Eine Manschaft ohne Nation

There has been considerable ink spilt in the last few days over the FIFA decision to ban the Iraqi national team, for a full year, from any international competition. The reason is a reaction to the dissolving of the Iraqi Olympic committee by the central government. The corrupted IC was basically a dead weight, but FIFA and the IOC see this as government intervention in sports affairs, and thus they are banning the teams.

As became clear to me during the writing of my thesis, there is no point where the state is not intervening in sporting affairs - so the point is moot. But that aside, the decision to ban the soccer team seems rather foolish. Not only has the soccer team given Iraq (as a whole) something to be proud of, but they have also proved to be a model of national integration. The presence of the three ethnic groups on the same team, working together as Iraqi's, should be something the west champions, not bans.

Though it is not my personal opinion, if there west wants stability in Iraq, and wants it via the creation of an Iraqi nation, then the soccer team needs to be put in the spotlight. FIFA should be flexible enough to give Iraq some leway for the national team.

But the whole debate is overlooking a fundamental point: how can Iraq even have a national team? Currently, and historically, there has never been an Iraqi nation as such. What has existed is a state, called Iraq, which forcefully made three distinct national identities live together. The attempts to impose the new, post colonial, Iraqi national identity on the population has failed. The removal of Saddam Hussein also removed the proverbial lid that was keeping the various identities in check. Now people have reverted to identity roots that predate Western designs.

In short, soccer, for a brief moment last summer, gave Iraqi's a glimmer of what national solidarity looked like. The success of the team at the Asia Cup had the ethnicities dancing together. But now the West has squashed the national dream of getting to the World Cup in 2010, because the team will not be able to go through the qualifying phase. It seems tragic and unjust for any Iraqi soccer fan; foolish and ill advised from a political standpoint; par for the course in relative terms.

Rob Huges has a good article in the IHT, and there are some posts in the NYT GOAL soccer blog.

Meeting with Big D (part II) ~ 1/21/08

As Serbia goes to a run off election between the hardline Nationalists and the pro-EU party, on the day when America celebrates the legacy of MLK, and after an interesting debate with E about the Racino issue and racism towards Native Americans, I finally got a sit down with Dr. D to take a look at the thesis.

As it stands the thesis is something of a compromise between the initial idea/inspiration for the thesis, and Dr. B's interest in doing a field study, a personalized experience with soccer culture in a community/region where marginalized peoples engage in the game. This second part was an idea that we banded around a few months ago, but that I never really was able to develop fully in my head, at least as part of the thesis.

So today, we looked at what I was hoping to get out of this project. This is not a one off for me, but really just a first chapter/trip into this subject. Considering my basic time frame (the thesis technically being due in May), the praxis is becoming something of an issue. As it stands, I was going to look at a very general cross section of soccer players in the US, players from USM, from an indoor league, and from the pickup games at Back Bay. But this doesn't really look at the "at risk" demographic meant to be the subject of this thesis.

If I think back to Oggi's speech (almost a year ago now) what had me so crazy was the possibility that soccer was available for use as a means of conflict resolution, or as empowerment of minority/repressed/illegal/other/'immigrant' communities. Since then the paradoxical nature of this has become clear to me. That the nation state can also tap this source for its own designs, perpetuating racism, inequality, and power structures. In light of the current complaints coming from the larger EU clubs complaining that the African Nations Cup is taking away the African stars for the next few weeks; considering the debate over immigration currently in the EU, this might rather be the focus of the project.

So, the suggestion was to look at the paradox of a sport that on one side empowers these communities, and on the other, allow the Nation State to further its ambition of control and power. Instead of trying, at this juncture, to do some field study, focusing on the theory supported by examples to support either side of the argument. The question will be to see if this debate is sustainable, if the co-existence of these two antithetical ideas means soccer is inherently dangerous, or if the risk is acceptable?