Building a Nation, Destroying a Nation?

There is a widely accepted idea in both academic and popular understanding that sport represents a major ritual of popular culture that perpetuates the concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, a term coined by the American political scientist Benedict Anderson. It is a social field encompassing social axioms, values and norms, thereby (re-)producing them. Particularly when it comes to national imagination, sport functions as a symbolic (and actual) field in which all complexities of the ‘nation’ can be reduced to more tangible and digestible entities. Most famously, the historian Eric Hobsbawm once noted that the imagined community is so much more ‘real’ when it is represented through eleven named players who symbolically embody the nation in their performance.

With regard to modern nationalism, the term ‘sportive nationalism’ refers to the argument that sport draws its strongest ideological momentum from the fact that it ostensibly represents a ‘true’ and ‘genuine’ expression of patriotism and passionate nationalism. It stipulates that this genuine support for the nation is not related to official forms of government-sanctioned expressions of national belonging. This ambiguity is epitomised in the capacity of sport to oscillate between being a legitimator and contestant of political authority and the political representatives of the ‘nation’. It is precisely this area of ideological ambiguity that is worth focusing on. While a great deal of the academic literature dealing with sport and nationalism has been centred on the role of sport in nation-building processes, far less attention has been devoted to its more destructive side as a significant social factor in the disintegration process of a state.

The history of sport in the later years of socialist Yugoslavia makes for an intriguing case study that exhibits both the both integrating and disintegrating potential of sport, and particularly football. During the late 1980s, more particularly in the very early 1990s, it was Yugoslav football that prominently highlighted the structural crisis in which the country found itself. Apart from severe economic problems, hyperinflation and a drastic rise in unemployment, the inability of the Yugoslav political elites to resolve what was initially an economic crisis gradually aggravated social problems. These were accompanied by the rise of nationalist politics and demands for stronger autonomy in some republics of the socialist federation. This increased politicisation of everyday life ‘from above’ was mirrored in the field of sport through the politicisation of spectators ‘from below’.

At the time, Yugoslav football had deteriorated into an increasingly contested space, with supporters demonstrating open allegiances with particular Yugoslav nationalities and promoting violence against other ethnic groups; a taboo within the socialist federation, where the ideology of Brotherhood and Unity still represented a fundamental pillar of political self-understanding. The stadium was turning into a social arena in which politically loaded slogans and other forms of nationalist paraphernalia were becoming the dominant sight at football games across the federation. The anonymity of the stadium made it difficult to prosecute people for displaying illegal national flags, political messages, songs and banners, with stadia thus representing a de facto space for political radicalisation that was outside the law.

Emulating and exacerbating the radicalised political discourse against each other, the reoccurring symbolic and literal violence emblematised the increasingly fragile condition of the Yugoslav federation at that time.

Nevertheless, this phenomenon remained predominantly visible within a fairly marginalised social group: football fans. Or, to use the sociologist Srdjan Vrcan’s terminology, Yugoslav ‘football fan tribes’. Emulating and exacerbating the radicalised political discourse against each other, the reoccurring symbolic and literal violence emblematised the increasingly fragile condition of the Yugoslav federation at that time. Within a very short period of time, football became one of the major mobilising tools for nationalist ideology and an intriguing social field in the process of Yugoslav disintegration.

CNN summarised the global fascination with the Maksimir riots – which is manifested in the countless academic and popular publications that are usually triggered by anniversaries – when in 2011 it suggested that due to its magnitude and historic significance, it should be listed as one of only five football games that ‘changed the world’.

Even today, the incident is commonly referred to in the post-Yugoslav space as the symbolic day socialist Yugoslavia’s dissolution began, or ‘the day the war started’.

The timing of the game was indeed historic. It took place only two weeks after the first democratic election in the still socialist republic of Croatia, which saw the pro-independence nationalist forces around Franjo Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) win the elections. The political landscape of Yugoslavia was rapidly transforming, accelerated by global developments and the ongoing domestic political crisis, with pro-independence and nationalist political forces all over the federation increasingly gaining momentum and institutionalising their political power.

The tensely awaited game escalated into wild stadium and street fights and violent clashes between supporters – the Delije of Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb’s Bad Blue Boys. Interestingly the Delije were headed by the future Serbian war criminal and paramilitary leader Željko Ražnatović, nicknamed ‘Arkan’.

The confrontation, however, soon escalated when other Bad Blue Boys decided to join in with their fellow supporters. What followed was an hour- long chaos with the Bad Blue Boys breaking through the fences and engaging in a massive brawl with the Delije as well as police forces on the pitch. The totally outnumbered and poorly organised federal police could not prevent what would turn out to be the worst riot in Yugoslav sport ing history, and it was transmitted live on television to the entire federation.

