From the Washington Post:
What France and Belgium’s World Cup success says about European immigration
By Afshin Molavi
July 6Afshin Molavi is co-director of the emerge85 Lab and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
In the future, determination of American immigration policy will be wholly outsourced to its rightful owners, immigrant People of Color who happen to look white, you deplorable racists you.
When the French national team electrified the world two decades ago with a 3-0 drubbing of powerhouse Brazil in the World Cup final, Kylian Mbappé had not yet even been born. …
That famous French squad that thrust the FIFA trophy into the air in Paris in 1998 was noted for its diversity. The French tricolors, it was said triumphantly at the time went from white, blue and red to “black, blanc, et beur” (black, white, and a term for Arabs of North African descent).
During the celebrations that ensued, French political leaders hailed the victory of “Les Bleus“ — as the national team is known — as not just a win on the football pitch, but a win for the “French model” of diversity and inclusion. The venerable Le Monde called the team a “symbol of the diversity and unity of the country.” Les Bleus cast a golden glow on France in that shining moment.
And having discovered the secret to World Domination — diversity — France has been unstoppable in soccer ever since.
No, wait, that actually didn’t happen. It turns out that soccer success is kind of a random, so the last three World Cup champs — Italy, Spain, and Germany — have been less diverse than had been expected after France’s 1998 triumph was the win that launched a thousand opeds about diversity, while France has since had all sorts of wacky ups and downs in the World Cup.
Among the less edifying subsequent Great Moments in French Multicultural Soccer include this all time classic from the final minutes of the 2006 Final in which superstar Person of Color / U-Boat Kapitan look-alike Zinedine Zidane self-destructed France’s chances:
By the way, the rumor that Zidane’s Algerian grandmother was awfully friendly with General Rommel is just a rumor. (In fact, I made it up.)
The Red Devils, like France’s Les Bleus, will not be able to solve their nation’s problems. But as Europe’s immigration debate heats up, the Belgian squad can point the way toward an ideal of successful, merit-based integration while boosting national pride as they play sublime soccer before billions of viewers.
Soccer is popular in part because of the individual matches’ high degree of randomness of results. So if semifinalist Croatia happens to win it all, will this lead to similar Deep Think pieces in the Washington Post about how the Croatian team, representing a country too poor to attract third world immigrants, enjoyed the advantages of homogeneity?
Probably not.
On the other hand, the overall winners of the World Cup aren’t terribly random in the macro sense. No African or Middle Eastern country has ever come close to winning. In the 2018 World Cup, for instance, the semifinalists are two largeish (France and England) and two smallish (Belgium and Croatia) European countries.
A more likely topic: Will the fact that all four semifinalists are European countries lead to op-eds about how this proves that nonwhites can only flourish in white run countries, therefore requiring Open Borders? This is a tricky one, but I suspect somebody out there somewhere has the tightrope-walking skills to pull it off. You’d have to start off with a long, long section about how the (rapidly receding) Colonial Era had somehow so debilitated Third World countries that, despite all their athletic talent, they can’t win at even a simple lowbrow game like soccer, so the only solution is to have everybody in the Global South move from their Tragic Dirt to the Magic Dirt of the Global North.
Or something. (Note: you probably shouldn’t explicitly mention Tragic/Magic Dirt. Just allude vaguely to these important concepts. And, especially, don’t capitalize the terms.) Like I said, it would be tricky but some bravura BS artist ought to be able to pull it off.
By Afshin Molavi
