I once worked with a colleague who was obsessed with a senior figure in the same organisation.
I can’t remember – I’m not sure if I ever knew – where the obsession sprang from. They may have clashed at some point, or he simply didn’t like the senior figure. Or maybe he was jealous: they were about the same age. Occasionally, they’d bump into each other on the campus and were always effusive in their greetings: the way people who hate each other often are.
But in our office or the canteen, my colleague would never miss an opportunity to talk about the senior figure, mostly to speculate on what this manager was “up to”: as far as he was concerned, every change in the organisation, major or minor, either emanated directly from this manager or came about as a result of his hidden hand. Conversely, he would calibrate a lot of his decisions based on how the senior figure might react to them. It was a little wearing to listen to.
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But this isn’t unusual for any organisation I’ve worked for. People form alliances and create enmities, often for no good reason. Every day, people in workplaces all over the country prove the maxim – originally coined about academia – that the politics are vicious because the stakes are so low.
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Outside of those places of employment, the same people will encounter politics in their sports clubs, among their friends, their WhatsApp groups, even their families. It’s not all obsession or back-stabbing; more that when human beings interact, we are all, to a certain extent, negotiating with each other. Human beings are innately political.
This isn’t a bad thing. Politics isn’t – or shouldn’t be – a dirty word. It’s far from perfect, of course, but on the micro or macro level, politics is how we get things done. We haggle, we compromise, we make calculations, we agree or fail to agree. We make decisions based on self-interest or the greater good.
And because this is the way humans act and think, every organised activity we engage in is infused with politics on some level. For instance: the (non-political) Eurovision. Since the 1990s, the LGBTQ+ community has embraced the song contest – and the contest has embraced them. It has become an annual celebration of queerness. That’s not political? Turkey thought it was when it withdrew from the contest in 2013. The Russian regime thought it was in 2014 when it pointed to the Eurovision as an example of “western moral decay”, using it as a justification to introduce its notorious “anti-gay propaganda” laws.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, nine of the participating countries demanded that Russia be excluded, and after some faffing, the European Broadcasting Union complied. That’s politics.
This year, despite the withdrawal of five countries, including Ireland, Israel remained in the contest – reportedly because Germany threatened to leave if Israel wasn’t allowed to take part. More politics.
Of course, there has to be a line somewhere. For the Eurovision and international sporting competitions, you can’t have a rolling beauty contest where only the ‘approved’ countries are allowed to take part. It would make a nonsense of such events and the internationalism they espouse. So, understandably, the likes of the International Olympic Committee, <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/tags/fifa/" …
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