In Search of Personal and National Identity

The national promises protection of the particular identity against the alienating consequences of turbo capitalism. Especially in the Third World, development has for long time been understood as dialectic contradiction between public action and commercial logic. Sport, however, may call this dualism in question.

Globalization, nation and sport
Sport is normally regarded as a typical means of nation building. Sport produces records for the nation and makes it possible to find ones place in the international ranking table of medals. Sport makes people wave the national flag and sing the national anthem in the case of victory. Sport produces the successful athlet as national hero, whom people can hail and with whom they can identify. Sport means organizing national Olympic committees and building national stadiums. By sport festivals, national unity is displayed. Sport gives body and face to national identity: "We are ourselves."

However, the Olympic type of sport, normally used for this purpose, is in itself a part of global neocolonialization. Competitive sport of elite achievement practices a worldwide standardization which is reproduced on the national level - and vice versa. "We do it like the others."

This contradiction seems to be true not only for the field of sport itself, but the dialectics between the national state and globalization more generally does not describe the actual situation sufficiently . This is still more important as in some parts of the world, especially in Africa south of the Sahara, post-colonial states actually are breaking down, synchronically with the breakdown of the order of the capitalist market. In large areas, the state - once modelled after Western patterns - has disappeared, giving way to local war lords and "revolutionary" armies without any program, to tribal unities, to mafias, drug dealers's and mercenary gangs. Tribalization of a violent type is threatening. The actual alternatives seem rather to be between state building and community building.

These inner contradictions oblige us to question deeper into the connection between nation building, bodily activity and personal human feeling. What happens when we meet alterity? How do sameness and otherness play together? And how is identity related to alterity, to alienation - and to concrete bodily movement and sport?

Democracy as culture of difference and belonging
Sport has a social and psychological dimension of identity building. When people are playing the game, they form social patterns expressing who "we" are. Identity develops by nostrification: "This is us". If democracy is a culture of difference and belonging, the aspect of social identity is common to sport and democracy.

Nostrification in sports is, however, not just a game, and identity in sports is neither only harmless, nor has it automatically democratic consequences. In Copenhagen, one has experienced soccer violence as late as May 2000, between Turkish and British supporters. Racist violence has entered into single fan clubs of Danish local teams, too. On the Balkan, sports and fan clubs have even been transformed into slaughtering units of the genocid. Playing the game is not innocent.

This obliges to more careful differentiations. Otherwise one may fall into the trapps of the Olympic rhetorics, overemphasizing sport - "the one sport" - as an automatic way towards identity, friendship of the peoples and world peace. Indeed, sport and identification can be linked to each other in very different ways. This can be illustrated by three situations of saying "we" in Danish sports and their - in some way or other - journalistic reflection.

Different ways of saying "we" in sports
(1.) The first situation may seem well-known to any observer of the world of spectator sports. A Danish boy of twelve years experiences the European soccer championship in 1992, which brought Danish football to the top.

"We travelled to Copenhagen some hours before the match should start, so we got some good places in front of the large screen which was erected on the place of the city hall. At first we sat down on the asphalt and regarded the singing roligans (fans), but later on we had to rise because more and more people arrived ... After 19 minutes, the first goal was shot. The mood raised extremely high, and the jubilation became wilder and wilder. When the half-time came, the atmosphere had calmed down a little bit, but there was all the time a mood of festivity and enthusiasm.

When 31 minutes of the second half-time were played and the second goal was shown on the screen, the mood really was up to the heat of cooking. A total chaos seemed to break out, and in the midst of the crowd one really had to take care in order not to fall and to be kicked down. Only with great difficulty I could keep myself uprised. But even if it became dangerous at last, this was one of the greatest experiences I have had in my life."

The soccer victory and especially the fact that the final match was won against Germany, became a national event in Denmark. Its significance transgressed by far the limits of sport. Some observers related this triumph in sports to the referendum the same year, when the majority of the Danish voted "No" against the Maastrich treaty of the European Union.

(2.) The second story is about quite another type of movement - the Danish tradition of gymnastics. In 1931, the Danish gymnastic leader Niels Bukh organized a tour around the world with his gymnastic team. This- is what he experienced in Korea, which at that time was under Japanese military rule.

