Tag: 2014 World Cup

The world learns about itself in new and unexpected ways. While it is true that old habits die hard, new fancies tend to catch on very quickly, leaving everybody breathless. As the 2014 World Cup wings to a memorable finale this evening with Argentina trying its luck against a revved up German soccer wehrmacht, there are many things that would remind one of a changing world.

One of these is the growing reality that soccer may become a simulated war game enacted by men with superior military brains and exceptional psychological stamina. If anyone was ever in doubt, the 7-1 vaporization of Brazil by the German soccer machine laid to rest forever the old notion of the beautiful game as a moveable feast of joyous passing, gyrating body movements and ecstatic acrobatics.

The Germans play without frills or freebies, and with a ferocious focus on the empty space between the goalposts. The charming but naïve Brazilians often croon about the open and flowing nature of their game, and the fact that they could allow their opponents to score as many goals as they can as long as nobody held their own fleet feet in fetters.

But that was before they invented spatial and structural marking which eliminates the old man to man marking but whose devastating oversight function is unprecedented in the annals of human hindrance. It is a tight and disciplined military formation which reminds one of a dragnet of limbs unfurling as they smother the solitary limbs in contention without any fuss or fanfare. More and more, the game relies on a moment of pure magical brilliance for the exceptional player to spring the tight cordon or some ruinous lapse of concentration which is punished with swift severity.

Ironically enough, the most telling revelation of this war of the nations on the soccer pitch is the changing nature of nationality itself and perhaps of the whole concept of nationalism. All that is solid melts into thin air in the crucible of human evolution. For decades, the forces of globalization have been eating away at the certitudes and certainties of nationality and nationalism.

International commuters switch and switch on nationalities with the ease and facility of free citizens of an increasingly borderless world. There are now people with dual and even multiple national identities. You leave Africa as a native in the morning and arrive at an international border post in the evening bearing a new identity, thanks to work and study, or some less mentionable means.

Often, you strongly and stoutly support the soccer team of the home country that you left behind even though you know in your heart that these boys cannot pass muster on the truly international stage. But your children have no such inhibition or ambivalence. They belong to a brave new world. Where you bloom and blossom is obviously more important than where you were born. Origin is often a source of haunting memory and inconveniences best forgotten. But it may also serve as a site of rearguard bravado against the forces of western globalization and the whole project of modernity itself.

When the Boateng blood brothers, Jerome and Kevin Prince, entered the soccer pitch again on opposing sides during the Ghana versus Germany match little would they have known that they have been making history as far as the confrontation between the nation-state and globalization, between locality and globality, goes. It was a repeat of their June 23rd, 2010 confrontation in South Africa.

To be sure, there have been cases of blood brothers playing for or representing different countries at one time or the other. There have also been cases of brothers representing different clubs. There are instances of great athletes and martial artists defecting to other countries even while still under oath to defend the honour and integrity of the home countries. But it is in the epic tussle between the Ghanaian Boateng and the German Boateng that the poignant ironies of contending nationalities came to the fore as never before.

Since the two Boateng brothers bear soccer arms for two different countries, it was to be expected that when they came face to face, they might not spare each other the odd ferocious tackle. There was always the possibility of one critically injuring the other. And if it came to a real shooting war between the two countries, the possibility of legal fratricide must be very high on the cards.

The prospects of two brothers dueling unto death are rare but not a new historical phenomenon. This one, however, comes with a novel inflection which owes its historical possibility to the forces of globalization breaking down iron barriers and old binary divisions. Had the Boateng father not been granted the opportunities of international travels, the contradictions would have remained at the level of the nation-state paradigm.

It is useful to note how the World Cup itself owes its rise and ascendancy to globalization which tends to abolish the ancient notion of time and space. The World Cup came on the heels of dramatic developments in human transportation, particularly aerial journeys which allow humanity to obliterate different and divergent time zones with the ease and facility of a fabled magician. Had humanity been stalled at the level of nautical journeys, the logistical nightmare of transporting people and players across seas would have made the World Cup an impossible dream.

