5 May 2022 – Online conversation
Dr. Dalibor Djukić delivered a lecture titled “The National Symbols in Multicultural States – a Case of Serbia” on 5 May 2022 at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade, Serbia. It was part of the series of lectures organised by the institute every Thursday of this year. The lecture was also held online as part of the “Religion in Society, Culture and European Integration” masters programme taught at the University of Belgrade and within the framework of the Central European Professors’ Network. The network was established in 2020 with the aim of creating a scientific community of recognised jurists from central European countries to represent the specific approach of central European jurisprudence in relation to current legal topics. The lecture was organised as a dissemination event and is a result of the research conducted by Dr. Dalibor Djukić, as a member of the research group on the topic “The Constitutional and Legal Protection of the State, National, and Community Symbols”. The lecture was dedicated to the issue of legal protection of the national symbols in multicultural states, with the emphasis on Serbian legislation.
The first part of the lecture was dedicated to the history of the legal protection of state and national symbols in Serbia. The lecturer presented the development of Serbian legal regulations protecting the state and national symbols divided into three periods. The first was the formative period that lasted throughout the 19th century. The struggle for the liberation of Serbia from Ottoman rule was closely connected with the struggle to gain the right to display national symbols. During the First Serbian Uprising (1804-1813), several different coats of arms were used. In the period after the Second Serbian Uprising (1815), Serbia’s old coat of arms (white cross on a red field with four firesteels) was chosen as the symbol of the new state. The importance of this issue is also embedded in the draft of the first Serbian Constitution of 1820, which allowed Serbs and Serbian ships to trade under their own flag.
Serbia’s coat of arms was officially used for the first time during the enthronement of Prince Miloš in 1830. Finally, the state coat of arms and the flag were made official in the Constitution adopted on 2 February 1835. Unfortunately, this Constitution was in force for only six weeks. Prince Miloš then employed tactics he often used. What he could not get by an act of higher legal force, he would attempt to get by an act of lower legal force. He managed to get a firman (decree) from the sultan at the end of 1835, which validated the colours of the Serbian national flag. The Constitution of 1838 did not prescribe the colours or the flag of Serbia because Russian diplomacy continued to insist that the issue remained unresolved for fear it would violate Turkey’s sovereignty and further complicate negotiations with the Ottoman Empire.
The negotiators at the time used the same approach embraced by Prince Miloš three years earlier, who at the time arranged with the sultan to issue an additional firman. And with this firman, the Serbian national flag and the coat of arms prescribed by the 1835 Constitution were reintroduced. After the Congress of Berlin (1878) with Serbia gaining independence, there was a need to restyle the country’s coat of arms. This task was entrusted to the renowned Serbian historian, Stojan Novaković, who wrote an extensive study on the coat of arms of Serbia, which is considered the foundation of Serbian heraldry. Studying various coats of arms used on the territory of Serbia, he came up with the idea to combine the coat of arms of Serbia (the cross with four fire strikers on a red shield), with what was then called the coat of arms of medieval Serbian state (Nemanjić state), a double-headed eagle. Djukić pointed out that this was the most successful combination in the history of Serbian heraldry. That is how the coat of arms of Serbia was conceived. The pattern established at the end of the 19th century in the Kingdom of Serbia is still in force today. The Constitution prescribes the existence of state symbols and regulates them in detail. The Council of Ministers (the government) then determines the appearance and graphic design of the coat of arms by a special decision or a decree. And finally, the archetype of coat of arms is made and kept by the Ministry of Justice.
The second period of the history of legal protection of the state and national symbols in Serbia is the period of symbolic engineering that can be divided into three phases. The first one is the phase of the multinational state that lasted during the interwar period. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed on 1 December 1918. The government of the new state passed a temporary decision on the appearance of the flag and the coat of arms on 22 December the same year. The coat of arms is interesting because on the chest of the two-headed eagle were added the coats of arms of Serbia and Croatia and what was supposed to be the coat of arms of Slovenia. The unofficial and unregulated anthem of the new state consisted of the first stanzas of all three anthems (Serbian, Slovenian, and Croatian), and the last stanza of the Serbian anthem which makes a reference to the king.
