Nation-building and football (soccer)?
During the third weekend of February 2017 at FIFA headquarters in Zürich the Schwabenakademie Irsee held the 10th Irsee Sports Historical Conference with the theme “Football as an Instrument of Nation-Building II”. I went as part of a delegation of students from the M.A. International Sport Development and Politics from Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln. We attended for the programming of Saturday and Sunday, but couldn’t be there for Friday due to our semester exams. (Link to program: click)
We were among the first to arrive on Saturday morning, with great excitement to be at the official site of such prestigious sport institution. The agenda included academics from Moldova, Armenia and India presenting accounts of how football had historically or politically influenced these nations. Also researchers from Israel, Germany, UK and USA shared the insights of their investigations from Brazil, Japan, Liberia and Portuguese-speaking African countries, respectively. In this reflection I’m sharing a few of these memories.
The day began with the “re-imagination of the nation through football”. Through an historic narrative of football in Hungary until the modern times, we learned that during the communist era Hungarian football became a politicized instrument to promote the regime ideology, especially with the international winnings such as the 1953: England 3–6 Hungary. But in 1954 when the team lost to West Germany 3–2, the people took out to the streets against the regime. After the collapse of communism in 1989 and the election of Viktor Orban in 2010 there has been a rise of Hungarian football as a tool for social cohesion for Orban.
In the case of emerging nations such as Moldova it’s been challenging to forge their own identity. Soviet Moldova never succeeded to establish their own grassroots football, and the absence of local traditions mostly explain the reason of Moldova lacking a good national football team. There was an excessive “russification” of football, and adding to this the interconnectedness with Romania made it challenging for Moldovans to strengthen their national team.
The history of football nationalism in the USSR and India were presented in narrative throughout the successes of F.C. Ararat Yerevan and Mohammedan Sporting Club. In the 1960s Armenians demanded the recognition of the Armenian genocide, and as part of the nation building process there were two constructions, one was the Genocide Memorial and the other was the new stadium for Ararat, Hrazdan Stadium built in 1970. Ararat became a symbol of nationalism in 1973 after winning the Russian league.
In India the Mohammedan Sporting Club signified the community sentiments of the Muslims. A radical Indian nationalism movement was taking place in 1911 when coincidentally a local football team won against the British, marking a combative triumph for the people. In the following years the Mohammedan was rising in popularity greatly to their strategy to use religious networks and play against college teams, strengthening their fan base. The Muslim League manipulated Mohammedan to develop an agenda of their own for an independent Islamic state in the 1940s.
The case of Liberia was of much interest for having look at the modern practices of sport, development and peace organizations (SPD). Liberia is a post-conflict state with the presence of many international organizations such as the UN (peacekeeping) and NGOs using football for social cohesion with SDP activities. Football rose since the 1930s being of much interest to Liberia’s Presidents, and even a candidate to the presidency was famous footballer George Weah. However, there are some considerations about using football as an SDP tool according to the research done by the presenters.
Finally, for us a question stuck in our discussions and overall reflection, what is really nation building? And especially in this context, what is football as a tool for nation building? Is it used only with torn-apart societies or to radicalize a movement of nationalism and identity? And can we look at grassroots examples (from other sports as well) and not only elite types? In the article Critical left-realism and sport interventions in divided societies by John Sugden he quotes George Orwell at large, and it is worth sharing it to end this reflection:
It [sport] is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure . . . If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles and Italians and Jugoslavs [sic], each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators.
To understand the benefits or perils of football or sports, in the construction of nation or the healing of a divided society, we can look at historical and/or political situations as the mentioned previously. Sugden says that sport includes and excludes, and it is for this reason that it should be looked at critically in its socio-political function. This conference was an eye-opener with many open-ended questions for us, worth considering to our continued work in the fields of sport for development, development of sports and sport politics.
