This is a number that immediately caught my eye: According to a count of the official tournament squads, ninety-nine players at this World Cup were born in France. In other words, if the delivery room decided such matters, there would be enough French-born players for nine squads made up entirely of Frenchmen, but 76 of the 99 wear somebody else’s shirt: 13 play for Algeria, 12 for Haiti, 11 for DR Congo, and nine for Senegal. Contrary to what the current debate in the United States tells us, your place of birth does not necessarily decide where your loyalties lie. At the same time, the American Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship in its June 30, 2026 ruling in Trump v. Barbara, Chief Justice Roberts tracing the principle from English common law through the Fourteenth Amendment to Wong Kim Ark in 1898. Some, including myself, would call this a stretch. After closer inspection, it turned out that apparently just being born on a plane in US airspace would entitle someone to citizenship, an idea that surely would have surprised the originators of English common law. Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco before almost losing his citizenship to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, had at least been physically present in the US and on US soil. Nowadays, it seems, not even such minimal requirements would be necessary to become a US citizen.
Whatever one thinks of the decision, it rests on the simplest possible definition of belonging: Geography at the moment of birth. A child delivered in an aircraft over Nebraska is an American, and whether anyone ever teaches that child what being an American means is, constitutionally speaking, nobody’s business. I would argue that this is probably too little to create a national identity and a sentiment of solidarity between citizens. The two stories I began with today are in essence the same story, and it is a story older than most participants in the debate suspect. Even Aristotle already insisted that a polis does not consist of its walls alone: A regime is the way of life of a people, something worth living for, and perhaps worth dying for. Citizens, in his account, are formed by education, habit, and the character of the community long after the birth certificate has been filed.
The modern version of the argument was fought over Alsace both on the real battlefield as well as on the battlefield of ideas. France and Germany fought consistently over the land of Elsaß-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine) and whether its people are French or German. After the French defeat in 1871 that led to the annexation of Alsace (only to be returned to France after 1918, then to Germany in 1940, and again to France in 1945), the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke declared the province German by blood and language, whether its inhabitants felt it or not: “We Germans, who know Germany and France, know better what is good for the Alsatians than those unfortunates themselves.” The French thinker Ernest Renan answered in 1882 with what I consider the most useful definition of a nation anyone has produced to this day: A nation is a daily plebiscite, resting on a shared inheritance of memory and the present will to live together. He added a warning that has aged uncomfortably well: A Europe that defined nationality by biology would one day fight “zoological wars.” Unfortunately, there is a bit of this “zoological attitude” returning in today’s debates. Before the 2024 home European Championship, a WDR poll found that 21 per cent of Germans, and 47 per cent of Alternative for Germany (AfD) voters, wished for a “whiter” national team. The player Joshua Kimmich called the question itself “absolutely racist”, and two-thirds of respondents said they were glad about the squad’s diversity, an inconvenient detail for anyone hoping to diagnose a nation of racists.
Yet the anti-racist side has its own reflex that shows that despite all the praise for diversity, it has a hard time accepting it once it actually faces it. The German national player Jonathan Tah was born in Hamburg and pronounces his name the German way, but he had to patiently explain time and again to broadcasters who would never dream of an unkind word to stop anglicising Jonathan and calling him “Dschonathan”. In Vienna, where I live, we once watched the Tyrolean governor and former defence minister Günther Platter greet David Alaba, born and raised in the city, in English. Alaba responded with composure, saying “feel free to talk to me in German, I am Austrian.” As these anecdotes show, the people most anxious to prove that skin colour does not matter keep treating it as conclusive evidence of foreignness.
What ordinary people register, though, is something else: The withdrawal of the offer to belong to something distinctively German (or Austrian, or English, etc) and the elite’s hostility to even the idea of such a distinctiveness. Germany’s labour and social affairs minister, Bärbel Bas, chose this spring to celebrate the disappearance of the country’s Einheitsbraun, its uniform brownness (which is a not very subtle allusion to the National Socialists, also known as “brownshirts”), a formulation in which the natives appear as a problem awaiting dilution. The unease that pollsters keep filing under racism is, on inspection, a reaction to this withdrawal rather than to anybody’s complexion: The Germans have no trouble accepting a black player as German, but their country’s elite has a problem accepting its own population as German. That this makes integration ever more difficult is an added problem highlighted by the following anecdote told to me by an Austrian politician: A German entrepreneur of Turkish origin was asked why he did not feel more affection for a country that gave him so many opportunities. His answer? If you Germans hate your country, you cannot expect us newcomers to love it.
The historical record is unambiguous about what does work, and overall it is good news. To a certain extent nations are made, not found, as they begin as ideas that then become reality. Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote the Song of the Germans in 1841 on Heligoland, then a British island, for a country that existed only in the heads of romantics. Thirty years later Bismarck proclaimed it in the Hall of Mirrors and turned it into a reality. Italy imposed a common language on regions that had been sovereign states for a millennium. Eugen Weber documented how the Third Republic turned “peasants into Frenchmen” through the school, the barracks and the railway timetable. America ran the most ambitious assimilation machine of all, and ran it so successfully that we no longer recognise its products as such: The Continental Army was drilled into shape by a Prussian named von Steuben, and the armies that liberated Europe were commanded by an Eisenhower. None of this happens by itself, and none of it survives institutions that bore in the opposite direction. A citizenship that functions like a club membership – all benefits, no attachment – produces exactly the teams we are now arguing about, eleven correctly registered members. Whether the men on the field and the people in the streets feel more like eleven friends or more like eleven strangers is decided long before kick-off, in the classroom rather than the stadium. A society of strangers will soon no longer be a society of any kind, and I am afraid that Europe is on the road to finding that out the hard way.
