World Cup is a celebration of nationalism but also, fleetingly, of life beyond borders
As an avid reader who never has any time to read, I’ve belatedly discovered the joys of the audiobook. My commute to work has changed: goodbye talk radio, hello all the novels I’ve been neglecting.
And it can feel quite jarring to drive around Johannesburg while the sounds of a fictional universe fill my car, the voices of narrators and characters completely at odds with the view through my windscreen.
At the moment, for example, I’m listening to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Mock me if you will. It’s just one of those texts you have to get under your belt.
And exploring the Russian literary canon seems appropriate at a time when the world’s attention is turned more positively than usual towards Moscow and St Petersburg.
The Fifa World Cup is, as various commentators have noted, an exercise in wilful forgetting. We ignore human rights violations committed by the governments of countries whose football teams show onfield pluck and skill.
We set aside the mafioso dealings of the organisation under whose auspices the tournament takes place. And somehow the “host nation” card temporarily absolves Vladimir Putin of both his domestic tyranny and his Machiavellian meddling in elections and economies around the globe.
Such sports events are often presented as opportunities to overcome conflicts between nations — or at least to redirect the energies that might cause war-mongering towards more innocuous sporting rivalries, offering the resolution of “fair play” and a handshake.
Just as often, however, this backfires; sports fixtures can ratchet up geopolitical tension or reinscribe outdated enmity.
By contrast, sport’s unifying effect is temporary at best. Certainly, it is no panacea; images of the combined Korean team at the Winter Olympics, like dozens of Olympics stories from over the years, make for feel-good moments but ultimately remain gestures.
Perhaps Korea will be united one day. But South Africans who have learned not to sentimentalise the 1995 Rugby World Cup know that sport has its limitations. Whether it is transmuting global conflicts or creating superficial bonds between citizens, the premise of sport at the highest level is an irrational patriotic attachment to the idea of the nation. And this, in an age of resurgent nationalism, hardly seems to be a good thing. So what can be salvaged from the gathering of 32 teams in Russia, beyond athletic prowess and escapism?
This brings me back to War and Peace. I’m listening to a BBC adaptation that makes the affectation and dithering of 19thcentury Russian aristocrats seem all the more self-involved and annoying.
Yes, there are the universal anxieties of trying to find love and money and happiness. But although Tolstoy’s characters are memorable, what makes it a great book is its preoccupation with the relationship between individuals and sweeping historical forces. Do men make history? Does history make men? Hovering over the novel is the figure of Napoleon, whose conquests and eventual defeat did more than anything else to spread nationalism in Europe. For two centuries since Waterloo, as the map of Europe has been drawn and redrawn, spurious forms of “national identity” have remained an obsession. Nationalism also spurred colonial expansion, when the only thing uniting Europe was a shared disdain for all the other continents.
Today, there are new permutations to the old question — Tolstoy’s question — “What is Europe?” The choice is between a progressive, transnational EU that embraces multiracial cosmopolitanism, and a rightwing retreat into (white) nationalism, closed borders and false nostalgia. This is where, although Putin and many racist football hooligans would undoubtedly prefer the latter option, the World Cup in Russia may be redeemed.
Historian and football fan Laurent Dubois makes a bold claim for the significance of players such as Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku: the son of African immigrants, he is nonetheless better than most of his compatriots at navigating the country’s Flemish-Walloon divisions and he exemplifies “Afro-Europe”. Lukaku represents Europe’s high road.
Dubois muses optimistically: “Football can’t change the world, or even a nation. What it does, sometimes, is hint — through what is before us, on the pitch — that other worlds are worth imagining, even if only for an instant.”