Spain's victory over the Netherlands wasn't just a matter of national pride or world glory. Despite being a game that made even the announcers apologize for its boringness, the players on each team made clear two very different styles of trying to win that can teach us a lot about global relations, as can the World Cup media coverage.
A striking parallel can be drawn with the recent Stanley Cup victory of the Chicago Blackhawks over the Philadelphia Flyers, a series of games which was whatever the polar opposite of boring is. Going into the final, the Flyers were known as the "bullies" of the league, and the young Chicago team was known for its finesse and skills. (Disclosure: I live in Chicago and grew up with hockey as a quasi-religion in Canada.) As you can guess, finesse trumped bullying in the end, which is one part of the moral of this story as it related to global relations.
Soccer players are famous for the on-field drama, but when the Spanish player got kicked in the chest by the Dutch, I felt pain, and not just in my metaphoric heart. Let's leave aside the complex political nuances of the "Orange" (Dutch, after their jersey color) playing near what was once the Orange Free State of Dutch settlers later called Boers and who carried out Apartheid. I'm no soccer/football buff by any means, but I know when I see too many yellow cards and too few shots on goal. That's called bullying, just as it is in hockey. And the Dutch rightfully lost, making Spain's win righteous. Unfortunately, that's not how it always works in global relations even if it should.
South Africa did a tremendous job in hosting the world's largest sporting event, giving the continent its rightful place amongst the rest when it comes to prestige potential. However, the media coverage did a despicable job of reporting on the country and its people, say compared to what was done for China during its recent Olympics, using euphemisms like "troubled past" to gloss over the super-human struggles of South Africans still alive today. Nelson Mandela's name popped up a few times, but rarely was what made the World Cup possible to begin with-- the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) headed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu-- ever mentioned. This is the kind of travesty of omission mainstream media commits everyday to the detriment of global relations.
Neither was Apartheid ever faced head on, as a problem or with its triumphal solutions, ostensibly not to mix politics and sports (sorry, that's impossible), actually pushing them below the surface so that they exploded for anyone in the least in the know. The situation in Israel/Palestine is the parallel here. Even a Spanish-born announcer said that his country's team victory was political because it unites Spaniards of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in ways that have never been done. Did you notice how few Blacks were in the stadium for the final? Did you know that local vendors were prohibited from being within two miles of the stadium so that major multinational corporations could take the stage?
So in addition to the lessons that skill and finesse beat bullying in sports as they should in international relations, here are two others: Don't erase or suppress the past because doing so creates an un-understandable present that can only lead to a undesired future. Do acknowledge the connections between both sports and politics as part of culture for constructive and destructive purposes alike. And, finally, prestige can never replace collaborative prosperity in domestic or global relations.
Photo credit: babasteve

Someone who studies endangered languages for a living once told me that when a language dies, so does a way of understanding who we and the world are; I would add a chance to integrate and improve both as well. Combine this notion with another saying, "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" and we find ourselves closer to the predicament in which Kurdish speakers in Turkey and Spanish speakers in the US, among many other people around the globe, find themselves on a daily basis. To what extent is the denial of the right to communicate in a language a violation of human rights?
Taste buds, it seems, can be allies of cultural integration and economic empowerment as of mutually exclusive, self-limiting policies alike. Pasta is rarely if ever the first thing to come to mind when we think of protectionism and anti-immigration impulses. Yet the city council of the Tuscan town of Lucca in Italy, a picturesque tourist hot spot for international visitors, recently announced a new initiative to crack down on immigrant-run restaurants serving non-Italian food in order to protect its culinary heritage and corner the food consumption market in its centro storico, or historic center.
If you asked 100 people and ethics experts what is more morally wrong, murder or rape, chances are that they would say it’s a poorly phrased question and their answer would be both equally (or at least we may hope so). But a clear-cut answer came from Amazon a day before Valentine's Day, when the internet's largest retailer pulled a Japanese video game simulating rape and sexual assaults from its site while keeping thousands of others that simulate other kinds of corporeal violence. So what?


