Barca

I am trying to prepare next week's lecture on cosmopolitanism for the course, but I keep getting distracted by thoughts of football, so I thought I'd purge them here before returning to the lecture. The game that is very much on my mind is that played between Barcelona and Liverpool earlier this week and I was trying to work out why I was so pleased that Liverpool had won the game. I am by no means a Liverpool fan but I was truly delighted that they beat Barca in their own back yard and I was wondering quite why this is the case. There are a mixture of footballing and political reasons involved and I think I ought to concentrate on the latter (fyi, I think Barca's style has become somewhat parodic and a little pointless, however beautiful it can occasionally be). More than most teams, Barca are desperate to convey the idea that they are much more than a football club and that supporting Barca involves buying into a wonderful set of shared values. This is enshrined in their slogan "Mes que un club", which you can see in the accompanying picture, at their Camp Nou stadium. These shared values are mainly to do with Barca being seen as the unfofficial national team of Catalonia and a form of memorialisation of the repression of Catalan identities under Franco, when support for Barca, especially against Real Madrid, was seen to be an outlet for that expression of national identity.

So what is Gallois's problem with all this then? After all, to be a football fan is to be a tribalist of some sort, but my issue with Barca is that their kind of nationalism represents a smug, self-satisfied form of provincialism which lies at the least pleasant end of Catalan identity politics. This kind of nationalism tends towards the exclusionary, especially in questions of language, which have a much deeper historical resonance than one might think. While one can understand the Catalan desire to promote their language in contradistinction to Castilian Spanish, I have a serious issue with the aside that has often been made to me that "Catalan is the superior language because it is the purest Latin tongue". Now on one level this is really stupid, since languages are in the end neither superior nor inferior to others, but it also masks a subtle form of racism, since the allegation being alluded to here is that Castilian is a language that was corrupted by Arabic, whereas the brave Catalans successfully resisted Islamic influences on their society and their language. That actually happens to be untrue, but it is widely believed, and it's for that reason that I restrained some of my better instincts and managed to cheer even a Craig Bellamy goal on Wednesday night...