European Football and Collective Memory

W. Pyta, N. Havemann, W. Pyta, N. Havemann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137450159
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Is it possible for football matches or players to help forge a collective European identity? Pyta and Haverman seek to answer this question through a detailed analysis of how football is remembered across the continent. European Football and Collective Memory is the first book to deal with collective memory of football on a continental scale.

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Introduction: Football Memory in a European Perspective

Wolfram Pyta

The missing link in the European integration process

The historiography of European integration has traditionally mainly dealt with the forces profondes in politics, economy and the world of ideas that have led to the formation of the European Union (EU) in its present shape (Bitsch and Loth, 2007; Loth, 2008). Historians specialising in political ideas and political philosophy, as well as sociologists from the social constructivist school of thought, have scrutinised the roots and fundaments of the integration process. Therefore, the discursive origins of the European institutional arrangement belong to the favourite issues of researchers who take a close look at the history of contemporary Europe (Risse, 2004; Hörber, 2006). With the advent of the European single market and the introduction of a common currency, increased emphasis has been laid on the study of the economic factors of European integration (Thiemeyer, 2010). And since the 1990s, the discipline of European Studies has known a significant ‘Europeanisation turn’, with a strong focus on the analysis of the processes through which European political dynamics are interiorised in policy-making or preference formation at the national level (Ladrech, 1994; Börzel, 1999; Featherstone and Radaelli, 2003; Ladrech, 2010).

One conclusion that the increasingly diverse research strands on all aspects of top-down and bottom-up dynamics of European integration and their rich publication output seem to agree upon is that the ‘missing link’ in an overall remarkably successful integration process is collective identity. Cultural sociology has shown that successful community building must produce practice-relevant patterns of meaning (Giesen, 1999; Giesen and Eder, 2001), and there is no doubt that the European project does not seem to have produced such patterns of meaning. Statements on the lack of a ‘European demos’, the insufficiency of ‘European narratives’ or of the absence of a genuine European ‘public sphere’ for want of genuinely European political parties or pan-European media have even entered the mainstream of political discourse and have become conventional wisdom in speeches and editorials.

What research on European integration has mostly neglected or underestimated, however, are the often unintended social and cultural practices that have contributed and are contributing to give the European project the dimension of a cultural community project. It is perfectly possible, especially given the present severe crisis of the EU, that it is precisely such practices, experienced and internalised in everyday life outside the realms of politics and economy, that may lend genuine stability to the European project beyond institutional action.

The research in this book on the collective memory of European football not only adopts a change of perspective but also applies a conceptual refinement. It concentrates on ‘Europeanisation’ in the sense of those soft forces which provide cultural substance to the integration process (Risse, 2004, pp. 166–171; Demossier, 2007, pp. 58–62). Methodologically, this means that such ‘soft’ Europeanisation processes are described with a historical and systematic approach which has proven its effectiveness in the humanities and social sciences. This approach is used by qualitative-oriented cultural sociologists, by political scientists who are aware of historical developments and, quite naturally, by cultural historians. Against this backdrop it is not surprising that all scientific contributions to this book also use this approach. They reveal that historians, political scientists and sociologists can build up productive cooperation, particularly in analysing Europeanisation processes.

Competing identity layers

European community building has always had to compete with two other cultural codes: the concept of nation and the concept of ‘the West’ or a Western hemisphere.

The concept of nation is by no means an outdated model of community creation that reached its peak in the nineteenth century. Even after 1945, it has continuously proved its strong capacity to forge collective identity. In all European states the nation continues to be the primary framework of allegiance and a major instance of socialisation. As a result, it both overlaps and partly blocks the construction of a European identity (Dell’Olio, 2005).

The relationship between the construction of a European identity and the recourse to a universalistic code is not free of tension either. The reason is that universalistic values as they were put down, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are clearly based on assumptions, norms and beliefs that are rooted in Western, or transatlantic, culture or ‘civilisation’. They are transatlantic in the sense that they have their foundations both in the cultural heritage of Europe and in norms and traditions that became sustainably effective in the USA and were, due to the cultural hegemony of the USA after 1945, successfully exported to all parts of the world, including of course Europe. It is therefore difficult to claim that there are European core values which, from a normative point of view, would be substantially different from Western values (Grillo, 2007, pp. 72–73; for a master narrative on German history, cf. Winkler, 2006).