"Our good reminiscences from China and Korea are related to crowds of people and Danish flags at the reception at the railway stations of Mukden and Seoul and to childrens' choirs singing Danish songs there. When we demonstrated our gymnastics in the stadium of Seoul and let our flag down in front of 35 000 amazed people who were jubilating for Denmark, and when the large students' choir was singing \'King Christian' (the Danish national anthem), we all felt stronger than ever before how wonderful ist was to be Danish and to serve Denmark."

The Niels Bukh gymnastics had its roots in the democratic farmers' folkelig gymnastics, but was in its new form met by an especially warm welcome in Japan as well in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Niels Bukh was himself- impressed by the Germany of 1933 which he, though not exactly a National Socialist himself, regarded as a model for Denmark.

(3.) The third situation differs fundamentally both from the sportive and the gymnastic pattern. The story is about a tug-of-war contest, which was the high-light of Fagenes Fest, the workers' "festival of professions" in Copenhagen 1938. The Danish daily "Social Demokraten" described it like this:

"There were gigantic achievements. The blacksmiths quickly defeated the bakers, and the tailors could not stand long time against the coal-heavers who weighed at least twice as much. But there arose a gigantic competition between the dairy workers and the brewery men - and much to the distress of the agitators for abstinence, the beer won. The final was between the brewers and the coalmen, and here the brewery workers had 'to bite the dust'. 'This is not at all surprising', said the captain of the coal-heavers. 'You only carry the beer, but it is us who drink it.'"

The "Festival of the Professions" started in 1938 as an annual sport festivity of the Danish workers' movement, stimulated by similar arrangements in France and Germany. It combined sports events with more carnivalistic competitions like running-matches of domestic servants with buckets and scrubbers, going-matches of pottery workers with piles of plates on their heads, hammer cast of blacksmiths and obstacle races of socialist scouts eating cream puffs on their way. The games had not only -a joking character, as the story tells, but during the Second World War when Nazi German held Denmark occupied, Fagenes Fest developed towards a demonstration of national togetherness. As this, the festival attracted the largest spectators-hip in its history.

Production, integration, communication
In the three described situations of sport, very different patterns of identification or nostrification become visible, different ways of "we"-building and belonging.

(1.) One pattern is characterized by competition and result, and what comes out of it is an identity of production. Sport of achieve-ment produces "wares" in centi-metres, grams, seconds, points, goals, medal listing ranks or victorious names, which are taken as an indicator for "who we are". By linking identification to these results, the competitive encounter in sports is stirring up feelings of connection and togetherness. Out-comes and records of sport are regarded as representative, as collective results: "Two-zero for us." The result can release strong emotions: "We have won" - or: "We were defeated." This model is hegemonial in the most of modern sport, especially in Olympic sport and consequently in the media reception of sports.

(2.) Another pattern stresses discipline and fitness for the purpose of an identity of integration. Gymnastics contrasts to sport by being independent of the measurement of results. Competition is not needed here either, and it can be one single team alone which arouses the impression of collective identity and the feeling of community. In this case the presentation and production of "we"-feeling is effected by discipline and a collective demonstration of fitness. A team of dynamic young people moves in rank and file, with flag and hymn, radiating by its joint force and precision, "who we are".

(3.) The third pattern centers around festivity and play, leading to popular identity-. In popular festivity, dance, play and game, all people can participate, old and young, male and female, people from different ethnic origins and different languages, top athletes as well as handicapped persons. The feeling of "we" is produced by the encounter, the meeting in a temporary community of participation. In this situation, tradition and surprise are mixing, competition and laughter, drunkenness, role game and masking. Local associations may function as elements of continuity for popular sport, but the festive encounter is the important event - a moment of discontinuity, surprise and becoming "high" in the here-and-now. The differences inside the group are not treated by streamlining or uniforming them, but by displaying or even overstressing them, often in grotesque and carnivalistic forms. The excentricity of popular culture follows the logics of mutual communication: The truth is neither here nor there, it is in-between.

