the Union into the Organization of American States, with 21 founding republics stretching from the United States to Argentina. The seal carried over. A flag took another thirteen years.
Royal blue, by order of the Secretary General
The flag itself was commissioned in April 1961 from Annin and Company of New York, the country's oldest flag maker, whose products had flown over Iwo Jima and would later go to the Moon. The background color was chosen with some care: royal blue, described in the organization's records as neither light nor dark. First used during the administration of Secretary General José Antonio Mora, the Uruguayan diplomat who led the organization from 1956 to 1968, the flag was formally adopted in 1965.
The composition has stayed constant since. The seal sits at the center of the blue field: a white disc with a gold border, the member flags fanned in an arc on golden staffs, ten staffs crossing at the bottom of the arrangement, the whole framed by a circle. The flags are not decorative abstractions but recognizable renderings of each national flag, which commits whoever draws the seal to getting 35 separate designs right at a few millimeters' height.
Alphabetical order, in Spanish
The flags in the arc follow a strict protocol: Spanish alphabetical order, read clockwise from the lower left. Antigua y Barbuda leads, Venezuela closes. The choice of Spanish for the ordering is its own small statement in an organization with four official languages (Spanish, English, Portuguese and French) and a headquarters in an English-speaking capital. For physical displays at General Assembly sessions the organization allows an alternative: an order of precedence drawn by lot.
Membership growth has forced repeated redraws. The 21 republics of 1948 were joined from 1967 onward by the newly independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean, beginning with Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. Canada, which had kept its distance from the Pan American system for most of a century, finally joined in 1990. Belize and Guyana followed in 1991, their admissions long delayed by territorial disputes with Guatemala and Venezuela respectively, and the seal was redrawn that year to hold 35 flags. No state has joined since, so the current flag has had an unusually long run of accuracy.
When the roster and reality diverge
A flag that doubles as a membership list invites awkward questions whenever membership becomes contested, and in the OAS it often has. Cuba is the oldest case. The Eighth Meeting of Consultation at Punta del Este in 1962 excluded the Cuban government from participation, but the resolution suspended the government's participation rather than expelling the state; Cuba remained, in the organization's careful phrase, a member. The 2009 General Assembly in San Pedro Sula lifted the 1962 exclusion, and Cuba promptly declined to return. Its flag has stayed in the seal throughout.
Venezuela is the newer puzzle. In 2017 the Maduro government denounced the OAS Charter, a withdrawal that would have taken effect in 2019, but the organization continued for several years to seat a representative of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, leaving Venezuela's status contested rather than resolved. Honduras was suspended outright after the 2009 coup and readmitted in 2011. None of these episodes has produced a redrawn flag. The seal records states, not governments, and so far no state has managed to argue its flag out of the arc.
The flag flies daily at the OAS headquarters in Washington, at the annual General Assembly, and at electoral observation missions across the hemisphere, where the blue banner with its ring of tiny flags is often the most visible sign that the organization exists. Whenever a thirty-sixth member arrives, the whole design goes back to the drawing board, one more time.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Flag of the Organization of American States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Organization_of_American_States
[2] Flags of the World (FOTW), "OAS - Organization of American States." https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/int-oas.html
[3] OAS General Secretariat, Administrative Memorandum No. 85 on the OAS flag (1991 revision). http://www.oas.org/legal/english/admmem/ADMMEM85.pdf
[4] Organization of American States, "Who We Are" and member state records. https://www.oas.org/en/about/who_we_are.asp
[5] Charter of the Organization of American States, signed at Bogotá, 1948. https://www.oas.org/en/sla/dil/inter_american_treaties_A-41_charter_OAS.asp