France Gets Revenge for Agincourt...

...at the Euro 2004 soccer championships, according to Reason's Michael Young. He doesn't mention that les Bleus crashed out against Greece in the quarter-finals (revenge for the 1054 schism? anti-Byzantine policies of the Avignon papacy?), but I think there's definitely something to the idea that field sports, with their uniforms, national anthems, concepts of "attack" and "defense" (which English sports writers prefer to the wimpier by contrast "offense" and "defense" of American football), captaincies, vice-captaincies, etc., preserve somewhat both the traditions of battlefield warfare and national antagonisms---by which I mean something stronger than just rivalries. Even Yankees vs. Red Sox looks like a lovers' spat compared to the Somme campaign redux of every England v. Germany match in major soccer competitions.

Further, Young's implication, that the consolidation of the EU into a supra-national state will be consistently hampered by the technocratic bloodlessness---and utter tone-deafness on the role of Geist, emotion, and sentimentality in electoral politics---on the part of the EU administrators. For more on the prospects for the creation of a pan-European identity, see Jan-Werner Mueller in the most recent Dissent.

And for more on the slow but inevitable progression of human politics into one-world technocracy, see Orwell's remarkably prescient Road to Wigan Pier.