In nationalism people recognize themselves as a part of a group and the group in which they belong, as different from other groups. Nationalism is based on the shared reading of certain symbols. There is no symbol that has as a “natural” property something national. Every property of a symbol acquires a distinctive value (positive or negative) after its correlation or its comparison to other symbols. It is needed a complex of national traits (a system of identifiers) that has the ability to stand against other complexes. These characteristics acquire a value simply because they cannot stand alone, but instead, they are read in relation to others (Buccelatti, 2010). As in language, a letter of a word or a word in a phrase have no meaning by themselves, they acquire a meaning when they are included in a whole word or phrase.
As national symbol we could define everything that aims to the inspiration of national feelings and at the same time unites under it, a group of people. These for example are national fiestas, marches, banners, statues, monuments, coins and paper money, stamps, street names etc., which provide national enthusiasm with a material status (Bozos, 2004). Besides, according to Castoriades the national symbol is “a sign … that one can and must die for and what sends shivers down the spine of patriots as they watch the military parade pass by36”.
The goal of national symbols is for them to be the filter through which the individual and in extension the community will reproduce its own image. In other words, it aims to intervene through the individual and its self-image, so that the individual sees itself through the frame of that symbol and thus acquire an identity that bears the colors of this frame. In the same way the outer world will be understandable though that prism, and this prism has no class or other social traits.
In every semiotic analysis of nationalism, the role of perception and awareness is pivotal. For nationalism it is crucial that the individual understands and is aware of national symbols as such. This is achieved investing on education37. In this way perception and awareness makes the individual have an instinctive response even on an emotional level, when it finds itself in front of a national symbol. However this response refers only to the individuals inside a certain group. Everyone outside this group reads the national symbols in a different way, because it has different perceptive tools, which in turn is due to different experiences38. In this way the individuals inside the group feel that they have something in common with the rest individuals of the group (Buccelatti, 2010).
The national symbols are plenty and vary from place to place and from populace to populace, ranging from macho captains and looters, to works of art, national poets, animals and items as horses and swords. All of these are not selected randomly, because dominance does not use as a national symbol something irrelevant to its goal. For instance, national myth has never used as a national symbol a toilet paper roll. This is because contrary to the pragmatic maxim that a sign can be applied to anything, as long as there is a form of social agreement in its signification, certain relative perceptive experiences are needed to be taken into account39 (Eco, 1999). These experiences need to relate somewhat –in a real or in an imaginary way– to what the national symbol wants to express. Such experience is evident on the figure of Alexander in contrast to the toilet paper, as Alexander was a person who -according to his concurrent historians- is related to the ancient Macedonians.
We are going to focus on two such symbols which have been instrumentalized by the Greek and Macedonian nationalism. These are the symbols of Alexander the 3rd also known as the “great” and the so-called Vergina sun, together with all the properties they bear.
36 Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institutions Of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Back
37 Like parades, school’s national fiestas, flags and the participation of pupils to rallies as the one held at Thessaloniki in 1992 under the threat of being punished. Back
38 For instance, a French does not perceive the Greek skirt in the same way the Greeks do. Back
39 Of course here we have to mention that myth has the ability to give reason to the unreasonable and so create a primitive perceptive experience out of nothing (Barthes, 1979), which will signify later. However this doesn’t mean that the myth has the power to signify something that doesn’t have any perceptive experience (constructed or not) whatsoever. For instance, if the toilet paper existed in 4th century b.c., the myth could have connected it to the figure of Alexander the 3rd, thus creating the perceptive experience that Alexander used toilet paper even if he didn’t. That perceptive experience could be later twisted by some mythical argument in order to convert the toilet paper to a symbol. This could be done for instance with the mythical argument that Alexander was the first throughout history who used toilet paper, or that he escaped death because an arrow heading towards him, hit the toilet paper roll that he carried with him and not his heart. Back
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