We may yet thank God for globalization, particularly the likes of Jurgen Klinsmann, the great German soccer hero and current coach of the US soccer team. Two centuries ago, it would have been considered the highest form of state treason for a German to coach another country, particularly the bumptious and insufferable Yankees, about how to upend the great German soccer machine.

But treason itself has become globalized and this particular variant would cut no ice with a man of Klinsmann’s Teutonic thoroughness and contempt for idiotic waffling. Judging from Klinsmann’s boundless enthusiasm for his American team on and off the pitch and the clinical precision with which he has raised the American game, it is clear that the German icon has stuck to the clause of his American contract rather than a phantom obligation to the motherland.

This seeming infraction is unlikely to diminish Klinsmann’s iconic stature in his motherland. He will still return to Germany as a hero, if he doesn’t decide to take up an American citizenship which will be readily available. He has already paid his dues to club and country. In any case, the ubiquitous and impersonal forces of globalization have made it easier for him. Take a look at the German team as well as all the European teams at this year’s edition of the World Cup in Brazil. It is a rainbow coalition of all colour, creed and complexion. Globalization is a homogenizing Leviathan which grinds everything into conformity. Everything and everybody is grist to its crushing and compulsive mill.

It has, however, been noted that globalization is a decidedly one-sided affair; a one-way traffic which merely revalidates the overwhelming superiority of the west and western modernity over the rest of the world. How many people voluntarily leave the west for the Third World? The balance of knowledge production is grossly and grotesquely in favour of the metropolitan centre. The ceaseless and ruthless adaption of cutting edge technology reinvents capitalism in such a way that leaves the rest of the world gasping for breath. Globalization, they claim, is just another word for the Americanization or Coca-colanization of the rest of the world.

We do not need to look farther than the outgoing World Cup for proof that the truth is more nuanced and the reality less heavily one-sided. Slowly but inexorably, the forces of globalization have been chipping away at America’s cultural and ideological rampart. The gradual build-up of a more confident and more assured immigrant community, particularly from Africa and the human armada from Latin America who never forgot the soccer-mad culture they left at home appear to have thawed America’s resistance to soccer and the widespread belief that its almost effeminate gyrations is a psychic assault on American Exceptionalism and its Roman notion of sports as an intensely physical gladiatorial affair.

Before our very eyes, America has become a soccer loving country. This World Cup has witnessed an unprecedented rise in American viewership. Enthusiasm for the beautiful game exploded reaching a national fever pitch during America’s last game. From a superlative futuristic bar abutting into the Pacific Ocean in a Los Angeles suburb to a dark and dingy Nigerian drinking hovel in New York, they were watching football all the way. It helped that America qualified, at least. It also helped that modern soccer has witnessed a renewed athleticism and martialization  which is in consonance with American sports’ spirit. One way or the other in this de-Brazilianization of the game, globalization has done its duty.

So has it for the continent of Africa whose two solitary survivors were dismissed in the second round of the tournament with the continent as usual holding the short end of the stick. The first wave of globalization led to the internationalization of slavery and the enslavement of a substantial chunk of the African populace. The second wave led to the forcible cooption of the continent into the capitalist orbit. With the latest wave, African nations are being frog-matched to the post-nation frontiers without having achieved the consolidation of the nation-state paradigm.

In a delicious and sublime instance of historic irony, it is instructive to note Nigeria stumbled to defeat from France with the two goals scored by Africans. The first by Pogba and the second an own goal scored against his team and country by Joseph Yobo, the Nigerian skipper. In its crowded eighteen, and under grave historical and political pressures, Africa always scores against itself either directly or indirectly. Neither the changing nature of nationality nor the changing epochs of globalization will put an end to that. It will take a new breed of Africans. And we have been waiting for only six hundred years.