The Disunion Jack: National Flags and the Fragile Balance of Orderly Disorder

Emma Armstrong

Steve Hall

One year and one month after the summer riots of 2024, here we are again. The same tensions are bubbling to the surface. Across towns and cities in England, the St George’s flag has been painted on roundabouts, draped from lampposts, and flown proudly from windows and car bonnets. Some councils have begun to remove them, arguing that it’s a matter of health and safety – in our region, a local hospital requested their removal because they posed a risk to air ambulances (O’Leary, 2025) – while others insist they will leave them untouched (ITV, 2025). But for protestors, these removals are not bureaucratic housekeeping, they are a direct attack on free speech and national pride.

The St George’s Cross has long carried contested meanings in England, and today’s disputes are part of that longer story. In the 1990s and 2000s, the flag was heavily associated with far-right groups, but at the same time, for many football fans major sporting events such as the World Cup normalised its display. During the World Cup in 2014, Labour MP Emily Thornberry caused a furore and was forced to resign from the Shadow Cabinet after she had posted an inferential photo of a football fan displaying a St George’s flag in his window with his white van parked underneath it. This dual history means that the St George’s Cross continues to sit uneasily between patriotism and xenophobia, between an apparently benign symbol of national identity and a banner that can evoke fear and exclusion (Brown et al., 2012).

The current disputes, then, are not a new phenomenon but the latest manifestation of a long-running symbolic struggle over who the flag belongs to, and what kind of nation it represents. From an ultra-realist perspective, we argue that these disputes are not really about flags or even about free speech. They represent the deeper insecurities and fractures of the West’s late-capitalist, post-industrial, post-imperial societies. The national flag is a convenient symbol onto which people can project numerous feelings ranging from pride and belonging to exclusion, resentment and xenophobia.

We use the concept of pseudo-pacification to explain how these symbolic battles are the way conflict is staged and managed in Western societies. Over a period of 700 years, the overt physical violence that was once a primary internal social structuring and managerial force has largely been repressed and institutionalised (at least for now). However, underlying resentments and insecurities have in many ways increased in intensity. During flashpoints associated with economic decline, political failure and social unrest they have to go somewhere.

Hall (2012) argues that modern societies have not eliminated or even ‘stored’ physical violence as Elias (1939) suggested, but have essentially re-routed and repurposed it. Through what Hall (2007) calls the pseudo-pacification process, everyday physical violence is suppressed by the state in order to allow markets and commerce to flourish and property to be protected. But the aggressive impulses that once played out in direct confrontation have not simply disappeared and indeed were never discouraged. Instead, they were encouraged, sublimated and bound by evolving norms and laws to fuel the sociosymbolic competition essential to consumer culture’s crucial role in boosting aggregate demand (Hall and Winlow, 2025).

In other words, the arena of physical conflict has been relocated from the battlefield or the street to the cultural sphere, where people fight over meaning, recognition, and legitimacy. This is what we see in the disputes around flags. In a pseudo-pacified society, the West’s national flags have become a gesture representing deeper frustrations, a major signifier in the symbolic site where struggles over identity and belonging can be staged. To remove them is an act many experience as silencing, erasure, or disrespect. For others, flying them is an attempt to reestablish atavistic sentiments of imperial supremacy that should be consigned permanently to a history we should all be glad to leave behind.

But why now? Ultra-realism’s historical research suggests that capitalism cannot survive in conditions of either pure pacification or pure disorder. Energetic markets rely on sublimated competition in the spheres of production and consumption and therefore simply cannot function in cultures of normalised altruism or violence. Too much violent chaos disrupts trade, property, and everyday life. Too much altruism, peace and stability, however, would sap the competitive energy and resentment that consumer capitalism relies on. What we live in, then, is a managed middle ground, what Horsley et al. (2015) call ‘orderly disorder’, where people are simultaneously stimulated and pacified.

In situations where market systems veer rapidly towards plutocracy and fail to deliver social justice and economic opportunities or rewards for increasingly precarious workers, political protests and riots are common responses. Where brutal repression has been imposed in the past, today’s neoliberal authorities do not aim to eliminate unrest but to manage it within tolerable boundaries, a process Horsley et al. (2015) describe as essential to the maintenance of legitimacy. Subjects must be given the opportunity to feel as though their protests are resonating amongst the political class at the same time as their activism is quickly absorbed back into the system to become yet again neutralised, mythologised and, where possible, commodified as a historical memory (Kotzé, 2020). “Yes, we showed ‘em what’s what on that day!”

