UN flag has worldview
By James Breig
Hosted by Gettysburg Flag Works
The flag of the United Nations has been very flexible since it was adopted in 1947. Two years later, it was unfurled – by the building’s project manager — atop the unfinished UN tower in New York City.
Through the years, the flag’s map of the world has been adjusted slightly. Its first version, for instance, omitted an entire country. (Do you know which one? The answer is below.) Furthermore, the website for the UN states that the banner’s proportions, rather than being fixed, should be the same as the “national flag of any country in which the UN flag is flown.”
The image on the flag, surrounded by olive branches, is officially defined by the UN as “a map of the world representing an azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the North Pole…The projection of the map extends to 60 degrees south latitude, and includes five concentric circles.”
The United Nations’ Flag Code, affirmed in 1952, declared that the banner “shall not be subjected to any indignity” and that no UN flag could be manufactured without the “written consent of the Secretary-General.” He or she even had to approve the sale price.
In 1967, those rules were rescinded, perhaps due to the number of requests asking the Secretary-General to okay the cost of flags at gift shops around the globe.
In 2012, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke in his native South Korea about meeting Yi So-yeon, “the first Korean astronaut who carried the United Nations flag into outer space….I was deeply honored when she presented me with that special United Nations flag. I immediately hung it on the wall in my office.”
He continued by saying that “our values — peace, human rights, opportunity and dignity for all people — are universal values. You do not need a flag to uphold them. You do not need a spaceship. All you need is the determination to stand up for what is right.”
(Answer to the question in the first paragraph: Argentina was not a member of the UN when the emblem was designed and was not included on the first flag.)