The three cases show that there is not only politics in sport and not only identity building in movement culture. But also the other way round: There is sport in politics - there is experience of movement in identity. And we find neither only one sport, nor only one type of national identity, but a structured multiplicity.

National identity is not one
As we see, the different types of sports can express very different types of political identities.

(1.) Nationalism of production and the logic of the market. The model of competitive sport has evident correlations with a type of nationalism which is oriented towards achievement and production, growth and expansion. The nation is understood as an economic unit, competing with other nations on the market and developing step by step in an historical evolution from the local to the global level. This nationalism as well as the corresponding sport appears as "un-ideological", needing no explicit nationalist theory.---- Historically, this model has especially been developed by the Anglophone nations and sport cultures.

(2.) Nationalism of integration and the logic of the state. The patriotic gymnastics, in contrast, looks much more explicit and "ideological". It corresponds to a nationalism of integration, stressing the nationalpedagogical unity of all citizens. In this type of nation building, sport may serve as a means of national representation and outward demonstration on one hand or/and as an instrument of national education and inward directed discipline on the other.

Niels Bukhs gymnastics, fascinating both Japanese militarism and German Nazism, showed some possible authoritarian and corporatist developments. However, the nationalism of integration has a much wider significance, following the logic of the territorial statenation and its rationality of public order. As such, the disciplining type of national identification and integrative movement culture became visible in Jacobine France and in the Spartakiads of Soviet type.

The tension between state and market is often regarded as the only or main axe of (post-)modern society. However, the popular culture as it became visible in the case of Fagenes Fest, shows an- important underground dimension of identity building. Its social psychological dynamics are often overlooked.

(3.) Popular identity, civic nationalism and the logic of civil society. Democracy and nation building is an action of civil society, of the people from below, or what we in Danish call folk. Revolution, association and togetherness in practical action have built modern political identity - "We are the people". In the Third World, the peoples' anti-colonial uprisings have had similar effects.

In Europe, the people of democracy rose for first time in a dramatic way in the early phase of revolutionary democracy between 1789 and 1848, and this was not by accident synchronical with the genesis of modern gymnastics and sport. A new wave happened in the phase of revolutionary troubles around 1900/1920 - and synchronically again, sport had its breakthrough as a mass activity and became now an element of personal life of the young generation. A further push happened with the revolutions of folk identity in Eastern Europe and Central Asia around 1989/91. Festivities of sport and culture marked the change of political identity as in the revival of national springtime festivities in Tatarstan, in the wrestling festivals of Mongolia and the "singing revolution" in the Baltic states.

In Denmark, the culture of associations and festivities of sports goes back to the folkelig movements of the early nineteenth century, to religious revivals and democratic self-organization around the revolution of 1848. These movements shaped the atmosphere and paved the way towards cooperative production, folkelig gymnastics in free associations and the alternative pedagogy of folkehjskoler, the free peoples academies. The modern nation was built from below.

The different models of sport - as well as those of identification and nation building - thus point into very different directions. Sport is not only one. There are alternatives in sport. There are fundamental psychological differences in identity building. Nation building is not one as well.

The three models are, however, also connected. Their configuration can be compared to the triad of freedom, equality and brotherhood, which once had characterized the dream of the modern revolutionary democracy in 1789. The freedom of competition and record production corresponds to the logic of the market - survival of the fittest, right to exaggerate (in-cluding do-ping), "it is the achievement that matters". The equality of discipline and integration reminds of the rationality of the state and public order - "we are all united", standing in rank and file, in togetherness responsible for our common matter, res publica. And the sisterhood or brotherhood of festivity and association is the base of civil society - meeting in popular self-organization and voluntary action, encounter with otherness in dialogue.

The troll, the golem and the joker
Each of the three sectors and logics is necessary, and none can be spared away. Nevertheless, they call for a separate and differentiated evaluation.

(1.) The market is needed for supplying society with wares and services. The dimension of commercial interest cannot be excluded from social life, this is what the experiences of state monopolism - whether of Eastern European Soviet type or of East Asian Confucian type - have shown. But the market cannot or can only to very limited degree be regulated along democratic or social lines. The market appeals to the greediness of the individual, it cultivates dreams of voracity, eagerness for entertainment and waste, it favours prodigality.

