What Is a National Anthem? Music Doing Political Work
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A tune played before a football match, at a medal ceremony and at a state funeral is carrying a considerable load: it is supposed to make a group of strangers feel like a single thing, and it does this through synchronised collective performance, which is among the oldest bonding mechanisms humans have. The oldest one still in use dates to 1568, the most recognisable was written as a revolutionary war song in a single night, and several countries have changed theirs because the words became impossible.
Where the idea came from
National anthems are a product of the modern nation-state and mostly of the nineteenth century, when the idea that a population constitutes a people with a shared identity became the basis of political legitimacy. The Dutch Wilhelmus is the oldest melody and text in use, dating to the 1568 revolt against Spain, though it was adopted officially only in 1932. The British God Save the King was performed in 1745 and became the model, and its tune was borrowed by numerous other countries, including the German states, Russia, Switzerland and, in a form that survives, the American patriotic song My Country, Tis of Thee. The French Marseillaise was written in a night in 1792 by an army officer as a war song for the Rhine army, was carried to Paris by volunteers from Marseille and named after them, and is unusually bloody in its imagery, which has produced periodic proposals to change the words. Most anthems date from a country's independence or revolution, which is why the map of adoption dates traces the collapse of empires.
What they are about
The texts fall into recognisable categories and the category says something about the state:
- •Monarchical anthems addressed to a person, which are the oldest form and now a minority
- •Revolutionary and military songs written during a fight for independence, which is the largest group and explains the quantity of blood in the lyrics
- •Hymns and prayers, including several African and Latin American anthems and the South African one, which opens with a hymn originally written for a mission school
- •Landscape anthems praising the territory rather than the people or the state, which is the Nordic pattern and avoids the problem of defining who belongs
- •The Japanese anthem is the shortest and oldest text, a poem from the tenth century set to music in 1880, and Spain's has no official words at all, attempts to supply them having failed repeatedly because any wording offends someone
- •Several anthems are shared or near-identical, with Estonia and Finland using the same melody and a number of Greek-speaking states sharing texts
The ones that were changed
Anthems are revised when the politics they encode becomes untenable, which makes the revisions informative. South Africa replaced the apartheid-era Die Stem in stages and now uses a composite combining it with Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika, moving through five languages within a single song, which is a deliberate constitutional statement in musical form. Germany retains the melody of the Deutschlandlied and sings only the third stanza, the first having been used by the Nazi state. Austria altered its text in 2012 to include daughters alongside sons, and Canada made a comparable change in 2018. Russia has changed anthem four times in a century, ending with the Soviet melody restored in 2000 with new words by the writer who had supplied the previous two versions. Rwanda replaced its anthem after the genocide. Nepal adopted a new one after abolishing the monarchy. In each case the music was doing political work and had to be altered when the politics changed.
Why singing together works
The effect of these songs is not mainly about the words, and research on group singing suggests why. Synchronised activity, whether singing, marching or moving in time, reliably increases cooperation and reported closeness in experimental settings, an effect demonstrated repeatedly and proposed as the reason music evolved at all. Singing specifically involves coordinated breathing, and studies have found heart rates synchronising among choir members. The setting adds to it, since anthems are performed while standing, facing a flag, in a crowd, at moments already loaded with meaning. That mechanism is neutral as to purpose, which is the uncomfortable part: the same process that produces a moving moment at a medal ceremony produced the mass rallies of the 1930s. It is also why refusing to participate is so potent a gesture, from athletes remaining seated to citizens who decline to sing an anthem whose words exclude them, since the objection is legible precisely because the act is collective.
The takeaway
National anthems are mostly nineteenth-century products of the nation-state, with the Dutch text oldest at 1568 and the British model borrowed by numerous other countries. They divide into monarchical addresses, revolutionary war songs, hymns and landscape praise, and Spain has never agreed on any words. Countries revise them when the politics they encode becomes untenable, as South Africa, Germany, Austria and Russia have. The bonding effect comes from synchronised collective performance rather than from the text, which is why refusing to join in registers so strongly.