Flag symbols, gathering banners

We live a period where, paradoxically, more and more states are gathering into larger bodies and where the total number of national States goes growing.

The first integration movement touches all continents: NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations), MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market), EU (European Union), AU (African Union) etc. It expresses a national prerogative reduction to the benefit of collegiate authorities. The second tendency results from empire collapse (former USSR) or conflicts (former Yugoslavia, Timor etc.) creating new sovereignties.

These two opposite movements globally generated a growing number of national and transnational flags, which are exceeding two hundred today. Nevertheless, these symbols of gathering at the national and international level constitute the congruent left of the vast fan of flags, standards, banners, swallow-tailed pennon, triangular pennon etc. representative of regions, cities and communes, of military and civil instances, of corporate bodies and so on. As many of gathering emblems that contain plenty of symbols of which only the most meaningful will be studied here.

More than coats of arms, colours are playing an essential symbolic role in the flag signification. The various national et transnational flags use six basic colours (white, black, red, yellow, green and blue) in the following proportions approximately:

A single flag displays these six colours, the Olympic flag. Let us note that red dominates within the flags of the northern countries of the world and green in the southern ones and observe that both colours complement each other.