With a picture from popular culture one can say that the market is the troll. The troll, the demon, is a picture of human ugliness, which is part of our existence, whether we like it or not. The human being cannot exclude the ugly from its life without damageing itself and humanity. The troll is in us, we are ourselves actors in the market. Expressed in the terms of psycho-analysis: The market, the troll, is our shadow.

The demon shows its face in sport as soon, as the peaceful supporter culture turns into violence. By the racist construction of the "natural" body, the othering of the troll - "the unathletic Jew", "the unintelligent, athletic Negro" - points towards ones own troll inside. The ugly troll is also present in the culture of doping which is not a contradiction to the principle of sport, but a logical prolongation of the strive of performance towards technology and scientification, towards chemistry and genetics, towards growth and maximation. The principle of achievement itself is the home of the troll. However, without performance, achievement and excellence - what would be our life?

(2.) In a similar way we cannot imagine modern life without the state. But power always corrupts. Dreams about some sort of state-guaranteed justice or about state socialism did not lead to any humanistic solution. The state is a golem. The old Jewish legend tells about the golem as a human-like being made of loam for serving the human beings. But the golem has the tendency to make himself auto-nomous and turn against his master. The golem withdraws from the control of the human being who should give the orders. The golem wants to become the master him-self. Fascism and Soviet state monopolism have shown the golem rising to tremendous power, and the disci-plinary gymnastics of Niels Bukh delivered a picture of the golem culture.

(3.) That is why one can expect only limited help from the golem against the troll, only little support from the state against the totalitarism of the market. But there is a third factor in the game. Civil society, the people, is the joker. Where two main actors clash - West against East, bourgeoisie against proletariat, market against state, or how ever one has defined the maincontradiction in society - there is always a third figure, suddenly giving the game an unexpected turn. The people rise and enter into the game - the joker, the fool, the trickster appears on the scene. Democracy can be understood as an official recognition that the people is the decisive joker.

The picture of the joker is, however, not only positive or unproblematical as it may appear to a romantic observer. There is something unserious about the fool - as well as about the festivities of civil society, the joking relations of the workers' tug-of-war. There is carnival. We hear a tone of situational laughter, aroused quickly and disappearing as quick again.

Anyway, market, state and civil society are parts of our own daily practice, of our personal psychology. The pictures of the troll, the golem and the joker tell about the inner logic contradictions of the human being. The personal identity of "the individual" is not just one, but a field of permanent social contradiction.

The need of otherness
This has practical consequences for the ways in which societies treat internal differences - and how journalists design their stories of sports.

(1.) Sport is good for the function of nation building, thus goes a saying of mainstream sport functionalism - meaning "the one sport". Competitive sport teaches streamlining the body and keeping to rules. It homogenizes and normalizes the individual human being by adapting it to the rational body technique of winning and producing results. There is not much place for otherness. We are all united in the striving for achievement and excellence, but some are better, and some are worse. This is what the first model of sport - and nation - is telling.

(2.) The second model, exercise and gymnastics, works on the integration of the individual into the social system by choreographical body formation, typically in straight lines, in rank and file. The individual movements are synchronized, typically on command of a leader. The authoritarian physical discipline and body control does not favour difference, deviation or dissidence - or even explicitely suppresses them.

Both models - the competitive and the disciplinary - give priority to the production of sameness.

(3.) Popular culture as a third model contrasts this by its display of diversity. In popular festivity, people meet otherness. The nonpanoptical order of folkelig festivity makes survey impossible, otherwise the festival would just be a "show". The non-panoptical (dis-)order of the bodies is a picture of communication in democracy, where nobody has the authoritative survey. Everybody belongs in some way or other to a minority.

Body culture and democracy are, thus, related to each other - or may come into contradiction - by the right of difference. And more than a right, more than mere acceptance of deviation, democratic life is based on a culture of difference. The culture of democracy does not only tolerate otherness, but identity needs otherness. Only by the difference of the other, the own identity can be discerned. If the existence of "the other\" should not mean war, democracy demands a cultivation of diversity.

