The Formation of Political Traditions and National symbols in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Abstract

The interpretation of national symbols, as socio-cultural practices that produce and disseminate ideology, change constantly throughout historical periods and within cultural areas. This article focuses on the origin and spread of national symbols and nationalism in nineteenth-century Colombia. It examines Colombian national symbols such as the coat of arms, the flag and the national anthem in order to determine how these national symbols were used in the early nineteenth century by a Colombian nationalist elite, composed of ‘official intellectuals’ to construct a ‘patria cultural’. The article seeks to demonstrate that the national symbols produced and institutionalized in nineteenth-century Colombia were European imitations of French and German nationalist models and, therefore, were the results of the affiliation of Colombian republican intellectuals to the European liberal national project of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article concludes that the construction of the nineteenth-century ‘patria cultural’ has ever since prevented the emergence of an organic and more democratic modern nation state in Colombia.