Put more strongly, 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 the philosopher 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 nasty 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 identifying 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, to take the most obvious example, practice the illiberal variety, with no respect for the determination of other nationalities. But there’s no reason that nationalism should inherently HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM
culminate in these ugly feelings. To blame the Croatian and Bosnian wars on excessive love of country drasti-cally 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 o¤ to foreign impulses. And it’s not just theory. This is the spirit of Barca. I love it.
II.
FC Barcelona could have easily gone the other direction.
It could have become a caldron of radicalism, violence, and grievances. But the roots of Barca’s cosmopolitan nationalism run too deep. They are part of the national culture and part of the club’s founding spirit. In 1899, a Swiss Protestant businessman called Joan Gamper joined with English expats to launch FC Barcelona. It is stunning that a foreigner created what would become a defining institution of Catalan nationalism.
There’s a simple explanation for Catalonia’s openness to foreign influences: Catalonia sits in the middle of the Mediterranean world. Before the fifteenth century, as part of the kingdom of Aragon, the Catalan conquered their way as far east as Athens, Sicily, and Sar-dinia. Even then, at the height of its greatness, the nation’s most powerful men were traders and capitalists.
Barcelona became a great trading city deeply entangled in the global economy, growing into an industrial giant.
By the late nineteenth century, only the United States, England, and France outpaced the production of Catalonia’s textile mills.
But as it advanced economically, Catalonia sustained political subjugation. Spain’s political power, concentrated in Madrid, consisted largely of Castilian landowners. The interests of the central government and Barcelona’s capitalists clashed. Barcelona’s growing cadre of bourgeois nationalists resented that the Castilians used the government to impose “Spanish” culture and language upon them. Nor did it help that Madrid tilted government policy so strongly away from industry and toward the protection of agriculture. The Catalans took out their anger at this unjust arrangement by crudely stereotyping the Castilians and their capital.
Where Catalonia represented modernity and progress, Madrid consisted of cultureless yokels. It wasn’t entirely a self-serving image. Barcelona’s bourgeoisie proved its greatness to the world, by patronizing monumental works of art and architecture—Gaudí,
Doménech i Muntaner, Miró. And because of its
immersion in the world of global commerce, it happily opened the doors to foreign influences.
Joan Gamper and soccer were just another of the imports to become part of the Catalan fabric. It didn’t hurt Gamper’s local image that he fervently admired the Catalan cause and had translated his own name, Hans Kamper, into the local language. By some
accounts, Gamper wanted the club to celebrate the Catalans and their dreams of autonomy. Under his stewardship, Barca adopted a crest containing the colors of the nation and the cross of St. Jordi, Catalonia’s patron. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM
Catalonia’s proclamations of national superiority didn’t go down well in Madrid. The ancient Castilian regime tried to put the upstarts in their place. With the support of the king, in 1923, general Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power and ran a dictatorship that prefigured the Francoism to come. Primo de Rivera banned the Catalan flag and purged the Catalan language from the public sphere. Because of its symbolic role, Barca inevitably faced the same repression. After its fans booed the national anthem before a 1925 exhibition game, the dictator shuttered Barca’s stadium for six months and fined its directors. The government made it clear to Gamper that he should leave Spain or his family might su¤er some unfortunate consequences. Gamper fled. A few years later, in a fit of depression, compounded by his losses in the 1929
stock market crash, he took his own life.
Primo de Rivera had Franco’s agenda without
Franco’s totalitarian state apparatus to back him up.
Rather predictably his repression backfired. He resigned in 1930, replaced by a democratic republic imbued with the utopian fervor of the interwar era.
There was, however, an important di¤erence between Franco’s attitude and his forerunner. Primo de Rivera had reacted to Barca with fury because he was a classic caudillo, your run-of-the-mill dictator who squashed any dissent that threatened his fragile grip. For Franco, the battle against Barca took on the form of epic personal struggle. On the most obvious political level, he had good reason for punishing the club’s devoted supporters. Catalonia had held out the longest against his coup. Barcelonans, after years of pre–civil war indus-trial strife, had become Henry Fords of barricade construction. Although parts of the city welcomed Franco with open arms, many of its residents fought urban warfare with a savvy that
