So me and my 4-month-old son have been sitting at home these past few days as I do my stay-at-home dad thing, and have spent some quality time watching the European soccer championship tournament on ESPN. There have been some great, exciting matches.
Now what could any of that possibly have to do with nation-states and geopolitics? Well, this: I still remember not long ago a liberal acquaintance of mine on a discussion list writing that some day we would see "the end of the nation-state." (She wrote that both in the sense that she believed it would inevitably come, and she wrote it hopefully--she wanted it to happen).
But when you watch Euro2008, you see what you always see when you view these international matches--thousands of Dutch and Swedish and Italian and Turkish and Swiss soccer fans screaming and rooting uproariously for their national teams, getting delirious when their heroes win, and horribly downcast when they fall short. Before the games they belt out their national anthems with gusto. During the games they display their national colors and wave their nation's flag. What is this? Simple: nationalism. And it ain't going away anytime soon, and neither, then, is the nation-state. Do you really think Germans will want Frenchmen to have a say in how they are governed? No, and I don't think the creation of the EU and the euro changes that. The fact remains that European nations, while wisely using innovations such as the EU to improve free trade and better economic relations in Europe, have not ceded, at all, the ultimate sovereignty belonging to their governments and nation-states.
Just watch the nationalism, the full-throated singing of the national anthems from thousands of a national soccer team's partisans, at these Euro2008 games. And you won't be surprised at that.
