INTERNATIONAL football can be an enjoyable spectacle but we can’t ignore how, for many fans, it is an important habituator of patriotism. Billig notes in his book ‘Banal Nationalism’ how national symbols – national football teams, flags and anthems – are part of everyday routines through which the ‘nation’ is reproduced:
We must be reminded, constantly, that we are part of this thing called a “nation.” Even more, that we belong to it and it belongs to us. Banal nationalism is how the idea of the nation and our membership in it is reproduced daily. It occurs not with celebrations, parades, or patriotic war, but in “mundane,” “routine,” and “unnoticed” ways.
The mediation of such symbols are sociologically differentiated but national football teams, in global sporting events, have a powerful populist effect, cutting across cultural class divides. The powerful signifier that is the national football team should not be underestimated and merely stating the name of a team as ‘England’, ‘Germany’ or ‘France’ personally brings strong discomfort – football teams are football teams but in the logic of patriotism they are extensions of the ego.
Gus Poyet defends Luis Suarez as a ‘national’ hero and Maradona documents his handball goal and elimination of England as if “it was as if we had beaten a country, not just a football team … although we had said before the game that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas war, we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds. And this was revenge.” The French team’s mutiny, in South Africa, sees moral responsibility extending to the ‘nation’ and its prideful appearance amongst other nations. Stuart Pearce sends a special message, on the behalf of the England team, to ‘our’ service men and women in Afghanistan. Similarly Bobby Moore states, concerning England’s 1966 team – “we were more than a team. We were a formidable nation, bonded and held together by our will to win for England.”
One football fan observes from the stands, when England defeated the USA (2008) in a friendly:
The majority of those around me were so busy singing that St George was in their hearts and Brittannia would never, never, never be slaves that it took nearly 40 minutes for them to realize just how dire England were. Not that they were that bothered by the football, it was the shirt that counted not the ball.
These banal forms of nationalism, rituals of honour and self-serving pride, flag nationhood in daily lives – a reminder, observes Billig, that “provides a continual background for their political discourses, for cultural products, and even for the structuring of newspapers. In so many little way, the citizenry are daily reminded of the national place in a world of nations”.
Importantly, while interpretive categories or theories of nationhood are important, Billig states these as lived embodied cognitive schema – schema that provide an imagined communion of what it means to be part of a national community. These schema emerge over time but are not merely waiting to be triggered in a ’salient situation’- ”it is part of a wider rhythm of banal life in the world of nations. What this means is that national identity is more than an inner psychological state or an individual self-definition: it is a form of life, which is daily lived in the world of nation-states”.
In other words, we are reminded daily of what makes ‘us’ an ‘imagined community’, with stereotypes as distinction, as opposed to ‘them’ – we mustn’t forget that institutional settings and contextual resources are domains affecting a social genesis of shared practice (the interaction order). The salience of the situation is important but not abstracted from its systemic settings. So the situation is a site of lived interactions and mediation of social conditions can be found here.
Bourdieu’s notion of a community of dispositions is insightful, as it considers mediation as collective – the habitus as subjective meaning. The habitus, for Bourdieu, is an immanent law and as such is inherent within social conditions – there is a consciousness and strategic logic to practice but this only extends to a prior rationale of practice and “in accordance to schemes engendered by history”. The national team (Nationalmannschaft) is just one of many social materials that fall within a rationale and generates conduct in its fulfilment.
There is much to say about Bourdieu’s emphasis on a narrow discursive rationale and mediation of social conditions, being viewed on those terms. But that is for another post.
So is international football both divisive and sows the seeds of distinction and boorish pride? May be its banality and mundane nature renders the symbol of the national team and the arena of performance (international tournaments) a harmless event, where patriotic sentiments and affectual energy could be discharged, after all it is merely a game.
Billig believes that the everyday and mundane forms of nationalism does not entail its harmlessness. In fact, he states “banality is not synonymous with harmlessness. In the case of Western nation-states, banal nationalism can hardly be innocent: it is reproducing institutions which possess vast armaments. As the Gulf and Falklands Wars indicated, forces can be mobilized without lengthy campaigns of political preparation. The armaments are primed, ready for use in battle. And the national populations appear also to be primed, ready to support the use of those armaments”
I agree, despite a personal enjoyment when following the game. An event that features two teams as national symbols, in opposition and labelled in the name of their nation states (labelling theory is relevant here), can only make collective folk categories salient. It is true that these categories cannot be blamed on football (a stratified and relational view of sociality, will not allow this reductive form of analysis) but the language of nationhood, more than mere football, finds for itself an almost ideal-type arena – football games provide the event for pre-existing lived categories (contextual resources) or what Bourdieu would state as “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures”.
In this place we are engulfed with national flags and chants, flagging collective memories of historic events and what it means to be on our side of an imagined community, in pitch distance of the ‘other’. There is little place for deliberation or reflection in the midst of a collective, almost hysteric, mediation of global sporting events – a heightened site for an implicit pedagogy with its own logic of nationalistic ideas. At even a more banal level, Bourdieu states “nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious, than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as “stand up straight” or “don’t hold your knife in your left hand”. To discount this is to be bereft of a sociological imagination.
