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| Trashing the trispalvė |
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| Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira | |
| 2007.02.21 13.27 | |
        Fascists during a Jan. 13 commemoration. lrytas.lt First, we’ve had the problems over the question of why citizens of the Republic Lithuania must be citizens of the Republic of Lithuania alone (the propagandized diaspora version of this you may have heard is: “why should ethnic Lithuanians not be allowed to get Lithuanian citizenship”—which they are still, of course, allowed to get...), and now a new dilemma arises, sparked for me by a rather emotional email I was forwarded: Subject: Our Lithuanian Flag: Endangered?!?Of course I can imagine a Lithuanian Flag without the tricolor (“trispalvė”). In fact, for the large majority of the time that there has been a Lithuanian state, it has used as a flag the very state flag mentioned above. That flag incorporates historical symbols of the Lithuanian state that date back to the 14th century. The tricolor, on the other hand, is a phantasmatic representation of a Lithuanian nation (not state)—being nothing more than an ethnic/nationalist symbol and not, importantly, a symbol of the apparatus of the state. In fact, I'm glad that the people of Lithuania are acknowledging the difference between the Lithuanian state and the Lithuanian nation by engaging in this debate, as it points to a future Lithuania which is more in touch with the contemporary European situation and with the tolerant tradition of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which I discuss further below. Conveniently, Lietuvos rytas published today an article about the tricolor. In it, author Agnė Litvinaitė rehashes the (astonishingly short) history of the tricolor, which I'll return to later. But now, it's important to discuss the history of the state flag, the Vytis on the red background that has been used since the 15th century in state ceremonies for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Now let's recall what the Grand Duchy of Lithuania looked like in the 15th century:  Lithuania in the 15th century. Wikipedia Those borders contain parts of contemporary Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. No one would ever imagine that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was made up solely of ethnic Lithuanians. There were obviously Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and other ethnic groups who were subjects of the Grand Duke of Lithuania (or, to oversimplify and modernize: citizens of the Grand Duchy). Importantly, there were also many, many Jews who were subjects of the Lithuanian Grand Duke. Any visit to Vilnius will reward the attentive tourist with the rich Jewish history of the capital, a city that did not even boast an ethnically Lithuanian majority population until the 20th century. In short, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a multi-national state. Within it, it had populations of several different nations. And though it is historically inaccurate to call the Grand Duchy that, since, effectively the concept of "nation" did not exist in the 15th century, our imagination of a historically good and just Grand Duchy can provide for such space.  Contemporary State Flag of Lithuania. The reason for the absence of the tricolor is simple: it simply did not yet exist. It was not invented until, after over a century of Russian rule, Lithuanian nationalists (also a new invention) decided to reassert a Lithuanian state in 1918, but this time the state would not be a multi-national entity like the Lithuania of the past, but, rather, an ethnic homeland for the ethnically Lithuanian people. But before I get into the specific history of the tricolor, I have to underscore the differences between a state and a nation: The state (valstybė) is the political entity. A state has fixed borders, agreed upon by treaties. The state has a government. The state is sovereign. The state confers citizenship. The state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, as Max Weber noted. The nation (tauta), on the other hand, is (and has) none of these things. The nation can be a group that shares a language, a history, or a certain way of eating dumplings. The nation is dispersed, blurry, interwoven, intangible. The nation has arbitrary effects that can be felt in a bar on 69th St. and in a camp in the hills of São Paulo. The nation, like the state, has a history. But unlike the history of the Lithuanian state, which begins, effectively, in 1236, the history of the Lithuanian nation begins, at earliest, with the work of Simonas Daukantas in the first half of the 19th century, and more forcefully with the group of Suvalkiečiai peasant intellectuals who developed the idea of a Lithuanian nation (and with it the idea of a Lithuanian language) in the latter part of that century. But the problem with maintaining the 1:1 correspondence between nation and state is clear from the photo (from this article in Lietuvos rytas) of two representatives of the LNDP at the top of this essay: it breeds nationalism, which breeds violence done by the nation in the name of the state. If the State of Lithuania is synonymous with the Nation of Lithuania, then Jews, Russians, Poles, and the rest who currently reside in the State can have their rights (their citizenship) revoked.  