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The Pain In Spain
Spain won the Euro 2008 Championships, one of the better international football competitions of the past few years. There seems to be general delight in the press at the success of Europe's perennial underachievers: Despite boasting one of the continent's finest leagues and arguably its two best club sides in Barcelona and Real Madrid, Spain hadn't won a major title since 1964.
But why did sports reporters across the globe have to curse Spain's victory by claiming that it "united a divided nation?"
Yes, Spain is relatively divided: Basques and Catalans resent Madrid's status as national capital and call (violently, in the case of some Basquet-cases) for autonomy and independence. There are further divides between Catholic and Socialist Spain, following the reforming centre-left government's snipping of a mass of laws related to homosexual and women's rights.
But cast your mind back to the World Cup in 1998, when journalists strayed outside their brief and claimed that the victory of France's multiracial team meant that Old and New France were reconciled to one another at last.
Within four years, far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was voted into the run-off of France's Presidential elections. Three years after that, France erupted in the worst riots it had seen since 1968, as the inhabitants of the mostly immigrant housing estates fought police and destroyed property for weeks on end.
And last year, the forces of the conservative and radical left joined forces to oppose the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, who posed as a radical reformer, in one of the most bitter and divisive Presidential elections in decades. France continues to simmer. Youth unemployment has barely improved, social exclusion still festers and riots like those in 2005 feel as if they are only the thump of a truncheon on a racaille's head away.
Please don't wish this on Spain. Stick to congratulating the team on their victory, ladies and gentlemen of the press, and leave it to that!