Even within these exceptional circumstances, there was still one moment that stood out. At one point, with the chaos still raging, the 19-year-old Dinamo Zagreb captain, Zvonimir Boban ran onto the pitch, trying to help a Dinamo supporter who was being beaten by the police. He used a – now legendary – kungfu kick against a Yugoslav police officer. In this way, Boban, who later reached global fame with AC Milan, strikingly captured the antagonisms of the Yugoslav crisis.

The magnitude of his kick, however mythologised it may have become in the contemporary context, lay in its symbolic message. Boban did not strike down one single police officer, but rather a representative who stood symbolically for the Yugoslav state. His act ultimately earned him a place in the Croatian pantheon of national heroes.

The Maksimir riots, while symbolically significant, should nonetheless be understood as a condensed symptom of the ongoing political crisis in socialist Yugoslavia, most strongly manifested in the rise of Serbian and Croatian nationalism. The riots were rather a social mechanism that publically and forcefully expressed social tensions and the public frustration with a political system that was still in denial over the severity of the crisis in which it found itself. Without diminishing the symbolic significance of the Maksimir riots, they have to be included in a series of football-related incidents that happened in close proximity in order to fully grasp the mobilising power of football for nationalist ideology at that time.

What can be established is that the Yugoslav ‘war(s)’ did not start at Maksimir on 13 May 1990. Rather, the incident set in motion a process in which football would grow into representing a social field in which physical and symbolic violence became a general and almost legitimate form of conflict ‘resolution’. Football games began mirroring the weakness of the Yugoslav state, the symbolic transformation of spectators into soldiers, the mobilisation of nationalist agendas and ultimately the country’s dissolution.

The incident set in motion a process in which football would grow into representing a social field in which physical and symbolic violence became a general and almost legitimate form of conflict ‘resolution’.

Less than a month after the Maksimir riots, the Yugoslav national football team was scheduled to play a friendly match against the Netherlands at the very same stadium. It was the last preparatory match for Yugoslavia's top footballers before heading to the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. The team mainly consisted of players who had won the FIFA U-20 World Cup in Chile three years earlier, with the team being eager to have a significant impact at senior level, too. The team itself was headed by the ‘last Yugoslav’, Ivica Osim, who is still widely considered to have been the mastermind behind the successful ‘golden generation’ of Yugoslav football.

With the political climate still tense from what had happened a few weeks earlier, the game was labelled by many media commentators as an indicator of whether the riots had been a genuine and popular expression of Croatian nationalism and opposition towards Yugoslavia or whether they were just a one-off incident that got out of hand.

Shortly after the two teams came on the pitch it became evident that Maksimir stadium would once again be at the centre of a Yugoslav-wide debate about fan behaviour as manifestations of political ruptures in the country. Supporters in the roughly half-full stadium greeted the Yugoslav team with boos and jeering and verbally attacked the players and head coach Osim. Not only did the spectators drown out the Yugoslav anthem 'Hej Slaveni' but they sang the unofficial (now official) Croatian anthem 'Lijepa naša'. The act was a clear message from the 20,000 spectators that they no longer accepted Yugoslav state symbols as their own, particularly if they were superior to Croatian symbols.

The game itself became utterly secondary, with Yugoslavia losing to the Netherlands 0:2. Many commentators were left perplexed because most games involving the Yugoslav national team had until then been largely spared any chauvinist incidents, and the national team was widely perceived as being a strong (popular) cultural force of integration. That summer the Yugoslav national football team played an inspired World Cup in Italy, only to lose on penalties in the quarter final against Argentina. It was doomed to be the last major football tournament for a unified Yugoslav team.

By August 1990 the Yugoslav state crises had deepened alarmingly with the jibes and rhetoric of the preceding months and the inability to resolve the constitutional crisis, leading to the so-called ‘log revolution’. It saw the Serbian Minority in the Croatian hinterland of Krajina revolting against the newly elected Croatian governance by sealing off the region around the city of Knin, bringing the country to the brink of war. This crisis was highly anticipated in the heavily politicised field of Yugoslav football fan tribes.

On 26 September 1990 another game in the Yugoslav football league escalated into a Yugoslav-wide debate about football, hooliganism and nationalism. Less than 100 kilometres from the uprising’s epicentre in Knin, the game between Hajduk Split and Partizan Belgrade at Split’s Poljud stadium once more epitomised the volatile situation the federation was in. During the game a large group of the organised section of the Hajduk Split fans, the Torcida, decided to explicitly express their opposition towards Yugoslavia. Their initial pitch invasion turned into a far-reaching political statement after it was followed by another even more symbolic act. The supporters targeted the highest point of the stadium where several flags were hoisted, took down the Yugoslav flag, set it on fire and hoisted the burning flag back up the pole. This all happened against the background of constant ‘Croatia – independent state’ and ‘Burn the flag’ chants coming from the stands.