Consequently, the construction of a genuine European identity is a very ambitious project which is made even more difficult by other factors. The EU as the organisational core of the European project has not succeeded in providing its institutions with a symbolic added value. Like all democratically legitimised institutions, they would have a significant symbolic potential if they were able to condense political and cultural guiding principles that underpinned their creation (Melville, 2001) or to corroborate their legitimacy by efficient staging or self-projection of their actions (Pyta, 2011). Moreover, the construction of specific temporality will always be successful if institutions manage to create a founding myth about their own origins. But unfortunately, Europe is miles away from the ability to create such a founding myth which would be the historical fundament or pillar of Europeanisation (Mayer and Palmowski, 2004, p. 580).

As a result, European institutions seem to be both unwilling and incapable of providing any appealing offers pertaining to the affective dimension of citizenship. They do not touch European citizens emotionally and therefore fail to induce the crucial patterns of identification that are summed up in the Aristotelian notion of philia and that are considered essential for the sustainable functioning of the polity. One of the reasons for this lack of visibility and symbolic power of the European institutions is the complicated multilevel system of the EU, where a large number of players compete for decision-making power and public attention. Another reason is the strong focus of the European institutions on economic and financial issues since the construction of the European Single Market and the introduction of the common currency. As a result, the institutions of the EU have been unable to challenge the ‘emotional monopoly held by the nation-state’ (Sonntag, 2011). As Ernest Renan famously said in 1882, ‘a Zollverein is not a fatherland’ (Renan, 1996).

Football in European memorial culture

Collective myths and narratives need to be rooted in a shared memory. Given the incapacity of the EU to produce a binding common narrative, it is not surprising that a genuine European memory culture does not exist.

For a long time it was assumed that an increasingly converging, mutually acceptable interpretation of National Socialism and the Holocaust could become the most important historical-political element on which a European post-war narrative or identity could be founded. However, this assumption, or hope, was very much a Western European one. The experience after the collapse of the communist dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe shows to what extent memory cultures in Europe are still framed nationally. For the states of the former Eastern Bloc, the historical-political debate on the experience under communist rule clearly had a higher priority than remembering the National Socialist crimes (Bauerkämper, 2012). Furthermore, the question must be asked as to whether a ‘negative memory’ drawn from the experiences with dictatorships of different sorts can actually be an appropriate and suitable base for a cultural European identity of Europe (Bauerkämper, 2012, p. 393). Historical-political discourse that is overloaded with normative moral exhortations has at best limited social impact and at worst contributes to turning Europe into a continent of a plurality of ‘painful pasts’ (Mink et al., 2007). It is therefore advisable to explore less normative cultural practices with regard to their potential of producing pan-European narratives.

Football is one of the practices that fit well into the recent research agenda of ‘Europeanisation of life worlds’ (Niemann, Garcia and Grant, 2012, p. 5). The reason for the growing research interest in football is the fact that it is a cultural phenomenon which gives expression to configurations of meaning in a very practical way (Pyta, 2006, p. 2). Among all kinds of sport, football has by far the biggest power for community building because this game is solidly anchored as a classical spectator’s sport and as a form of popular culture that has become premium media content. As a result, when we are looking for cultural practices that are a very important part of daily life for a vast majority of Europeans, football imposes itself as a revealing object of study (Mayer and Palmowski, 2004, pp. 581–582).

In other words, football is a trans-European cultural practice that was not artificially conceived by marketing strategists with the aim of promoting the European project on the cultural level. But does football’s community-building potential actually target Europe as a level of identification? Is it not much more powerful in providing space and opportunity for the consolidation or celebration of national and regional communities? Is football not, in a rationalised world of closely linked states and economies, one of the last remaining ‘playgrounds’ on which individuals can release and display patriotic emotions in the public space? These questions show that it is far from certain whether football, whenever it serves as projection screen for identity construction, actually also contributes to European identity.

In order to explore this question more thoroughly, it is necessary to identify criteria against which football’s contribution to European identity construction can be assessed. One of the most promising conceptual approaches in this respect is the theory of collective memory, which is now well established in the cultural sciences (Assmann, 1992; Ricoeur, 2000; Giesen, 2004; Assmann, 2006). Since communities are founded on the construction of collective images of history, the fundamental question is whether there is, or is not, a shared football memory on a distinctly European level.

