Victory euphoria in France at the end of the 1998 World Cup.
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France’s recent footballing
successes have been hailed as victories over racism, but discrimination lingers on
 Writing in the liberal English national
newspaper The Guardian after the French World Cup victory in 1998, Nick Fraser suggested
that “no man or woman really believed in a multicultural France… French people probably
merely wanted foreigners to be more like themselves.”
His remark seemed to fly in the face of France’s cup-winning exuberance. Just as
major sporting tournaments offer some of the last spaces in which notions of identity
and nation can be ritually expressed and celebrated, victory can also seem to breach,
or even dissolve, racial differences within a country. And the French national team’s
achievements in winning the World Cup and Euro 2000 were widely credited as such
a triumph over traditional, culturally homogenous nationalism.
The French national team which achieved these feats displays an incredible diversity,
with many of its stars born outside of metropolitan France, including Marcel Desailly,
Patrick Vieira and Lilian Thuram. Others like Youri Djorkaeff, Thierry Henry, the
talismanic Zinedine Zidane and the Championship Final scorers Sylvain Wiltord and
David Trezeguet, would qualify as what France’s Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the
extremist National Front party, would call “Français de souche récente,”
meaning that such players are not “real” Frenchmen because their parents were recent
migrants.
French Sports Minister Marie Georges Buffet stated in the aftermath of the Euro 2000
victory that the multi-ethnic side proved France had created a harmonious society
“that could do great things together.” The prominent presence of Arab and black citizens
among the celebrating crowds in the capital appeared to back Buffet’s point, especially
given that the French had previously suburbanized urban poverty and largely confined
its immigrant populations to the desolate banlieue ring surrounding Paris.
Notions of diversity, however, can still be seen as little more than a style of nationalism
that assimilates (rather than excludes) newcomers and insists on one universal sovereign
identity. What mattered in the victory party was that Arabs and black citizens were
cheering for a France whose identity had already been secured in their absence. Deeper
patterns of discrimination had certainly not been resolved.
Paris’ racially stratified geography was once again apparent the morning after, as
the same Arab and black citizens lauded as symbols of a new united France returned
to their homes on the outskirts of the city. Meanwhile, the multicultural band of
players who won the Euro 2000 trophy have now returned to luxury homes in Italy,
England and Germany where they play their club football—managed by white coaches,
paid by white directors and watched by white spectators.
The enduring
stereotypeof brain versus brawn
The pretext for these sporting
hierarchies may well be the culture of Europe’s former colonial powers, in which
white settlers ruled indigenous “coloured” populations on the basis of the supposedly
greater rationality of white people as against the sensuality, lack of emotional
restraint or intelligence of the “native.” The continuing power and resonance of
such notions were reflected in the interpretation of the outcome of Euro 2000 by
the left-wing French daily, Libération, which claimed that “France’s victory,
its secret, is without doubt based on the winning combination of two styles—physical
and technical.” Sadly, the metaphor ‘physical = black, technical = white’ is only
thinly disguised within such analyses, which do little to move beyond the racial
differences implicit within the concept of multiculturalism.
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