When is something English?
1 June 2008 – 11:29 am by Nathan Charlton
What criteria apply to an institution or individual to make them English? Does it involve a love of tea and fair play, an general feeling that Scots’ grievances are largely baseless or just English parentage? Is it ever possible to nail this stuff down?
There was a Big Ideas post a while ago that discussed football clubs and identity. This week the subject has moved on with the announcement that FIFA have proposed a “6+5″ rule for football clubs. (Stick with us if you have no interest in football, I’ll get on to a more general point soon enough). This would specify that whenever a football club fields a team, 6 of the eleven players that start must be eligible to play for the national team of the country in which the club resides. Supposedly this will address the problem of nations that have successful, but foreign-dominated, leagues not having good national sides (eg, England). (Quite why English players can’t get top level experience in other countries leagues, I’m not sure).
Now, as I’ve stated before, “English” club sides do not necessarily adhere strongly to an English national identity. Further to this, there was a possibility this month that should Cardiff City, a Welsh side, win the FA Cup they would have been entered into the UEFA Cup on account of winning an “English” cup. All very confusing. Perhaps the situation in the UK is an exception, a legacy of pre-FIFA “Home Country” arrangements.
But there is a more general point here. Models of nationhood and nationality differ significantly from one jurisdiction to another. For some the rule of jus sanguinis applies, others jus soli and in most a specific combination of the two. For some nations the concept of nationality is central to national identity: German nationality, for example, was expounded as an ideal based on jus sanguinis by Fichte long before there was a German state that could grant it. So what is being proposed is not a uniform, easily measurable thing. In fact when we do try to pin it down with rules, those rules are easily swept aside when convenient (a famous sporting case of this is that of Zola Budd).
I think that the impulse to tie these things down, as FIFA is attempting to do, is an aspect of human nature that is all too common but not always helpful. It is the impulse to universalise and make absolute issues that are in fact quite vague. Inevitably such restrictions keep us locked, by definition, into forms of organisation that might have been useful in the past but give us little room to change and grow in the future. The English Premier League is one that I would describe as post-national, it has moved to a different idea of identity that is more fluid and more accurately reflects modern British (I use that word advisedly) life.
The fact that it’s so bloody expensive to go and watch a game is a different (though, I’ll concede, related) matter.
Incidentally this subject came up at the excellent Café Philo at the Institut français, London, yesterday morning. Whilst talking about the possibility, or lack of, absolute morality, a contributor used the fact of so many foreign players in English football as an example of the folly of subscribing to universal laws (the gentleman concerned cited the European Convention on Human Rights, though I think that he meant the Bosman ruling, an interpretation of the EEC Treaty). My contention is that he was simply prioritising one universal (nationality) over another (freedom of movement), though I didn’t pipe up and say so as I should have.
2 Responses to “When is something English?”
The problem with English nationality is that it can’t be different from itself. Like Austrian nationality after 1918 and Turkish nationality after 1923, English nationality is the uncomfortable hole left at the centre after the collapse of an empire ruled from the centre.
As well as the vicious oppression of others on the basis of race and location, such empires also contained within them progressive seeds of transnationalism. To be a citizen of the commonwealth is to have some (but not all) of the rights and heredity of the English. To be a citizen of the commonwealth and anything but English is to be able to define yourself in terms of your difference from the Englishness (we speak a Jamaican form of English; we are Canadian, but French speaking; we are white natives of Africa…) but never quite able to define yourself or your culture entirely autonomously.
And it’s in this area of difference that the most vital and interesting aspects of English-speaking culture have emerged since the second world war. From Steel Pulse to Salman Rushdie, for English people in this period the most exciting culture has always been on the edge of national experience. And likewise for football, the ambiguity of a domestic league dominated by international players, with international support is what makes the Premier League the highly profitable global commodity it is.
By Danny Birchall on Jun 3, 2008
Danny’s comment reminded me of the apocryphal tale of the MEP and modern day pretender to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Otto von Habsburg. Once he was asked if he’d watched the recent Austria Hungary international football match. He replied, “Who were we playing?”
I wonder whether the same seeds of transnationalism that Danny refers to exist within the EU today?
By Nathan on Jun 4, 2008