Football Hooliganism in Europe.

• Author: Blackshaw, Ian
• Position: Book review

By Anastassia Tsoukala, Palgrave Macmillan United Kingdom, 2009, hardback, pages 179 + VIII, ISBN 9780230201149 price [pounds sterling]50

This Book is the fruit of twenty years of research into football hooliganism-that is, collective football-related violence, which is often referred to as 'the English disease' although English football fans abroad have generally been more muted and better behaved of late!-in Europe. The author, Anastassia Tsoukala, is Professor of Criminology at the University of Paris XI and also a Research Fellow at Paris V-Sorbonne University, well qualified, therefore, to tackle such a highly controversial and intractable phenomenon.

This is the first EU-wide study of this subject and, as its sub-title 'Security and Civil Liberties in the Balance' implies, the author draws attention to the erosion of civil liberties in the interests of public order and security in the fight against football hooliganism throughout Europe at the European (that is, actions by the Council of Europe and UEFA, the European Governing Body of Football) and National levels. In fact, the author concludes that, because control measures have become increasingly repressive, especially following the events of September 11, 2001, the ".... breaching of civil liberties has become invisible to society because legal abnormality is now accepted as normal." Some years ago, the author of this review wrote an article in 'The Times' entitled 'Even the football supporter has rights', which the author of the study cites, and which did not go down very well in certain quarters, who were of the school of thought that the end justifies the severest of means! It is always a question of balance in this field and whether society as a whole has got that balance right. That question is not an easy one to answer in practice. and is a constant theme and also particular concern of this study.

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