New magazine Monocle (founded by Canadian Tyler Brulé, of Wallpaper fame) has a fascinating series of articles on breakaway states and country branding in its September 2007 issue. Unfortunately, you’ll have to buy the printed magazine since only subscribers have access to full articles online, but you can see the photo essay on the breakaway republic of Abkhazia on the Black Sea. It declared its independence from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1994, but so far not a single government has officially recognized its independence. The magazine, by the way, is beautiful and interesting and worth its slightly lofty cover price.

The same issue lists several other non-recognized “countries” that are seeking recognition in various ways, whether it be petitioning the United Nations or through sport. FIFA is one organization that features teams from several entities that are not recognized counties with United Nations representation. Many of these unrecognized states feel that it is through sport (and football in particular) that they can generate support for their nations.

Journalist Steve Menary has just published an interesting book on this very subject entitled Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA Forgot. Read more about it at the author’s blog.

Monocle Article on Abkhazia (subscribers only, but there are some good links included for the rest of us)

by Thomas Dunmore

Whilst we English wring our hands over the ever disappointing state of our football team, our situation is in no way as sorry a fall as others have experienced. Uruguay, for example, have scaled peaks of international football that England have never reached; equally, they have fallen to an ignnomy that England have also not yet matched.

Rodrigo Orihuela has connected the fall of the national team to the similar problems in England and Spain.

Uruguay’s problems are not exactly unique. The recent unconvincing form of the English national team has given rise to a barrage of comments from pundits who believe English football is suffering from the impact of too many foreign players blocking the emergence of local talent. Similar arguments have been heard in Spain and Germany over recent years. Uruguayan football suffers from a similar syndrome: too little homebred talent plays regularly in the top flight before being whisked off to far off lands where the pay is better.

But whilst club football thrives in England and Spain – at least, financially and in terms of continental success – Uruguayan teams have reached a new low in the Copa Libertadores. As Orihuela notes:

Results such as reigning champion Danubio’s defeat last week in a Copa Libertadores qualifier, which saw it knocked out of the tournament by Argentina’s Vélez Sarfsielfd on a 0-5 aggregate score, are cause of concern in the tiny Atlantic nation. It is unprecedented for Uruguayan club champions to miss out on the Libertadores group stage.

Once, it was Uruguay whose economic boom in the 1920s was reflected in its football: Nacional of Montevideo embarked on a six month European tour in 1925, playing 38 games often on the back of gruelling, long rail journeys, of which they won 26, drew seven and lost six. Uruguay’s Centenario stadium – built for the 1930 World Cup – was known as the greatest ever made and an architectural paean to Uruguay’s modernism.

And it was the Uruguayans who in many ways first brought South American flair to the world’s game, as Eduardo Galeano waxed in Soccer in Sun and Shadow:

Forty years before the Brazilians Pele and Coutinho, the Uruguayans Scarone and Cea rolled over the rival’s defense with zigzag passes that went back and forth from one to the other all the way to the goal, yours and mine, close and right to the foot, question and response, response and question: the ball rebounded without a moment’s pause, as if off a wall.

Uruguay have won the World Cup twice and the Copa America fourteen times (seven times more than Brazil). Not bad for a country of 3.5 million people. A decline from such heights, considering Uruguay can barely sustain its own league in good form, was probably inevitable. But it was football that made a Uruguayan pronounce on the back of their Olympic triumph in 1928: “We are no longer just a tiny spot on the map of the world.”

Galeano again:

The sky-blue shirt was proof of the existence of the nation: Uruguay was not a mistake. Soccer pulled this tiny country out of the shadows of universal anonymity.

Yet sadly, even the site of Uruguay’s greatest triumph – their shocking 4-2 defeat of Argentina in the World Cup final at Estadio Centenario in Montevideo on July 30th 1930 – has little time left. Unlike Wembley Stadium, it has not been rebuilt at massive (and admittedly overblown) cost. Uruguay have long had an enviable record at home, only losing twice in twenty games with Brazil. Still, Estadio Centenario is now a crumbling wreck, awaiting its final fate, as David Goldblatt writes in the The Ball is Round:

Soon it will be gone altogether, its experimental reinforced concrete unable to deal with the salt air of the Atlantic. It has, perhaps, less than a hundred years. Maybe climate change will get there first. The Rio de la Plata will flood the city and leave it marooned: a carved grey beacon alerting sailors to submerged treasures.

Reposted with permission. Original post appeared Sunday February 18, 2007 on Thomas Dunmore’s If This Is Football, a blog about “football politics, economics and history.”

Editor’s Note: My wife and I visited Uruguay in November 2005 and visited the Estadio Centenario. Unfortunately, our visit fell between Uruguay’s last World Cup qualifying match against Australia and the Classico derby between Nacional and Peñarol. We did, however, see Nacional play Liverpool (the Uruguayan team) to a boring scoreless draw at the much smaller Parque Central stadium. Uruguay has the melancholy feeling of an entire country lost in the remembrances of past glories, whether in sport, politics or business, and it’s a shame, because it’s a beautiful and hospitable place.

Over on my main blog, I wrote about the recently-announced nominations for the Academy Awards in the area of feature documentaries, and I got to thinking that in our “winner-take-all” culture, we sometimes forget to revisit the worthy nominees who DIDN’T win in previous years. With that in mind, here’s a companion piece to that blog entry.