So, briefly, what are the principal ways in which the subjects we see today spray-painting roundabouts stimulated and pacified? We can see populist rhetoric positioning the white working class as betrayed or left behind (Telford, 2025) in a context where the death of the left and absence of effective political representation (Winlow and Hall, 2022) creates a desolate empty space in which resentment echoes and reverberates to a crescendo. Some white working-class citizens in precarious economic situations (Lloyd 2018) perceive immigrants and minority groups as ‘the others’ able to enjoy sympathy, freedoms and cultural expression supposedly denied to them.

This ‘theft of enjoyment’ (Žižek, 2005), once derived from a sense of cultural belonging spiced by an old imperialist ideology of false superiority, has been lowered by the liberal political elite into a dark abyss of inferiority and displacement (Winlow 2025). From this perspective, the removal of St George’s flags is not a neutral bureaucratic act, but another example of stolen enjoyment experienced in stark contrast to the ‘celebration of the other’, typical of a treacherous political elite populated by figures such as ‘two-tier Kier’ currently haunting the Palace of Westminster and our other mainstream institutions.

To these insecure people it seems quite unequivocal that consumer capitalism’s broken promises of success and the ability and right to display all its symbols have stoked feelings of inadequacy (Ellis et al., 2018). Flags are perfect vehicles for this nostalgia as they condense the memory of a simpler, more secure identity, which, for a brief period after WWII, was celebrated as heroic, functional and deserving of all the rewards under the sun (Winlow, 2025). Those who were imaginary heroes of the British Imperium and workers in the temporary industrial economy of rising wages have experienced the reality of a great fall.

This sense of loss after a rapid fall has jeopardised the efficiency of the pseudo-pacification process. Where subjective violence has been largely suppressed through criminalisation and anger has been assuaged by the consumer pleasures of streaming services, sport, alcohol, fast food and so on, there are times when the sense of loss, humiliation and betrayal intensifies and erupts through these always fragile layers. Here the shameless display of nationalistic symbols acts as a perverse duality, a personally risky yet structurally safe challenge to the distant political elite – a spectacular micro-resistance that allow subjects to feel as though they are resisting and being punished while at the same time showing their loyalty and commitment to the system.

Misrecognition of immigrants as their principal enemy permanently distracts these theatrical white nationalists from effective political engagement with opposition to the neoliberal system that has pulled the rug from under their feet. When the anger subsides and the streets are cleared, nostalgia returns as the great pacifier, redirecting emotional energy backwards to a mythical past rather than a future that would be susceptible to real change should substantive politics return (Winlow and Hall, 2022). Anger is thus trapped in this imagined history, fuelling a yearning for a past that can’t be restored and succeeding only in reproducing sentiments that belong to it, an emotional spectrum that ranges from mutual love and solidarity to overt racism.

However, when the balance of stimulation and pacification is disturbed the pseudo-pacification process breaks down (Winlow et al., 2015) and we see acts permitted by special liberty, the subject’s sense of entitlement to enact harm and violence with impunity (Kotzé, 2024). When the balance tipped in the UK in July 2024, the consequences were volatile, enabled by the rioter’s momentary belief that they had the ethical case and the social permission to act. The physical violence that marked last year’s riots was repressed and remains so for now, but the underlying energy of the unsymbolised Real trapped in the misrecognitions of the Imaginary continues to fuel battles over representation.

The disputes around flags are not isolated eruptions of cultural grievance. They are symptoms of a social order dependent on a managed tension between stimulation and pacification. Symbolic battles such as the fight over the St George’s Cross absorb the frustrations of those who feel excluded, channelling aggression into disputes over cultural meaning and recognition that risk bouts of outright violence and revanchist racism – a risk the dominant neoliberal order is willing to take rather than confront coordinated political action. Councils remove flags, protestors re-erect them, media coverage amplifies the outrage, and the cycle continues. Neoliberalism’s underlying insecurities remain unresolved, but the conflict is contained, managed, and endlessly recycled. It is also quickly and easily commodified. Parsley (2025) reported that ‘sales of Union Flags and St George’s flags have risen by around 20 per cent and flagpole purchases have doubled in recent weeks’. What appears to be an act of cultural defiance is also a profitable consumer trend, with neoliberal capitalism once again the only winner.

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