How Soccer Explains the World

"..Barca doesn't just redeem the game from its critics; it redeems the concept of nationalism. Through the late twentieth century, liberal political thinkers, from philospher Martha Nussbaum to the architects of the European Union, have blamed nationalism for most of modernity's evils. Tribalism in a more modern guise, they denounce it. If only we abandoned this old fixation with national identities, then we could finally get past natsy ethnocentrism, vulgar chauvinism, and blood feuding. In place of nationalism, they propose that we become cosmopolitans - shelving patriotism and submitting to government by international institutions and laws.

It's a beautiful picture, but not at all realistic. And it turns its back on a strain of liberalism that begins with John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and continues through Isaiah Berlin. This tradition understands that humans crave indentifying with a group. It is an unavoidable, immemorial, hardwired instinct. Since modern life has knocked the family and tribe from their central positions, the nation has become the only viable vessel for this impulse. To deny this craving is to deny human nature and human dignity.

What's more, this strain of political theory makes a distinction between liberal nationalism and illiberal nationalism. The Serbs at Red Star..practice the illiberal variety, with no respect for the determination of other nationalities. But there's no reason that nationalism should culminate in these ugly feelings. To blame the Croatian and Bosnian wars on excessive love of country drastically underestimates the pathologies in Serb culture. Besides, in theory, patriotism and cosmopolitanism should be perfectly compatible. You could love your country-even consider it a superior group-without desiring to dominate other groups or closing yourself off to foreign impulses. And it's not just theory. This is the spirit of Barca. I love it."

-How Soccer Explains the World: An unlikely theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer