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17 Chapter 1 Yet Another American Exceptionalism: The Minor Role of Counter-Cosmopolitan Fan Behaviour in North American Venues Compared to Their Salient Quotidian Existence in Europe’s Soccer Stadiums Andrei S. Markovits In this chapter I will continue to compare Europe and America, a topic that has been central to my work for decades. I will look at the following fascinating puzzle: soccer stadiums in many European countries continue to remain cauldrons of racism, xenophobia, and physical assault, whereas comparable phenomena remain virtually unknown among North American spectators. Can this really be? Why are physical violence, racist invectives , and abusive language and behaviour among spectators of North American major team sports much rarer and less salient than in Europe? What renders this discrepancy so interesting is the fact that by virtually all statistical measures, these European countries exhibit a much lower level of violence than does the United States. The question, of course, is why do we see such a sports exception in terms of the norms of violence governing the public cultures on these two continents? Clearly, in all competitive endeavours such as agonistic team sports, every team’s supporters will do their best to become “the twelfth man,” to use the world of football and soccer, or “the sixth man” in basketball, or “the seventh man” in ice hockey. Spectators will do pretty much anything to get into an opponent’s head, to get under her or his skin, to render her or him insecure. This constitutes the very essence of fandom. But why has such partisanship come to include violence as routine in Europe and not in the United States, an otherwise more violent society? In a historically informed comparison, I will propose a few hypotheses as plausible reasons for this fascinating discrepancy. To be sure, I fully believe that sports, on balance, have performed an enlightening function in human history, that precisely by dint of their Chapter 1 18 inherently competitive and agonistic nature, they foster a profound meritocracy that few other venues in social life do. And as I have argued emphatically in my book Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture, co-authored with Lars Rensmann, I firmly believe sports foster a cosmopolitanism that is an indispensable ingredient to all the good that the editors of this volume believe sports to have. Indeed, my chapter’s second argument consists precisely in the feting of just such cosmopolitanism by contrasting favourably the largely non-violent and nonracist discourses and demeanors of North American sports spectators with their European counterparts. But alas, just like in most realms of human activity, so too in sports do cosmopolitanism and inclusiveness meet with resistance by forces that could best be characterized by what Kwame Anthony Appiah has so aptly termed “counter-cosmopolitanism” (2007, 137– 53). Newcomers, challengers, immigrants, and “alien” languages are often met with ridicule, as well as harsh, hostile, or even violent reactions by the natives. Since cultural changes inevitably imply some threat to entrenched identities, such changes exact tensions and defensive responses. Nowhere is this clearer than in the world of sports, since adversity, opposition, competition , contest and thus conflict—in short, sports’ inherent agonistic if not necessarily antagonistic nature—are the most essential markers of identities . Without them, sports do not exist. By their very nature, by demanding winners and losers, sports possess a zero-sum essence that extols tensions, rewards the victors and punishes the vanquished. One of the characteristics of any entrenched sports culture is its initial suspicion of and hostility toward any newcomers from within the sport itself , and by a rival sport. In both cases, the established sport perceives the intra- or inter-sport newcomer as inferior in any number of ways. First, the newcomer lacks toughness, and is not sufficiently manly. For example, “true” English and Scottish football supporters perceive continental players and others hailing from outside the British Isles as weak “divers” who “feign injury”—in short, they are not as manly and tough as “real” footballers ought to be. Northern Europeans see Latin American and Southern European soccer players as “fakers,” “frauds,” and “sissies.” Or, reflect on how Canadian hockey fans and self-appointed guardians of the game, even beyond the provocative showmanship of Don Cherry, have continued to belittle the skill and very presence of European NHL players by calling them “soft.” And to millions of “manly” sports fans of the North American Big Four, soccer is basically a sport for patsies...

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