Aspirational Iconography: The European Union Flag as an Extraterritorial Political Symbol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".