Football and multiculturalism

The spanish newspaper El Pais brings today an interesting insight in what multiculturalism means for non-politicians. Even though I do not frequently read the sports pages, the headline of an interview to the dutch trainer of a spanish team called my attention: the Dutch likes to order, the Spanish likes to obey. Indeed, half way in the interview, philosophizing on the relation between players and trainers, the dutch trainer claims that he likes to play with teams down south and without stars, because then he will receive the attention that a trainer deserves. I presume that his perception of the spanish culture also make him happy at living in Spain, being Dutch. Which make me think in new reasons why so many retired old people from the north of europe like so much to move and live in the sunny towns of the south of Spain. Ageing in a society in which every young will boss you around is not such a beautiful perspective. Why to stay in rainy and bossy netherlands, if we can go to subservient and sunny spain?

Far too many parallels have been drawn by better writers than me in between football and politics, so I will not bother you with possible ramifications of this wonderful statement from that dutch trainer. But let's agree that the idea of southern, or latin countries being prone to authoritarism is one that runs deep both in (liberal and emancipated) north europe and in (corrupt and underdeveloped) southamerica. I will neither fall to the temptation of noting that every single prime minister of the netherlands in the last twenty years has profiled himself as a pater familias. More interesting, perhaps, is to think in the profiling that prominent politicians from the south have used. Can we really talk of subservient societies?

Lets start with the political landscape of few twenty years ago. There and then the picture was certainly appalling. Most of the countries of southamerica were under the boot of dictators. Even worse, dictators that successfully mixed the ideology of right wing with the values of the catholic orthodoxy, such as family, order and respect. We could say that precisely this dark chapter of history illustrate the view of our football trainer turned sociologist. How can not be subservient a society that bear decades of authoritarianism? But again, enlarging the time scale does bad for the analysis. What over the time before the dictators? Was southamerica not the beau of the european left wing? Don't we remember how the whole elite of north europe turned revolutionary admirers of the libertarian figures of Allende, for example? Was not, in the same decade, the revolution in Nicaragua a new breath in the libertarian cause? Or even today, when figures like Bachelet in Chile or Morales in Bolivia seems to rekindle the cause for the oppressed, the excluded and the tortured as viable leaders of a society, or when the iconic sub-comandante marcos still make the intellectuality of europe go gaga? So what are actually those societies in the supposedly subservient south? Libertarian people taking the future in their hands, or sheep following the first messianic leader that make it to the public arena?

I must conclude, once more, that society analysis is less prone to simplification than football. What is more spanish, one might ask, the boot of Franco or the individualism of Picasso and Dali? Or in the netherlands today, who is more representative, our stiff, young (and actually elected) prime minister, tireless champion of the mantra of law and order, or the still strong anarchic movement of squatters, emancipated prostitutes and vocal feminists?

I rather claim that our societies, in both sides of the Atlantic and the Ecuador keep their pendulous oscillation in between authority and emancipation. It might sound as a foregone conclusion now, but lets agree that describe spaniards as subservients and dutchies as bossy is as stupid as frame muslim as fanatics and danish as champions of the press freedom. Multiculturalism, that needed recognition of the existence of others, have blunted our capacity of analysis, and too frequently we fall prey of the easy cliché and the irresponsible analysis. The day that we will recognize the multiple layers coexisting in the idea that each individual has of his own culture we will be closer to a better functioning society. I keep on thinking that such a day is not that far away, but again, that might be falling in the cliché of wishful thinking. A sin that after all, belongs to my latin, and always positive, culture.