The second phase is the period of socialist Yugoslavia. In this period, the coat of arms, which was designed in 1943, featured entirely new symbols from all the previous ones. Its central element was a field encircled by ears of corn. At the base, the ears are tied with a ribbon. A five-pointed star is depicted between the tops of the ears. In the centre of the field five torches are laid obliquely, with their flames merging into one single flame. The emblems of the former Soviet republics were used as a model for creating socialist symbols in Yugoslavia. The five torches symbolised the five peoples of Yugoslavia, united in building a new state. The coat of arms was amended by the 1963 Constitution. The new coat of arms had six torches representing the six federal republics of Yugoslavia. The colours of the flag were not changed because the communist government wanted to demonstrate continuity with the previous state. A five-pointed star was added to the flag of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During this period several regulations were passed, mostly after 1970, which protected state symbols in a modern way. The current Serbian legislation largely relies on these regulations.
The last and shortest phase of the period of symbolic engineering lasted during the transition period between 1991 and 2004. Unlike other Central and Eastern European countries, Serbia experienced a period of a slow return to previous state and national symbols. The flag of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) was the same as the flag of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The idea again was to illustrate the continuity of the FRY with the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The 1993 law regulated the coat of arms, which was a combination of symbols of Serbia and Montenegro. It depicted the two-headed eagle, differently stylised than the actual coat of arms, with the shield divided into four parts. Each part alternately represented the coats of arms of Serbia and Montenegro.
Finally, Djukić talked about the present, which he described as the period of the restoration of the use of the Kingdom of Serbia’s symbols and Serbia’s national symbols. This restoration began awkwardly in 2004. In order to avoid a referendum, the Serbian National Assembly passed a non-binding recommendation on the use of the coat of arms, flag and anthem of the Republic of Serbia. Since 2004, the use of coat of arms of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1882 has been restored. The national and state flags were determined by the same non-binding recommendation. Also, it was prescribed that the solemn song „Bože pravde”(“God of Justice”) would be the country’s anthem. The changes made in 2004 were adopted in the 2006 Constitution of Serbia and the 2009 Law on the Appearance and Use of the Coat of Arms, Flag and Anthem of the Republic of Serbia.
The second part of the lecture was dedicated to the legal protection of state symbols, as well as the symbols of autonomous provinces, local self-government units, national minorities and religious organisations. The lecturer concluded that religious organisations also have the right to use religious symbols, although Serbian legislation does not mention or regulate the display and use of organisational symbols of religious communities. Also, the commercial use of national and state symbols has not been regulated in detail, although laws regulating trademark and industrial design prescribe that national and state symbols cannot be protected as trademarks or industrial property.
At the end of the lecture, Djukić referred to the two recently adopted laws that protect Serbia’s national symbols. Those are the Law on the Use of the Serbian Language in Public Life and the Protection and Preservation of the Cyrillic Script and the Law on Preservation of the Cultural and Historical Heritage of the Holy Hilandar Monastery. He underlined that those laws demonstrate the tendency of the state to restore and protect important national symbols, expressing the hope that other symbols of state and national identity will be adequately regulated and protected in the future.
The lecture was followed by a lively and inspiring discussion which gathered the participating students and researchers at the Institute of European Studies. The discussion started with the question about the Law on the Use of the Serbian Language in Public Life and the Protection and Preservation of the Cyrillic Script. Djukić clarified that this Law prescribes not only the official language, but stimulates the use of the Serbian language and the Cyrillic alphabet in the public sphere. For this reason, it goes beyond similar laws passed in other countries, which usually regulate only the use of an official language. The discussion then focused on the history of Serbian state symbols and the compatibility between the symbols of the Kingdom of Serbia and the Republic of Serbia. At the very end, several questions were raised about the use of symbols of national minorities and sanctions for the inadequate use of flags and other state symbols. The event ended with all attendees socialising.
This summary has been proofread and linguistically revised by the professional proofreader.
Dalibor Đukić
