BRITISH NATIONAL SYMBOLS
mission (Christianity) against `others' (non-Christians).
Nations cannot be dated in a precise manner. However, national symbols, such as national flags,
provide us with an indication when these communities started to assert hemselves.
From such a perspective it is useful to be able to account for, and interpret, the period when flags
appear related to historical events and circumstances around this time. This has something to tell
us about the complexity of the nationbuilding processes and the symbolic continuity, which may
or may not exist with regard to the national community of today.
Symbolic discontinuity may therefore be interpreted as a sign of a period of political instability
which has interfered, in one way or another, with the process of nation-building. Thus, some
nations may then have been represented by symbolism of early unions or connected to them as
part of empires, but they may have developed wholly independent symbolic regimes of their own.
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