the curious drama of the president of a republic versus a football fan

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© Copyright ISSA and SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi)
[1012–6902 (200203) 37:1;59–77; 021854]
THE CURIOUS DRAMA OF THE PRESIDENT OF A
REPUBLIC VERSUS A FOOTBALL FAN TRIBE
A Symptomatic Case in the Post-Communist Transition in Croatia
Srdjan Vrcan
Split, Croatia
Abstract This article offers a sociological interpretation of the conflict in the 1990s in Croatia
between the President of the Republic of Croatia, the late Franjo Tu3man, and a football fan tribe. It
began as a family quarrel in the same Croatian nationalist ideological and political family about the
imposed name change of a football club but gradually became the first public political contestation of
the President’s charisma with growing political consequences. The interpretation is based upon identifying the set of confrontations involved: social system vs life world, different deconstructions and
reconstructions of social and football reality, expropriators vs expropriated, nation-state politics vs
autonomy of the civil society, corporate politics vs sub-politics. In conclusion, it discusses a set of
problems regarding football and politics in so-called transition and, in particular, those regarding football fandom and nationalism.
Key words • Croatia • football • football fandom • nationalism • politics • transition
There is no doubt that the main course of events since the collapse of the
communist regimes in the European East has produced a series of surprises for
contemporary sociological analysis. This becomes evident when the vicissitudes
of transition to post-communism in the region of former Yugoslavia are seriously taken into account and not aprioristically minimized (presumably as an anomaly standing outside of the modern European political history).
The first surprise may be identified in the orgies of violence which exploded
in the 1990s and have not yet come to an end, with football fan tribes being
involved and engaged in them. Giddens’s proposition that ‘none of the major
figures now commonly accepted as the main founders of modern social theory,
including Max Weber, foresaw how savage and destructive would be the forces
unleashed in current times’ (Giddens, 1987: 18) seems adequate to describe that
type of surprise, in terms of expectations connected initially with the collapse
of communism and transition. The second surprise may be illustrated by
Poznanski’s statement that, following the first surprise of the rapid implosion of
communist regimes, a second surprise has emerged: the transitional crisis with
outcomes that surpass the devastating effects of the great world crisis in the 1930s
(Poznanski, 1998: 10). The third surprise regards the social dynamics already
identified by Beck operating in the early 1930s in Germany (Beck, 1996: 320)
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and now revived everywhere in the region — that is, the dynamics which turned
in a few days, a mere week or so, former neighbours first into others, then others
into strangers and finally strangers into enemies. The fourth is the surprise regarding the intensity of the irony of history operating unexpectedly in the region in
the 1990s and turning some very noble ideas, democratic at their face value, into
their direct opposite — for instance, turning autonomy into a new heteronomy,
national independence into new forms of submission and dependence upon a
foreign protectorate, a dream of full sovereignty into a form of limited sovereignty, individualism into new collectivism, establishing a society of affluence
into a society of scarcity and of expanding poverty, free citizens’ political participation into mass political apathy.
The current sociology of football has not been spared similar surprises concerning the role of football in the transition to post-communism and in a crisistorn post-communist transition. Particularly if one is inclined to believe that
‘there is a distinctively sporting contribution to civil society, based on sporting
values’, described as the
. . . importance of competing while retaining respect for opponents, the ability to express and
suppress individual talents and ambitions within the team, the acknowledgement that there is
something — the good of the game — beyond our immediate ambitions and an ultimate
willingness to accept, however harsh its judgements . . . may seem at the time . . .
A similar approach is expressed in Camus’s remarks that ‘all that I know most
surely in the long run about morality and obligations to men, I owe to football’
(Allison, 1998: 714). This is challenged in two relevant ways. First, the events of
the 1990s may be approached as a kind of rare contemporary experimentum in
vivo revealing the changing impact of various historical, social, political and
cultural circumstances or variables, and their manifold outcomes. This approach
has been taken by Sack and Suster, maintaining that:
. . . given the intensity of ethnic and nationalist sentiments in the Balkans and the importance
of sport (especially soccer) in this region, the former Yugoslav Republic provides a natural
laboratory for examining the intimate connections between sport, religion, ethnicity, and
nationalism. It also provides a setting for examining the relationship between sport and war.