The outstanding aspect of their actions was, as noted by the sociologist Dražen Lalić, the fact that the aggression was not directed at a direct rival, as there were no Partizan supporters present at the stadium. The Torcida had directed their anger at one of the most meaningful national symbols of Yugoslavia – its flag. The symbolic burning of the flag powerfully symbolised the erosion and utter lack of state legitimacy.

This period of highly politicised football games in the Yugoslav federation was concluded one month later on 17 October. It was the day when a selection of Croatian players, under the label of the Croatian national team, played an international friendly against the USA’s national team in Zagreb. In order to make this possible, the Croatian football association, which was still part of the Yugoslav association, cleverly used a legal loophole in the statutes that allowed ‘national selections’ to play international friendlies too. The fact that the game actually took place can be identified as a significant diplomatic success, with the entire occasion included in a set of national(ist) celebrations that took place during those days.

The symbolic burning of the flag powerfully symbolised the erosion and utter lack of state legitimacy.

Just one day earlier, the city had celebrated the re-installation of the Ban Josip Jelačić sculpture in Zagreb’s main square. As a symbol of Croatian resistance against the Ottoman Empire, the sculpture had been removed during communist rule. The game was considered to be an integral part of these celebrations. National imagery and symbols were meticulously designed with the Croatian chequered patterns and the Ban Jelačić monument juxtaposed with the Stars and Stripes and the Statue of Liberty. The newly elected Croatian government thus purposefully utilised the game to signal to the United States of America and the international community, that it was ready to stand on its own feet as an independent nation-state.

To date, popular discourse both in the region and beyond has been widely uncritical in adopting the mythologised construct of the Maksimir riots as an initiator of the Yugoslav break-up. Often arbitrarily used as an example characterising a ‘prelude to war’, the riots cannot be singled out if our aim is to grasp the extent to which football played a role in the country’s disintegration.

To counter the standard argument, we only have to look at sport events that took place just a few months later; for example the fact that Dinamo Zagreb played against Red Star Belgrade almost a year after ‘the war started’ on 18 May 1991 at Maksimir stadium, only this time without any incident. Furthermore, the story of the great Croatian national hero Zvonimir Boban, is rather flimsy if we add that after his suspension from Yugoslav football ended, he played for Yugoslavia on several occasions. The last time was in Belgrade against the Faroe Islands on 16 May 1991, when the political conflict in Yugoslavia had already turned into war.

But today, 25 years later, the Maksimir riots are remembered in several ways in the post-Yugoslav space. Research by the anthropologist Ivan Djordjevic has shown that in Serbia, media and popular narratives about the riots are mostly characterised by ‘silence’. Furthermore, there is no mythologisation of the riots by Delije. This is quite understandable, since they were ultimately the symbolic losers of the riots, particularly if we interpret them as ‘the day the war started’.

In addition, Serbian public discourse is still very strongly defined by a lack of consensus in dealing with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the question of Serbian responsibility. With regard to football ‘fan tribes’, who were among the first to volunteer for and operate in paramilitary combat, this means having to construct a sense of pride for having given their lives in a war in which Serbia officially never took part.

The notion of the ideological homogeneity of Croatian society was thus constructed in order to exclude political alternatives and competing narratives and function as a mechanism for securing legitimacy.

In Croatia on the other hand, the Maksimir riots have to be identified as a contemporary national myth. Its main mythologising function is to support the dominant national narrative on Croatia’s formative years: namely the inevitability of the Yugoslav dissolution and the formation of a Croatian nation state as a conditio sine qua non. The politicising and subsequent ideological exploitation under the Tudjman regime produced a mythologised narrative, identifying the riots as a symbolic initiation of the so-called Homeland War.

This particular interpretation of the incident is not without reason. It allowed the Tudjman regime to include the riots into their narrative of Croatian statehood and how it was established. It perpetuated the narrative of an overwhelming popular support for Franjo Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) from the moment of their electoral victory; something that does not hold up under the spotlight of social research. The final year of socialist Yugoslavia was much more a contested political struggle than a ‘manifestation of people’s will’. The notion of the ideological homogeneity of Croatian society was thus constructed in order to exclude political alternatives and competing narratives and function as a mechanism for securing legitimacy.

While it is difficult to argue that sport, and in particular football, did not play a significant role in late socialist Yugoslavia’s history as a social field of nationalist mobilisation, the games discussed here nonetheless have to be understood in the context of political cleavages and radicalised tensions within the federation. However, the broadly established popular narrative that the ‘war started at Maksimir’ on 13 May 1990, even if only symbolically, is rather problematic. The riots were neither the start of the conflict nor its initiation, but rather a powerful manifestation of the rise (or decline) of football to being a significant nationalising and homogenising social field in all the Yugoslav republics, but most openly in Croatia and Serbia. The gradual transformation of football spectators into soldiers and the rising level of physical violence as a ‘legitimate’ form of conflict-solving furthermore blatantly mirrored Yugoslavia’s weakness to deal with a crisis that would ultimately lead to its dissolution.