The World Cup is no longer banal nationalism, but principal

With flags on the pitch the size of half a field, starters and substitutes coming onto the field preceded by the flags of each country and lined up to sing the national anthems, heads of state in the stands, film and music stars occupying inaccessible seats and dressed in the national team jerseys, commentators losing their voices to hoarseness in the epic of patriotic pride... The World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada has pushed the limits of what we know as banal nationalism to turn it into mainstream nationalism.

National team football is the great machine for feeding identities and converting different doubters. There is no military parade, political speech, Eurovision festival, Nobel Prize, or tragic accident capable of bringing so many different people together behind the same flag. At a time when states have shrunk in the face of the disruptive power of billionaire technology companies and can barely ensure the social contract, the World Cup ensures the emotional contract and makes good, in every match, that definition that says a nation is the place where people suffer for the same things.

Statements like Rajoy's "without French people" are quickly turned into a source of illustrated apologies for national unity above origins, they are shamelessly used to deny the existence of the harsh reality of discrimination based on origin and seek the dignity that erases for a few days the ideologies of parties that are so triumphant at the polls. And in the case of Spain, with its fragile identity and its second-row international status, the expectation of a final victory is even less banal.