For most of the last month I, like most of the world outside of the United States, was hooked to the World Cup (WC). I like soccer (nee football) to begin with, and living in Argentina makes it so much easier to follow and get into. The WC is one of the rare events that are able to capture the entire world’s attention all at once. The Olympics come around every two years, but people don’t care about them or follow them in the uniform way that people follow soccer and the WC.

An international event of such magnitude brings up some serious questions regarding what it means to root for or have an allegiance to your country. The socio- and geo-political aspects of the WC have long been discussed (see the great new book The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup here), but more than that, the idea of taking a rooting interest in your own country for the sheer fact that it is your own country seems to be a bit bizarre. It has its roots in national identity, clearly, but that is an ever changing, ephemeral beast. What ties us to our national identities at all? Allegiance to government has nothing to do with sport; indeed, many countries support their national soccer teams in spite of their governments.

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I stand by what was written by Martin Heidegger in his work Being and Time, that we have no true essence apart from that which comes through our existence (Heidegger, Being and Time). We have no eternal part of us—no soul, no fate, no destiny. All we have is at most the soft determinism that comes from the buildup of the history into which we are born, and the every day existence in which we live. As such, we also lack such a national essence apart from the collective history of the country into which we are born. When people talk of national identity they use grand sweeping statements that amount to being stereotypes that happen to be true a large percentage of the time. None of this is ever able to capture the essence of any small snapshot of national life in any country with even a mildly free and diverse society.

What purpose, then, do these pronouncements serve? And why do people subsume themselves under their grand umbrella? The logic is then reversed: “we are very different, but we are both [insert nationality here].” If being that certain nationality doesn’t really mean anything in the first place, then the statement is just begging the question, and hence fallacy.

Some might say that embracing your national roots is akin to standing up for and believing in your country’s principles. But people from dictatorships who do not support their oppressive governments can have just as strong of a sense of national pride—if not a greater one—than those from stable countries whose governments were founded on laudable principles. As mentioned previously, there is a disconnect between a sports team representing a country and the government of that country. The two are separate and often times at odds with one another.

So what, then, is the reason for this baseless allegiance? [To call it baseless is not to disparage it, however. Rooting interests in international sports only becomes regrettable when those two separate worlds—politics and sport—become intertwined, with sometimes deadly results.] The rationale, then, would seem to be none other than the desire to be a part of something greater than oneself. As much as people (especially Americans) tend to extol the virtues of the individual (a virtue to extol to be sure), there is always the desire to rid the self of that individual strain at least on a temporary basis so as to become a cog in something seemingly much greater.

Sports rooting interests and fandom are based in this hypothesis at every level, but on the international level takes on even more importance. Maybe this is because a whole country seems much more powerful a rooting interest than anything else. Maybe it is because when rooting for your country you are basically guaranteed to be surrounded by fellow fans at all times, therefore increasing the sense of greater purpose involved in the endeavor. Maybe it’s because people so desperately want to believe that they really do have some sort of national character flowing through their veins as has been preordained from time immemorial.

Whatever the case may be, looking at the issue on a deeper level outside of the realm of politics is rarely done, and national identity by way of fandom is usually chalked up to making a show of national strength, building national pride, asserting oneself on the national stage, etc. All of these things may be true and there is value in discussing them, but they are still in a way begging the question; they leave unquestioned the important nature of what lies beneath these citizens and their need for collective recognition as a nation.

It is not damaging to align oneself with one’s country for rooting interests. It is normally what comes most naturally to most sports fans, being that it is the place in which they live and work. But the nature of fandom can all too easily spiral out of control, with fans perverting the notion of sport to include essentialist arguments about their makeup. All that can really be said about national identity can only ever be true in the more regional sense, unless the country in question is very small. National identity becomes inverted, as mentioned above, and becomes its own abstract concept that is impossible to articulate, created from scratch by people whose only commonality may be living somewhere on the same large swath of land as one another.