Flaga Unii Europejskiej: symbol jedności Europy czy źródło prawno-politycznego i religijnego-historycznego konfliktu w XX i XXI wieku?

Mirosław Piotrowski

doi:10.18290/kip2025.6

Published : 2025-07-03

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2025)

The European Union Flag: Symbol of European Unity or Source of Legal-Political and Religious-Historical Conflict in the 20th and 21st Centuries?

Mirosław Piotrowski

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1517-0128

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/kip2025.6

Abstract

In the process of European integration, great importance was attached to both the creation of common institutions and symbols. One of the most important was the flag. It was to enable the building of an identity for the citizens of the old continent. This work was undertaken at two levels: The Council of Europe and the European Union. The flag was first adopted by the Council of Europe in 1955, by Arsen Heitz. The symbolism of twelve stars on a blue background was inspired by the description of Our Lady with a wreath of twelve stars, taken from the Apocalypse of St John. Others, against the wishes of the author, tried to associate the number of golden stars with the so-called perfect number. The European Communities, which had been in the process of being organised, and their institutions, took over 30 years to adopt the flag and recognise it as their own, which happened in 1986. After the creation of the EU, the flag tried to become enshrined in the Constitutional Treaty, which was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005. In Annex 52 to the Lisbon Treaty, 16 countries declared their willingness to use the flag as a symbol to express the sense of community of EU citizens. All EU institutions, adopted the flag as their own. Hence, the EU flag came to be regarded as official, although formally it did not have this status.

Keywords:

EU law, European flag, European Union flag, EU symbols, European Union, Council of Europe, European integration

Details

References

Statistics

Authors

Download files

pdf (Język Polski)

Citation rules

Piotrowski, M. (2025). The European Union Flag: Symbol of European Unity or Source of Legal-Political and Religious-Historical Conflict in the 20th and 21st Centuries?. Kościół I Prawo, 14(1), 107–133. https://doi.org/10.18290/kip2025.6

Altmetric indicators

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.