(Sack and Suster, 2000: 307)
Second, the course of events may be taken as pointing to a dilemma regarding the
heuristic validity of some current conventional ideas on football in totalitarian
systems or on the political role of football fandom in totalitarian regimes. The
crucial point seems to be the dilemma whether the sociological analysis of football and totalitarianism ought to operate with a specific set of concepts in order
to elaborate a peculiar framework adequate to that specific task, or whether it may
use the same set of fundamental concepts utilized in the interpretation of possible
relationships between football and politics elsewhere. This dilemma is emphasized additionally by the fact of an unexpected upheaval in the world of Croatian
football and in Croatian fan tribes’ behaviour in the 1990s but also in some other
societies in post-communist transition. For instance, some fan tribes in former
East Germany began to chant the provocative slogan ‘Put up the Wall again’
(Merkel, 1999: 63).
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A very curious drama emerged in football in the 1990s in post-communist
Croatia which may be viewed both as a surprise and a fascinating challenge to the
contemporary sociological analysis of present-day football, and more particularly
to the relationship between football fandom and post-communist politics today.
The curiosity of the drama lies in the fact that a manifest conflict arose between
the former President of the Republic of Croatia Franjo Tu3man and the leader of
Croatian nationalist movement and a football fan tribe1 named ‘Bad Blue Boys’
(BBB) about the politically imposed change of the name of Zagreb Premier
league football club from ‘Dinamo’ to ‘Croatia’. This conflict had arisen originally as a family quarrel within the Croatian nationalist political and ideological
family to which both the President and fan tribe ‘BBB’ belonged initially, but
quickly it turned in practice into public political conflict with ramified consequences and very unfavourable effects for the alleged charisma of the President
of Croatia and for the new post-communist regime claiming to be an authentic
post-communist democracy. Basically, it was transformed into a political conflict
representing the first public challenge with mass following to President
Tu3man’s authoritarian and autocratic way of ruling and running Croatia,
legitimized by nationalist ideology and applied to sport in post-communist
Croatia in general and post-communist Croatian football in particular. The
symptomatic relevance of the vicissitudes of this conflict lies in the fact that
it came before any sign of similar public political challenge from the existing
opposition parties, and not only predicted the ongoing erosion of the mass
political support for Tu3man and his political party, but added extra force to this
erosion. The vicissitudes of this conflict did somehow anticipate and directly
contribute to the later disastrous electoral defeat of Tu3man’s party at both the
parliamentary and presidential elections in January 2000.
Some Enigmas Emerging
The specific challenge in the drama may be reasonably delineated by four basic
enigmas to be dealt with in a sociologically more or less plausible way.
•
•
•
The first enigma may be spelled out as the question of why dissent arising
within the same nationalist political, ideological and football family, about
such an allegedly trivial affair as the change of the name of a football club,
could initiate a chain of events with increasing political relevance, culminating in an escalation of police violence and an eruption of fan violence in
a country which had recently been radically ‘cleansed’ of all ethnic and
political others.
The second enigma concerns the basis of the stubbornness of a fan tribe in
rejecting resolutely the change of the name in spite of all kind of political
pressure, anathema and condemnation. What were the roots of the fans’
readiness to bear all the bothersome and irritating actions mobilized by an
authoritarian and arrogant nationalist power elite to break down their
resistance?
The third enigma concerns the logic of the course of events begun as a
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difference of opinion, becoming a case of public dissent and ending in a
radical conflict with very important political implications. Why did all the
stratagems to find a solution to the conflict fail to eliminate it from the
public political scene, either by luring the fan tribe into some kind of peaceful cooperation or by enchanting them by typical nationalist emotionally
overheated verbiage or by scaring them with social isolation and exclusion or
systematic police harassment and repression?
