This is a post about lessons from the World Cup for ethnic integration and patriotism.
When the German footballer Deniz Undav, brought in as a sub in the second half, followed his first goal in the 68thminute, with a second in stoppage time to give his national side a 2-1 win over Ivory Coast, there weren’t many German fans who didn’t see him as the hero, epitomizing the spirit of their national team. Undav, the son of a Turkish-born and Syrian-born Kurdish Yazidi parents, didn’t have the classic German look. No matter. He was delivering an exciting victory to the German side and a glimpse of what makes the beautiful game so exhilarating.
Undav was also offering a rebuke to the obsessions of both the hard right and the hard left. Not just him but the entire German squad was a living demonstration that people of very different origins and appearances can be woven into a shared enterprise that, at its best, becomes a source of collective pride rather than a threat to it; and loving your country and welcoming newcomers into it are not incompatible impulses. The right insists the first half of that sentence is dangerous; the left often flinches at the second.
This isn’t the message from just the German team. The World Cup, played this summer across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, puts ethnically-mixed squads in front of billions of fans. Every serious contender in the tournament is fielding players whose families arrived a generation or two ago. And almost every one of them is generating a joyful patriotism shared by their team and supporters alike. The combination of diversity and pride, together, is precisely what the political extremes insist is impossible.
Consider the right first. Across much of the industrialized world, mainstream politics has become consumed by anxiety over the immigration of culturally and ethnically different peoples – and the supposed discord it brings. Ideas once confined to the darker corners of the internet, from the “Great Replacement” to “remigration,” are now aired and debated in respectable forums. In a recent YouGov poll, 45% of Brits, 50% of Danes, 51% of the French, 53% of Germans, 51% of Italians, 52% of Poles, and 46% of Spaniards expressed support for a scenario in which immigration stopped and many recent migrants departed. To be clear, the harshest version of such an agenda, which involves forced expulsion (sometimes bordering a modern version of ethnic cleansing) commands little support, and survey wording may be inflating softer concerns. But even allowing for those caveats, this is a striking reversal from less than a decade ago, when many of the same publics welcomed those fleeing war in the Middle East.
The left has traveled in a different but still troubling direction. Among some activists and philosophers, the world came to be read almost entirely through the lens of oppressor-oppressed dynamics, with Western nations placed firmly in the former camp. Patriotism – which at its best allows one to identify with the customs and history of one’s country while remaining free to criticize its failings – came to be viewed with suspicion, even disdain. The shift shows up in the data: the share of US Democrats reporting “extreme pride” in being American, according to Gallup, fell from the mid-60s in the early 2000s to just 22% in 2019 (even if it recovered somewhat since then).
That last figure deserves a caveat. Much of the collapse coincided with a presidency many Democrats sharply disagreed with, so some of it may reflect disaffection with who governed rather than a principled rejection of country. But the deeper trend is real: on parts of the left, the very vocabulary of national pride has become an embarrassment. This is troubling because without a shared identity it becomes harder for national politics to coalesce around policies that will watch out for and support those who are losing out – as the working classes, especially those without four-year college degrees, have been over the last several decades throughout the industrialized world.
Sport, of course, is not a perfect mirror of society. A national squad is a small, lavishly resourced, intensely managed group united by a single unambiguous goal-– hardly the same as integrating large populations into housing, schools, and labor markets. Nor is sporting integration as frictionless as the cheering suggests. England’s Black players were deluged with racist abuse after losing the Euro 2020 final; France’s “Bleus” are perennially dragged into arguments about who counts as truly French; and the US has an ugly history of racism not just in baseball but throughout many sports. Integration in sport is celebrated by the many and contested by a loud minority – exactly the pattern we see in the wider society.
The World Cup does not prove that integration is easy. What it nonetheless shows is something the extremes deny categorically: ethnic integration (rejected as impossible or even undesirable by the hard right) and patriotic pride (often looked down upon by the progressive left) routinely coexist. Most fans, watching their multi-ethnic team carry the national flag, simply experience both at once and think nothing of it.
If the hard right and the hard left could climb down from their high horses long enough to watch a few matches, they might rediscover what the rest of us already know: that integration and pride are not enemies. As on the pitch, they can be teammates.
English
