It was inevitable that, sooner or later, someone in the Italian press/blogosphere would link Euro 2008 and the recent rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the Irish electorate.
Giordano Bruno Guerri, self-declared ‘anti-modernist’, blogger and journalist with il giornale, steps into the fray with a none-too-convincing argument on his blog.
Crudely put, he suggests that the enthusiasm shown for the European Championships offers a clue to the rejection of ‘Europe’. People’s identities revolve around their nationhood, the product of centuries of cultural accumulation, according to the blogger, who ten years ago (when it was neither fashionable or profitable, chimes the ghost of Myles Na Gcopaleen)founded the association Italiani Liberi, with the purpose of opposing the impositions of Europe. That’s why Euro 2008 is exciting, because we – he suggests – consider our identity on national levels before all else.
On face value there seems to be some sense in the footballing analogy, and particularly so in Italy – indeed, while in other countries the rejection of the Lisbon treaty made the top headlines, in Italy it was, albeit temporarily, sidelined by the important discussions as to whether Luca Toni’s goal against Romania was really off-side. Experts were called to voice their opinions on the main evening news, before turning to the ‘international news’ that was Lisbon’s downfall.
There are a couple of points to make, though, considering for a moment football as sufficiently robust to balance on its shoulders arguments about cultural identity.
The first is that football fandom, in terms of identity, naturally gains power the more local it becomes. For example, the refusal of Francesco Totti and Alessandro Nesta, two giants of Italian football, to continue playing for the national team has, on the whole, been respected because fans of their clubs have been vociferious in their support. For AS Roma fans it’s more important that Totti prolong his career playing for the club, rather than risking injury with the national team.
The second point, seemingly contradictory to the first, is that nothing succeeds like success. The two most popular clubs in Italy are, without a doubt, Juventus fc and Inter Milan – both of which have a huge fanbase, the majority of which are not based in their home towns (indeed, both clubs boast an impressive fanbase outside of Italy). Football fandom, in many cases, becomes an easily acquired badge of identity that has little to do with centuries of local culture, and everything to do with buying the latest away-strip from the club plc.
International football championships will always be exciting, based on local rivalries. But who’s to say that a European team playing against a Latin American side wouldn’t provoke similar passions in the globalised world. Build it and they will come, etc.
Football aside, Italy doesn’t lend itself well to the arguments that the ‘people’ favour the national over the European state, for the simple reason that there is – perhaps now more than at any time since the finish of the second world war – an ongoing debate over Italian national identity. Amongst the powerbrokers of the current government are two movements seeking autonomy from the Italian state – the lega nord and the Sicilian movement for autonomy. Lega members have taken to wearing ‘Padania is not Italy’ t-shirts, and presumably have thus found little to cheer about with Italy’s qualification for the quarter-finals of the Euro 2008 championships.
Giordano Bruno Guerri’s main argument, that the people in individual countries view the quickening pace of the European project with little affection may well be true, but not because they are opposed to assuming a European identity. Ask most of the Irish voters who opposed the Lisbon treaty if they consider themselves as Europeans, and this monkey bets they would answer yes. Motivations for rejecting the treaty are both as simple and complex as the reasons for choosing a team to support – and don’t have to revolve simply around a dogged determination to retain national identity above all else.
All this is to say that GBG’s arguments are about as convincing as the Luca Toni – Simone Perrotta combination up front, i.e not very (particularly when amongst GBG’s grievances with the EU is that it might regulate what constitutes sexual harassment, supposing that it’s identical from Trapani to Stockholm).
Meanwhile, there’s an interesting post from the Centre for the Study of Wider Europe‘s director Dr John O’Brennan (who has written a number of articles in the past for Three Monkeys Online), who suggests that one of the things taken for granted by the international press regarding Ireland’s referendum on the lisbon treaty, the fact that Ireland legally had to hold a referendum to ratify the treaty, is not true. You can read the post here