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Among other things, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a little-known flag becoming more visible than before: the blue NATO flag. Rarely displayed, at least in Italy, the NATO flag is quite unrecognizable, at least for those born after the end of the Cold War, when the Atlantic Alliance lost its centrality for a few decades. She only recently spoke about it again after so-called “NATO enlargement” became an argument used by the Russian regime to justify the invasion and after some controversy surrounding the presence of NATO flags during demonstrations on March 25. April.
The NATO flag is quite simple: a blue and white compass rose, with four dots showing the four cardinal points, partially enclosed in a circle. Four white lines start at the tips of the rose, while the background of the flag is blue.
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also known as the Atlantic Alliance; the acronym NATO comes from the English North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was founded in 1949 as a defensive alliance of various western states against the Soviet Union and its allied states and satellites , in connection with what later called the Cold War. That the alliance needed a symbol became clear early enough, but it took a while for a decision to be made: the NATO flag as we know it today was adopted on October 14, 1953, and on November 9 at a Ceremony officially presented in Paris, four years after the formation of the alliance and after many months of discussions and tests.
The then Secretary General, as well as NATO’s first Secretary General, Britain’s Hastings Ismay, described the flag as follows: “A four-pointed star representing the compass that keeps us on the right path – the road to peace – and a circle that The blue of the flag represents the Atlantic Ocean. The flag, Ismay said, is “simple and harmless.”
The first version of the NATO flag was completely different. In its early years, when the Cold War was still in its infancy, NATO was a rather loose entity that existed primarily in name. The first military organizational core of the Atlantic Alliance emerged only after the beginning of the Korean War with the formation of the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers in Europe (English acronym: SHAPE) in 1951, i.e. the integrated military leadership of the Western Allied forces that they had won the Second World War .
It is no coincidence that SHAPE’s first commander was Dwight Eisenhower, who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces during the war and was elected President of the United States a few years later.
General Dwight Eisenhower in the German town of Jülich on March 6, 1945 (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
SHAPE was thus the first truly operational core of NATO, and the SHAPE flag was initially used as the flag of all NATO: a green flag with a gold pennant of two swords in the center and the Latin motto “Vigilia pretium libertatis”, vigilance is the price of freedom. Eisenhower himself is said to have helped design this flag, which is still the official symbol of SHAPE today.
A short time later it was decided within NATO that it was necessary to create an original flag. As the organization’s own website writes, flags had been talked about since its inception, but in 1952 a new commission was formed (the Information Policy Working Group) with tasks including deciding content, ideas, and symbols. related to NATO, including a flag.
Various styles have been explored, such as a shield with 14 stars to indicate the defensive nature of the alliance and the 14 member countries (there are 30 today), or other flags in which the blue of the Atlantic has always remained the more or less predominant colour. .
One of the NATO flag hypotheses from the Alliance’s official website
In the end, the choice fell on the four-pointed compass rose. It’s not entirely clear how the choice came about: the NATO website only states that there was “a lot of indecision about the design”.
In any case, the four-pointed compass rose has now become a universal symbol of the Atlantic Alliance. When NATO headquarters moved to Brussels in the late 1960s (following France’s temporary departure from the alliance), the courtyard was adorned with a large statue designed by Belgian architect Raymond Huyberechts, a version of the same rose as the Winds . Today both the statue and the symbol on the flag are called the “NATO Star” and are featured on postage stamps, postcards and other commemorative material.
NATO Headquarters in Brussels (AP Photo / Virginia Mayo)