It is a beautiful game

In June 1969 a second hotly contested World Cup qualifying match between Honduras and El Salvador was played in near riot conditions, with violence between fans and players spilling on to the pitch. Shortly afterwards the Salvadorian armed forces started to strike targets within Honduras, and what’s often described as “The Football War” broke out.

This incident, which took place over 40 years ago, is often quoted as a counter-example when anyone argues that international football promotes peace and harmony among the nations – yet what’s striking about it is that it’s pretty much a one-off. While there have been innumerable near-riots and many ugly incidents of racial intolerance in club-level football, international games – especially those played between national teams – have been amazingly free of such incidents.

This fact is especially surprising when you consider that the purpose of these matches is to establish rankings among countries – and what is potentially more inflammatory for a thin-skinned patriot than to discover that his father/motherland has been eliminated by a traditional rival or hated neighbour? But that isn’t generally what happens, and the current World Cup provides many examples.

Walking past a bar in Paris yesterday during the France-South Africa match (in which les Bleus were playing for a last slim chance to stay in the competition) I heard a great cheer of triumph from the assembled TV-watchers. Assuming that France had at last taken the lead, I looked in at the screen to check my supposition, and was amazed to see that the goal they had been cheering was actually South Africa’s – the first of the match. This morning’s newspapers offered the explanation that the France team had been behaving so disgracefully and playing so poorly that the fans were hoping rather for a South African triumph which at least would have enabled the host nation to qualify for the next round.

In fact, the World Cup offers a chance for nations to experience themselves, and each other, in quite a different way from the usual economic and productivist perspective of the media. Tiny Slovenia suddenly becomes the equal of the United States, while South Africa sends France back home to lick their wounds. Even semi-pariah nations enjoy their moments of respect and glory: Serbia, the scars of the ruinous conflicts of the 1990s still far from healed, overcomes Germany, and North Korea is able for a moment at least to challenge mighty Brazil.

And for the first time in many years the rest of the world sees North Koreans as footballers like any others, with their families at home cheering them on and their hopes and fears, their challenges and disappointments – rather than as the figures of fun or horror which are usually presented.

The Ivory Coast, normally associated with an ongoing civil war and massive official corruption, meets Portugal, ten times more affluent even in the midst of its debt crisis, and they play a good-humored game which leaves them equal (0-0) in a way which in the “real world” they perhaps never will be.

Isn’t there a glimpse here of a world which might be but which we rarely experience, where people are valued for themselves, not for their material assets or their economic potential, and where passion, skill, teamwork and creativity are enough to extricate oneself from the most hopeless situation? If football is a metaphor for life it’s a very optimistic one, and everyone, winners and losers alike, will go home from South Africa with a little more faith in humanity.

Liberation day

Looking for something cheerful to write about amid the welter of crashing currencies and street rioting, I decided to search for May 9 national festivals around the world - and found two of them. Today is Europe Day - the 60th anniversary of the day when, in a bombed and ruined post-WWII Europe, French Prime Minister Robert Schuman proposed the Coal and Steel Community which would later become the European Union.

It's also the anniversary of the liberation of Jersey and Guernsey. These small islands, part of Britain but geographically much closer to France and nowadays known mainly as low-tax offshore banking centers, were the only portions of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans during World War 2.

So the theme of war and Europe seem to be inescapable today: even though fewer than 10% of the population are old enough to remember images like these, they're burned into our collective memory, and kept alive by movies and media - not to mention the education system. The Nazi period remains a favorite part of the school curriculum in England and many other European countries, and if one goes back a bit further, the entire history of Europe is one of war, man-made famine and brutal subjugation - virtually everyone has oppressed or been oppressed by their neighbors at some point.

So now we're supposed to lie down and love each other, because a bunch of politicians, or worse still, bankers tell us so? Many political parties across the continent, including majority parties in some countries (notably the UK) operate on the principle that international co-operation should be strictly limited to the pursuit of national self-interest, and that euro-idealism is half-baked, misguided and doomed to fail.

Yet beyond the pragmatism of the European venture - many countries inhabiting the same small continent need to co-operate to survive - there's the simple fact that the European races are fundamentally the same race. Almost all European languages are descended from the same origin - which in turn is also linked to the infamous "swastika" symbol.

The term "swastika"simply denotes a lucky or auspicious object in ancient Sanskrit - the closest relative to the proto-Indo-European language from which modern French, German, English, Russian etc. ultimately derive. The German National Socialists adopted this ancient symbol of harmony (rotating it "forwards") to represent the bogus Aryan/Nordic super-race from which they believed themselves to be descended.

And the idea that the Nazi period represents some kind of unique German propensity to trample over their peace-loving neighbors is equally bogus. As another German, Schiller, observed - whose words, set to music by a fellow-countryman, are the official anthem of the European Union - "Alle Menschen werden Brueder" (all people become brothers). And brothers are notorious for fighting one another.

The presence of the swastika symbol on innumerable statues of the Buddha throughout Asia reminds us that all divisions and categories of people are illusions and causes of suffering. European history, if it proves nothing else, is eloquent witness to that noble truth.