For all that was made of the ‘diversity’ of the French World Cup side, what was truly striking about the team that took to the field to face Italy in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium was its very lack of diversity. For all but three of the players who thundered on to the pitch to do battle with the Italians were black Frenchmen.
Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira, the Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines of the beautiful game (along with its now disgraced Algerian maestro, Zinedine Zidane), fought the good fight for France in a contest that ultimately favoured Italy — and that says as much about the changing face of modern Europe as it does about the game of football. For what we saw on the pitch on 9 July was a French side which showcased the true global ideal of integration, not so much through its representation of that ideal, as through its very subversion of it.
The setting couldn’t have been more dramatic — or poignant. Berlin’s Olympischer Platz once reverberated to the Sieg heils of the Third Reich and, as the venue in which Nazi Germany staged the 1936 Olympics, was the place in which an important piece of political history was made when the black American sprinter Jesse Owens exploded the myth of Aryan genetic superiority with his four gold-medal-winning performance before an annoyed Adolf Hitler. Hitler despised black men as much as he did French men, and nothing stuck in his craw quite like the post-first world war decision to station African troops in the demilitarised Rhineland as part of the French entente occupation of the territory mandated by the Treaty of Versailles. Even more intolerable for ol’ Schickelgruber must have been the mulatto offspring that sprouted so abundantly from contacts between those same troops and local German women. Thus nothing could have been more fitting — and telling of how much time has passed — than what transpired in that same historic venue on 9 July 2006.
Black Frenchmen, it seems to me, have always appeared more comfortable draping themselves in the Tricolor and bellowing ‘La Marseillaise’ than black Englishmen have been with the Union Jack and ‘God Save the Queen’. This may be down to what these anthems and ensigns signify to their respective peoples. ‘La Marseillaise’ is an anthem that manages to be both fiercely nationalistic yet ‘global’, whereas ‘God Save The Queen’ has never quite convinced its erstwhile colonial subjects that it embraced them in its stanzas. It is an introspective, somewhat parochial song whereas ‘La Marseillaise’ once provided the tune to which the anthem of the international revolutionary movement, ‘The Internationale’, was set. It is a song of the world while still being powerfully and uncompromisingly French, whereas the British national anthem has never been anything more than the national paean of an island off the western shores of Europe. This is an important distinction that explains the relationship which black people on either side of the English Channel have with their adoptive homelands and points the way forward to a truly inclusive, yet singular and ‘national’, planetary civilisation.
The sheer unselfconsciousness and spontaneity of the ethnic composition of the French side represents a rebuke to the coercive, though well-intentioned, efforts at imposing integration and diversity in a vain attempt to produce authentically ‘multicultural’ societies. In its dogged insistence that all its citizens subordinate their respective national identities to an overarching French personage, that country, for all its missteps, occasionally attains the true ideals of integration that have eluded those states which sought to bring it about through politically correct coaxing, if not coercion. In the French approach there lies the seed of what the world at large should aim for. Rather than attempting to embrace all cultural values as equally valid (they’re not), this world should formulate one single, uniform and potent cultural standard to which all differences should be subordinate. There needs to be one global identity that derives its core ideals from the best values of the Western democratic tradition and to which all of the peoples of this world should pledge allegiance. There can be no more concessions to the intolerance, schizophrenia and extremisms of the Occident. It should be clear by now that in today’s world the basic values of Western liberal democracy are, in fact, superior to those of ‘Islam’, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America. The West’s ideals are not artefacts of the ‘white race’ but have evolved through its contacts with the rest of the world and have absorbed the useful within them to become the best of the world. Mankind should now agree upon this core global standard and urge universal conformity with it.
The continuing post-9/11 tensions between civilisations — not the least of which were witnessed in the recent riots across France — cannot be prevented from sliding into outright war unless humanity adopts the model that was played out on the pitch in Berlin. We must not force integration or slide into self-segregation, but instead create a world in which cultural variety can exist within a single, global Western civilisational norm. The French side was not selected to make a political point. It was pure Darwinian natural self-selection in which the best possible team France could field happened largely to consist of black men. They weren’t picked because of the way they looked and what presumed ‘message’ that would send to the bigots in the football stands and beyond about the importance of ‘stamping out racism’. They wouldn’t have come this far if they had. Indeed, during the course of World Cup 2006 we have witnessed the ‘darker’ nations of the South (Africa, South America, the Middle East, Asia) being systematically swept aside by the tactically and strategically superior North, and the team that came excruciatingly close to hoisting the trophy largely comprised black members of that very Northern world.
This offers clear proof of the basic superiority of the Western societal and civilisational model without being proof of any racial superiority. That very organisational and operational genius of the North which was so irrefutably showcased during the tournament should now cascade down into the South to transform the economies, societies and values of that part of the world. And the emissaries who should lead that effort should be precisely those political, business and scientific representatives of the black North whose athletic counterparts put on a masterful display on France’s behalf that will continue to provide — Italy’s victory notwithstanding — the most memorable single set of images of the World Cup.
Paul Bita’s blog is www.afristok-7.blogspot.com
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