The fourth enigma regards the motives of the behaviour of the highest
political notables, who were convinced they had an allegedly stable and quasi
plebiscitarian political support. What induced them to engage directly and
even personally in a public confrontation with a presumably small and
politically irrelevant fan group, which was transformed into a conflict with
high political risks and with probable negative political consequences for
them? What made them so eager (or so blind) to engage in a route so full of
seemingly superfluous political risks with so little to gain and so much to
lose?
Some theoretical ideas are needed for the task. This is just a hint at the path
that may be followed in a promising search for such ideas which are found
neither within the set of ideas focused on the relationship between football and
nationalism interpreted primarily as a natural reaction to national oppression2 nor
the ideas of a peculiar revenge of a long suppressed civil society, conceived of
existing as a kind of underground oasis of democratic values within the context
of a totalitarian communist system.3
Social System vs Life World
It is argued that such ideas may be hinted at in the well-known distinction made
by Lockwood between systemic integration and social integration and, more
promisingly still, in Habermas’s (1981) distinction between the social system and
the life world (Erlebnisswelt). It means that at the source of the conflict between
the President and the BBB fan tribe there lies a distinction and a friction between
what belonged to the new social system, on one side, and what belonged to the
fan tribe’s Erlebnisswelt, on the other. In that case, the initial dissent, transformed
from a family quarrel into a political conflict, becomes a conflict of two different
but adjoining social worlds hard to accommodate with the respective social actors
in the social field of football, which is actually a permanent meeting point
between the world of the social system and of the systemic integration and the
Erlebnisswelt and of social integration.
This approach may be illustrated by clarifying distinct meanings and functions of the term ‘dynamo’ as the name of a football club in the contexts of these
two different worlds.
It is evident that ‘dynamo’ in the post-communist systemic world, organized
in Croatian nationalist key, had the same meaning it had had previously within
the framework of official communist vocabulary, as well as the same symbolic
function as when it had been used within the communist organization of sport.
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It was quite normal to expect that for the post-communist systemic world and
systemic integration such a meaning might be experienced as too cosmopolitan
and productivist, and, therefore, at least anational if not anti-national. Its symbolic value might have created some kind of homogeneity and identification
indeed but not one that was sufficiently coloured in national colours, which are
considered to be the only normal and the only legitimate ones in the Croatian
post-communist nation state. Therefore, it was a term to be abhorred and rejected. Moreover, its further persistence in the new post-communist system would
have meant an unwanted survival of the detested old system, and it would have
symbolized that the systemic nationalist challenge to communism had not been
sufficiently radical, and that there were sections of the post-communist Croatian
society still somehow occupied by some communist relics or heritage. Therefore,
the change of the name was essential from the system point of view. The new
name ‘Croatia’ had all the political advantages that the Croatian nationalism and
Croatian nationalist system would welcome: it was synonymous with the name
of the fatherland (Croatia=Hrvatska); it belonged to the football tradition of
Croatian anti-communist extreme nationalist emigrants (in Australia, Canada); it
could symbolize the total colonization of the social reality by the systemic ideological and symbolic contents; it could create wished for national homogenization in football as well as the identification along nationalist lines; it might best
serve the international political affirmation of independent Croatia through football. Therefore, the change was introduced from above in the wider context of
politicization of football and its political instrumentation for systemic nationalist
political and ideological purposes. Obviously, for these reasons, the change of
name from ‘Dinamo’ to ‘Croatia’ for the system social actors was never a trivial
affair but an important political and national task.