Sumo wrestling and the crippled body
Otherness in this understanding, is not a construction of "the opposite" as the negative of ones own identity. It does not mean the construction of the enemy - though there are always potentials of this deviation in social reality. The recogni-tion of "the otherness of the other" which cannot be assimila-ted to ones own identity, means irreducible variety. It is the value of popular movement culture, that it delivers living pictures and practices for the culture of difference.

Japanese sumo wrestling is an example, having cultivated diversity in the form of the ex-traordinary body. The body of the sumo wrestler is far from the "normal" body of the Japanese. In contrast to what is regarded as ideal, the body of the real existing human being can be fat, huge and even grotesque, indeed. Some societies may dis-crimi-na-te this, demanding a "normal" or slim shape, as in Western fit-ness culture. Japanese popular culture, however, has by sumo opened a way for the culture of the "other" body. The kappa, the grotesque river demons of Japanese folk mytho-logy, are said to challenge the passing farmers to sumo mat-ches. As onna-sumo, sumo wrestling had also place for women.

The sumo wrestler may be a national hero, but he is definitely not a national body model. In contrast to the streamlining national body politics of Niels Bukhs disciplinary gymnastics and to the (inter-)national standardizing body image of Olympism, folk culture can value the excentricity of bodily otherness. This is, in some way, prefigurating the democratical acceptance of the outsider.

Quite another example from the world of Danish sports: At the time of the Sidney Olympics 2000, Danish sport reviews showed cripples on their foreside. "Ungdom og idraet", -the weekly of DGI, documented a photo exposition of crippled "strange bodies" (no.26, September 2000), while "Idraets-liv", the review of the Danish Sport Federation, commented the Handicap Olympics (no.10, October 2000). This might look shocking, especially when at the same time people around the globe were hailing the streamlined quickest men or women of the world. However, it tells a story about body and democracy.

Indeed, elements of popular otherness are not quite absent in modern sports. Gymnastics may have carnivalistic elements, working on the grotesque potentials of the body. And sport consists of a diversity of games, whose patterns only by the artificial construction of points or medal ranking can be made comparable to each other. Otherness in sport would become explicit when the weight lifter would spring synchrone jump, the ice dancer would enter the wrestling arena and the boxer would dance on the gymnastic beam.

The culture of diversity and difference works on the bodily relations of the human beings. In this respect, democracy is expressed in body cultures, just like anti-democratic attitudes can be expressed bodily, but with opposite configurations. Playing the game is not innocent. Radical, living democracy has a bodily base - in the culture of diversity.

Inter-body, folk-to-folk and inter-humanism
This view differs fundamentally from some mainstream theories of democracy, which construct the democratic citizen as an individual, ideally as a bodiless individual. In fact, the democratic citizen votes in a strictly individualistic way, isolated in the cabin of election. But democracy as democratic life in self-determination, as democratic action, is centered around social relations. The bodily dimension of democracy is a relation between body and body. The body of democracy is the inter-body.

In other words: The inter-bodily relations between the human beings, based on the recognition of otherness and the culture of difference, are the basis of living democracy.

The inter-bodily perspective on democracy and the human being contains a fundamental revision of our conventional concept of -humanism. Whilst the traditional Western view focuses on the human in-dividual in singular, popular sports show the human beings in plural, body-to-body. If the "substance" of humanism is not primarily seen inside the skin-body of the human being in singular, but between the human beings in plural, a new understanding of the human as the interhuman arises. The human being is not alone in the world, that is what popular sport tells us. The human existence is an "existence with" and "existence between". Basically, humanism is inter-humanism.

This casts also some light on the relations between collectives. In Danish we can say, that the mellemfolkelig - the inter-folk solidarity - is the test on, what the folkelig, the popular is. Only by the relations people-to-people, it becomes visible what "the people" or "the popular" is. The inter-folk relation is not identical with internationalism, which has a great tradition, but was based on the logic of the state rather than the logic of the people. Confronted with the global dynamics of the market, the people-to-people approach of civil society constitutes a powerful alternative to the globalization.