Fascist and antifa graffiti in Vilnius. Now back to 1918: following the self-deterministic fever of the time, the Lithuanian nation felt entitled to its own state. As such, the Lithuanian Council turned not to the Lithuanian state of the past for a flag—even though the Vytis on red was readily available—but, rather, invented one based on cultural traditions overdeterministically culled from the Lithuanian nation. Leading up to 1918, there had been several ad hoc national flags, including the white-blue flag seen in some emblems at the Balzėkas Museum and at Jaunimo Centras in Chicago that date from the dawn of the 20th century. It took, however, the declaration of independence to standardize the yellow-green-red flag. Litvinaitė rewrites in her article much of the history of the tricolor already available in English from Flags of the World, which quotes from The Heraldry of Lithuania, published in Vilnius less than a decade ago: Discussions in Lithuania re the national flag began at the 1905 Lithuanian Congress in Vilnius. J. Basanavicius thought that the flag of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - the white knight on red - was the most fitting. But the majority of Congress participants did not agree, because for them the colour red evoked unwelcome associations of revolution. Discussion vis-à-vis the national flag was renewed again in 1917, with the opening up of prospects for the restoration of sovereignty. At a meeting J. Basanavicius and Lithuanian public activists decided that the flag's colours might be found in ethnic weavings. A. Zmuidzinavicius took on the task, and subsequently decorated the hall of the Vilnius City Theatre, which hosted a Lithuanian Conference in September 1917, with small green-red flags. The conference delegates did not like the two-colour flag A. Zmuidzinavicius had created; they found it far too gloomy. A special commission made up of J. Basanavicius, A. Zmuidzinavicius and T. Daugirdas was formed to create a flag. They decided to supplement the two colours with yellow. In the beginning T. Daugirdas suggested inserting a narrow yellow band between the red and green, claiming that such a combination would symbolize the dawn very well. After long argument, on April 19, 1918, the commission finally decided that the Lithuanian national flag had to be made up of three horizontal bands of equal width: yellow-green-red. Yellow meant the sun, light, and goodness, green symbolized the beauty of nature, freedom, and hope, and red stood for the land, courage, and the blood which had been spilled for the Homeland.We get a brief moment of the historical hilarity of invented tradition in Litvinaitė’s account: Baltas raitelis raudoname fone buvo siūlytas ir kuriant tautinę vėliavą. Toks J.Basanavičiaus projektas 1917 metų lietuvių visuomenės veikėjų pasitarime nebuvo patvirtintas, nes reikėjo paprastesnės, lengvai pasiuvamos vėliavos. Čia ir prasidėjo komiškas trispalvės kelias iki „Geltona – tai mūsų saulė, žalia – tai...“, žymintis lietuvišką apsukrumą.In short, the tricolor was invented. It followed the fad of tricolored national flags, begun—surprise—by the French Revolution. But instead of choosing colors from Lithuania’s heraldic tradition, the commission chose something that was, you know, sort of, kind of, culturally based, but, also, aesthetically pleasing (“šiltos ir lietuviškai smagios,” in Litvinaitė’s estimation). This new flag would symbolize the new nation-state of Lithuania. Of course, just because the tricolor is not even 90 years old and was somewhat arbitrarily designed does not mean that it does not have deeply important sentimental value for Lithuanians around the world. It most certainly does. But in the discussion over whether the government of Lithuania should use the state flag or the national flag in its jubilee celebrations in two years, the question of what kind of state Lithuania wishes to be in the future becomes vitally important. The national tricolor traces its history to le drapeau tricolore, so it’s valuable to go to France to see what a post nation-state might look like. When thinking of the French tricolor, I always think of both Délacroix's Liberty and Barthes’s anecdote from “Le Mythe aujourd'hui”: [J]e suis chez le coiffeur, on me tend un numéro de Paris-Match. Sur la couverture, un jeune nègre vêtu d'un uniforme français fait le salut militaire, les yeux levés, fixés sans doute sur un pli du drapeau tricolore.  One of the Mariannes d'aujourd'hui. This is the future that will fall upon, I suspect, nearly all European states over the next few decades: the grip on a national identity will loosen, as marginal national groups see their voices slowly grow in volume. We see throughout Western Europe the various ways imperial powers are reimagining their national selves as political selves. At one point in a discussion over the summer, a person complaining to me about the massive exodus of Lithuanian youth from Lithuania asserted with horror that the empty spots left behind in Lithuania are now being filled by Ukrainians. I did not fully understand the problem. What does the Republic of Lithuania care if its citizens are ethnically Lithuanian or Ukrainian? Does the Republic of Lithuania even have a desire? Does the state have an end? to voice your opinions about why we should be able to retain our Lithuanian flag as it stands today and how we all grew up to know it, sang about its colors, wrote and read poetry about the significance of its colors and anything you wish someone to read, written from your heart, I must decline. In my heart is a desire for liberty, equality, and fraternity for all humankind, not just Lithuanians. That is why this website is not colored in yellow, green, and red. That is why I don’t even own a trispalvė. That is why I support any project of stripping the Lithuanian tricolor of any official status in the Republic of Lithuania. The project of a better world will not be achieved through celebration of delineation of difference, but rather through a far simpler humanistic means of understanding the other. |
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| Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2007.02.21 20.12 ) |