Happy #EuropeDay ! To celebrate here’s a thread of some of the 150 flag proposals which artists submitted to the Council of Europe before the formal adoption of the circle-of-stars.
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This flag was proposed by Salvador de Madariaga, a former chair of the League of Nations. Each star represents a European capital city.
This flag was proposed by Mirko Svetkov. This flag paid homage to Europe’s diverse roots specifically Egyptian, Hellenic and Roman. It attempted to symbolise the community of Europe. Each of the sun rays is representative of an EU State.
This flag was proposed by Alvin Mondon. This flag is more militaristic than others as the artist explained in his proposal “the enemy should be confronted with a special cultural symbol, ideally the culture triangle”
This flag was proposed by Walther Timm a Prussian veteran of World War 1 who lost both his right hand and eyesight fighting. He proposed his flag as he sought to symbolise a European unity which may lead to peace.
This flag was presented by Wolfram Neue. He proposed his flag of ‘colourful frats’, he noted in his proposal that Europe could use his flag for free as he had designed of his ‘own volition’
This proposal came courtesy of August Vincent who noted that he derived the cross design from the fact that he viewed Europe as a Christian continent. He then derived the colours, red, blue, green and orange from the fact that these colours were common in European flags.
This ‘European Barcode’ flag is more modern than the previous flags and comes courtesy of designer and architect Rem Koolhaas. This flag looked to incorporate the flag colours of each EU country into one smorgasbord of colour.
Finally, this simple flag may have acted as a precursor to Rem Koohaus’ work when an unidentified artist proposed that the European Council simply adopt a flag which incorporated all the EU flags of the time.
I hope you enjoyed this collection of European flags, the majority of the information in this thread comes courtesy of Jonas von Lenthe’s excellent book ‘Rejected Designs for the European Flag’
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