Massacres in the former Yugoslavia and the murder of Turks in Germany have exposed the nationalist and racist undercurrents of European life. Increasingly, the European peace of the past generation appears to have been an artificial one, kept in place by the constraints of the Cold War. Buford exposes just how ghastly European low-life can be. Although an American and the editor of the English literary magazine Granta, he immersed himself for several years in the world of football hooligans, befriending them in pubs and pitches, presenting himself at their brawls, even taking police blows on their behalf. His report is riveting and enormously disturbing.
Buford paints a harrowing picture of rampaging crowds and purposeless violence. When British teams play one another, the "lads" go at each other. When British teams play foreigners, they adopt an extreme, mindless nationalism ("England, England, England, England" goes their chant). Whether throwing bricks through Indian restaurants at home or brutalizing Italian policeman abroad, they wallow in violent antagonism for its own sake. American readers will probably find them more threatening than even the worst inner-city gangs.
While mostly disenfranchised and nearly without political importance, football supporters represent a strain of bellicose xenophobia not without significance. They send a message to near and far that public life in the United Kingdom, if not the whole of Western Europe, retains a brutal edge under its so-civilized exterior.