The following are the non-winning nominees in the category for the past few years. I’ve put an asterisk after the ones that I’ve seen as of today. I’ve also included the winner in white text (select with your cursor to see it) so you can quiz yourself to see if you remembered who actually won the Oscar:

2005

• Darwin’s Nightmare (2004)
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)*
• Murderball (2005)*
• Street Fight (2005)
• Winner: March of the Penguins (2005)*

2004

• The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)
• Super Size Me (2004)*
• Tupac: Resurrection (2003)
• Twist of Faith (2004)
• Winner: Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids (2004)*

2003

• Balseros (2002)
• Capturing the Friedmans (2003)*
• My Architect (2003)
• The Weather Underground (2002)
• Winner: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)*

2002

• Daughter from Danang (2002)
• Winged Migration (2001)*
• Prisoner of Paradise (2002)
• Spellbound (2002)*
• Winner: Bowling for Columbine (2002)*

2001

• Children Underground (2001)
• LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (2001)
• Promises (2001)
• War Photographer (2001)
• Winner: Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001)

2000

• Legacy (2000)
• Long Night’s Journey Into Day (2000)
• Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (2000)
• Sound and Fury (2000)
• Winner: Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000)

After February 25, another four worthy losers will join the list of films above. Why not track some of these down and let me know what you think?

A while back, I wrote about Paul Collins’ excellent book, Banvard’s Folly, which was a collection of “Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck.” Now, Paul’s fascinating blog has pointed me to a potential motherlode of similar stuff.

The Athanasius Kircher Society, based in Brooklyn, New York, is dedicated to the same sort of esoterica and historical curiosities. In fact, they will be hosting their inaugural meeting on January 17 in NYC. Alas, tickets are now sold out.

If anyone finding their way here was lucky enough to be in attendance, I’d appreciate a report.

Historical Note: The society is named for Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), a Jesuit priest who, in addition to being a professor of mathematics, could speak dozens of languages and wrote about astronomy, chemistry, mineralogy and many other subjects. He was also an early scholar of Egyptology.

by Stefan Geens

In the 18th-century exploration business, like in any other pursuit, there were winners and there were losers. Philip Carteret was definitely the latter. In 1766, as an ambitious young British Navy Officer, he was given a shoddy ship, no support, and ordered into the Pacific. He managed to sail straight across it, prevailing over scurvy, thirst, and attacks by locals. He put a good number of islands on the map, and charted new routes that would later be used by British ships sailing for Australia and China.

So why isn’t he famous? Because of James Cook. Cook found Australia and New Zealand just as Carteret’s expedition was limping home. Cook would go on to become a British hero; Carteret managed to name a minuscule atoll after himself and was then laid off, soon to be forgotten.

I learned all this after chancing upon a back issue of New Scientist magazine while staying at a friend’s place. (2006-02-11, readable online, £2.95.) The punchline that forms the premise of the article is that after 350 years, Carteret is about to be forgotten all over again. The atoll he named after himself, now part of Papua New Guinea, is about to disappear, washed away by a rising ocean. Its 1,000 inhabitants wil be relocated to nearby Bougainville Island by 2015, when Carteret Atoll is expected to be submerged completely.

News of these “first climate change refugees” has been covered by the press for a while. A 2001 Straits Times article calls the disappearing atoll a “dress rehearsal for global warming.” A Guardian article from November 2005 documents the plight of the islanders, and the decision to move them.

I read the New Scientist article yesterday in the wake of last week’s massive Google Earth dataset update, and wondered if the atoll might not now be having one final high-resolution curtain call before being swallowed up whole by the sea.

I first had to find Carteret Atoll. Wikipedia helped immediately: There are two articles (Carteret Islands, and Carteret Atoll), the first with coordinates. A visual check on OceanDots.com confirmed that the atoll at that location is indeed Carteret’s discovery.

Image credit: DigitalGlobe in Google Earth

Luckily for this blog post, the latest update reveals the atoll in glorious high resolution. In fact, the resolution is so good that you can make out individual palm fronds. There are six inhabited islands dotted along a ringlike coral reef — only the largest settlement is named in Google Earth: Weiteli, on Han Island. (The Guardian reports that Han was completely indundated by a storm surge in 1995. Another island broke into two.)

Is climate change the cause of Carteret Atoll’s disappearing act? Probably yes, though Wikipedia lists two alternate theories: overfishing with dynamite, and tectonic plate shifts in a region where the Earth’s crust is disappearing.

Here is a KML file with the islands. Here is the same KML file in Google Maps, because we can It also shows you what the dataset was like before last Thursday. Bonus: A portfolio of B&W photos taken on the Carteret Atoll in 1960, from the National Library of Australia.

Reposted with permission. Original post appeared Tuesday June 13, 2006 on Stefan Geens’ excellent Ogle Earth, a blog about Google Earth

Editor’s Note: It’s also interesting to note that Carteret was the discoverer of Pitcairn Island, which has had a troubled history of its own. It’s also in the process of being depopulated, though for reasons having nothing to do with climate change. My friend Josh Benton wrote a series of articles for the Toledo Blade back in 2001 that are essential reading.