On the other side, there is a group that believes in
“American exceptionalism,” an idea that America’s history and singular form of government has given the nation a unique role to play in the world; that the U.S.
should be above submitting to international laws and bodies. They view Europeans as degraded by their lax attitudes, and worry about the threat to American culture posed by secular tolerance. With so much relativism seeping into the American way of life, they fret that the country has lost the self-confidence to make basic moral judgments, to condemn evil. Soccer isn’t exactly pernicious, but it’s a symbol of the U.S. junking its tradition to “get with the rest of the world’s program.”
There are many conservatives who hate relativism, consider the French wussy, and still adore soccer. But it’s not a coincidence that the game has become a small touchstone in this culture war.
III.
I wish that my side, the yuppie soccer fans, were blameless victims in these culture wars. But I’ve been around enough of America’s soccer cognoscenti to know that they invite abuse. They are inveterate snobs, so snobbish, in fact, that they think nothing of turning against their comrades. According to their sneering critique, their fellow fans are dilettantes without any real understanding of the game; they are yuppies who admire soccer like a fine slab of imported goat cheese; they come from neighborhoods with spectacularly high Starbucks-per-capita, so they lack any semblance of burning working-class passion.
This self-loathing critique can be easily debunked.
I’ve seen the counterevidence with my own eyes. In the spring of 2001, the U.S. national team played Honduras in Washington’s Robert Francis Kennedy stadium. This vital World Cup qualifying match had generated the packed, exuberant stadium that the occasion deserved. Fans wore their nation’s jersey. Their singing and stomping caused the steel and concrete to undulate like the Mexican wave. In a country with lesser engineering standards, it would have been time to worry about a stadium collapse. On the field, stewards scampered to pick up scattered sneakers. Fans had removed them and thrown them at the opposing goalkeeper, a small gesture of homage to the madness of HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS
Glasgow and the passion of Barcelona. They merci-lessly booed the linesman, softening him up by insult-ing his slut of a mother. It might not have quite ascended to the atmospheric wonders of a game played by the English national team, but it wasn’t far from that mark.
There is, however, an important di¤erence between a home game in London and Washington. The majority of English fans will root for England. In Washington, more or less half the stadium wore the blue-and-white Honduran jersey, and they were the ones who shouted themselves hoarse and heaved their shoes. The American aspiration of appearing in the World Cup rested on this game. But on that day, the Washington stadium might as well have been in Tegucigalpa.
Traveling through Europe, you hear the same complaint repeated over and over: Americans are so “hyper-nationalistic.” But is there any country in the world that would tolerate such animosity to their national team in their own national capital? In England or France or Italy, this would have been cause for unleashing hooligan hell.
Nor were the American fans what you’d expect of a hegemonic power. The Washington Post had published a message from the national soccer federation urging us to wear red shirts as a sign of support—and to clearly distinguish ourselves from the Hondurans. But most American soccer fans don’t possess a red USA jersey and aren’t about to go down to the sporting goods store to buy one. They do, however, own red Arsenal, Man U., and Ajax jerseys, or, in my case, an old Barcelona one, that they collected on continental travels. While we were giving a patriotic boost, we couldn’t help revealing our Europhilic cosmopolitanism.
I mention this scene because many critics of globalization make America the wicked villain in the tale.
They portray the U.S. forcing Nike, McDonald’s and Baywatch down the throats of the unwilling world, shredding ancient cultures for the sake of empire and cash. But that version of events skirts the obvious truth: Multinational corporations are just that, multinational; they don’t represent American interests or American culture. Just as much as they have changed the tastes and economies of other countries, they have tried to change the tastes and economy of the United States.
Witness the Nike and Budweiser campaigns to sell soccer here. No other country has been as subjected to the free flows of capital and labor, so constantly remade by migration, and found its national identity so constantly challenged. In short, America may be an exception, but it is not exceptionally immune to
globalization. And we fight about it, whether we know it or not, just like everyone else. N o t e o n S o u rc e s
There’s not much written on the connection between Serbian hooligans and the Balkan wars. As far as I know, the anthropologist Ivan Colovic is the only one to cover this ground. His work can be found in a translated collection, Politics of Identity in Serbia: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: New York University Press, 2002). Colovic mines obscure sources—pulp fiction, television shows, sports pages—and comes back with profound observations. Unlike many cultural critics, however, he has as good a grasp of reality as obtuse theory.
My chapter on Glasgow owes a huge debt to Bill Murray, an Australian academic, who has produced the two most rigorous histories of the Celtic-Rangers rivalry: The Old Firm: Sectarianism, Sport and Society in Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984) and The Old Firm in the New Age: Celtic and Rangers Since the Souness Revolution (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1998).
Some of my anecdotes in this chapter come from Stuart Cosgrove’s Hampden Babylon (Edinburgh: Canongate