It was the French historian Pierre Nora who first pointed out that shared memory requires communicative focal points. Particularly in times of mass media and communication overload, such points of reference are necessary memory landmarks that attract attribution of meaning by their symbolic and communicative capacity (Bauerkämper, 2012, pp. 41–52). Nora named these memorial reference points lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) and he included in this concept not only geographical place, but also persons, events, monuments or even pieces of art that have the potential to become bearers or supports of collective memory (Nora, 2001).

Hence, the main research question that underpins the different chapters of this book is: are there lieux de mémoire which have been established by European football and which have become the object of attributions of meaning with a genuinely European dimension? Spontaneously, one might be tempted to give a negative answer, as the overwhelming majority of potential candidates seem to be firmly owned by national discourses of memory.

Take, for instance, the former Wankdorf-Stadion in Bern, where the German national team won its first World Cup in 1954, which seems to be a purely national site of memory. The same applies to 17 October 1973, when the Polish national team qualified for the 1974 World Cup against the ‘mother country of football’ in Wembley (Blecking, 2012). Or to the Andalusian city of Seville, which hosted to the legendary World Cup semi-final between France and Germany in 1982 and whose name has become a meaningful lieu de mémoire in French national memory.

European sites of football memory do not impose themselves. They are not marked in red on the map. And they suffer from the tendency of traditional historiography to favour so-called ‘high culture’ over popular culture. Even the editors of the commendable book on ‘European sites of memory’ (Europäische Erinnerungsorte), an ambitious initiative of 1,000 pages in three volumes with over 120 entries by authors from over 15 countries, could not – or did not want to – identify any football sites of memory that would have been so unambiguously European as to be included in their collection (den Boer et al., 2012).

In other words, the identification of genuinely European sites of memory from the international history of football is a demanding endeavour: just as the simple addition or juxtaposition of national memories does not lead to the formation of a European commonality, transnationality is not the same as Europeanness (König, 2008, 22).

The transformation of football through the media

There is a consensus in academic research that collective memory is always the result of a successful communication process. If football events are to be attributed a genuinely European meaning, they must necessarily have been made the objects of a Europe-wide communication process. They need to have become transnational media events (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Couldry, Hepp and Krotz, 2010).

As mentioned above, it is difficult to claim that there is today a European public sphere. And even if one accepts the hypothesis that a European public sphere ‘is still in the stage of emergence’ (Kaelble, 2010, p. 37), one would have to admit that this emerging sphere is an unstructured and uninstitutionalised one. What then could be an indicator that would enable us to maintain the thesis that there is a common communicative space across Europe that is capable of producing truly European media events?

If we consider the public sphere as an observatory sphere, in which the public is the anonymous observer that functions as a monitoring instance (Trenz, 2005, pp. 46–51), we have to acknowledge that football is a particularly privileged field of pan-European discourse. Hardly any other object in everyday life is characterised by the same dynamics of observation: since the European cup competitions have put ‘Europe’ on the football agenda in the 1950s, mass media in all European countries report on European football with increasing intensity and sense of detail. Although empirically documented studie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Football Memory in a European Perspective 1
• 2 How are Football Games Remembered? Idioms of Memory in Modern Football 18
• 3 Negotiating the Cold War? Perspectives in Memory Research on UEFA, the Early European Football Competitions and the European Nations Cups 40
• 4 UEFA Football Competitions as European Sites of Memory – Cups of Identity? 64
• 5 The Contribution of Real Madrid’s First Five European Cups to the Emergence of a Common Football Space 85
• 6 Football and the European Collective Memory in Britain: The Case of the 1960 European Cup Final 101
• 7 Erecting a European ‘Lieu de mémoire’? Media Coverage of the 1966 World Cup and French Discussions about the ‘Wembley Goal’ 119
• 8 George Best, a European Symbol, a European Hero? 139
• 9 Heysel and its Symbolic Value in Europe’s Collective Memory 152
• 10 Football Sites of Memory in the Eastern Bloc 1945–1991 171
• 11 Rituals and Practices of Memorial Culture in Football 185
• Index