On the other side, within the context of the fan tribe’s Erlebnisswelt, the
old name of the club had a quite different meaning as well as a quite different
symbolic function. Primarily, the actual meaning of the term ‘dynamo’ had
nothing to do in their Erlebnisswelt with the meaning ascribed to it in the communist political and sport terminology. In the same manner, it had nothing to do
with its function as defined by communist politics in sport. The actual meaning
of the term ‘dynamo’ for the fans was constructed upon the basis of the tribe’s
own long experience, including their best and most spectacular exploits on the
terraces at home as well as on the streets and the squares of their town, their
adventurous excursions into the territories of other tribes, their specific social
imaginary and symbolic paraphernalia (image, demeanour and argot), their
spectacular confrontations with other tribes — particularly their frequent clashes
with Belgrade fan tribes and primarily their clashes with the police of the old
regime. Drawing meaning from such specific experiences, the tribe in fact had
nationalized the term ‘dynamo’ in the Croatian key, eliminating all the traces of
its original meaning. At the same time, this term had a new function within their
Erlebnisswelt, producing a specific type of collective identity and homogenization. Owing to such a change in the meaning of the term ‘dynamo’, it became the
symbol of their particular identity, relevant not only to their football commitment
but also to their political ones, coloured generally in the 1980s in ardent nationalist and radical anti-communist keys. This was the main background reason for
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the tribe’s easy initial political mobilization in the Croatian nationalist movement
headed by the late President of the Republic of Croatia and more particularly for
their acting politically as the attack squads for that movement. Therefore, the
term ‘dynamo’ was an important part of the tribe’s grand narratives, of the tribe’s
subculture, the tribe’s identity and tribe’s activity. Consequently, it was no
wonder that the imposed change of the name of their beloved club was not
a minor affair to them as they used to refer to it as to ‘a holy name’. They
experienced the change as an abrupt cut into their tribe’s history, as an imposed
de-construction of their own identity and as a tailoring by orders from above of a
new identity for them.
This may be a plausible interpretation of the sources of the initial dissent and
quarrel caused by the imposed change of club’s name. However, some enigmas
still remain open.
Contrasting Reconstructions of Social Reality
There is another crucial fact to be taken into consideration. The whole problem
was located in the social and political setting defined by so-called transition from
communism to post-communism. Therefore, it is very plausible to project it
onto a turbulent background characterized by social, political, ideological and
cultural de-construction and reconstruction of almost the entire social and cultural
texture, to be described as a specific case of social construction and reconstruction of the social reality (Berger and Luckmann), with different social actors
participating in it with their different group perspectives (Srubar, 1998). Therefore, it may be argued that there was more involved than just a difference in two
collective actors’ perspectives regarding the name of the Zagreb club. It may be
argued also that there was more involved than it being just an example of typical
bricolage, characterizing fans’ utilization of symbols of very diverse provenance
but giving to them a peculiar meaning within their Erlebnisswelt.
First, different reconstructions of the time dimension relevant to Croatian
football were involved. From the perspective of the group of political and football nationalist notables, the previous 50 years were reconstructed basically as a
time of absolute evil and total darkness, standing outside the mainstream of the
genuine national Croatian history. Basically, they were reconstructed as a time
which ought to be detached from normal Croatian history and wiped out of
the collective memory as some kind of unhistory or as a black hole in national
history. And this was applied to sport and football, recent and past, as well. From
the perspective of the fan tribe, the same time was reconstructed in a different
way, as a glorious past characterized by their brave exploits in spite of the
adversities of the old regime. Therefore, it was a time not to be forgotten for the
club and the memory of the fan tribe past. Least of all should it be sacrificed for
pragmatic political party purposes.
Second, a more complex difference appeared in their respective reconstructions of the space dimension. There was a common feature in notables’ and fans’
reconstruction of the space dimension in nationalist key: both reconstructions
operated with a space which had turned from a pluri-ethnic one into a mono-
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ethnic one, and it was applied to football and more particularly to the stadium
space. In both reconstructions there was no room left for the ethnic others.
Furthermore, they both operated with the same distinction between what
belonged to the space of everyday life and routine practice and what belonged to
the space of exceptional and not-everyday experience. And the stadium space
was constructed as the space for exceptional, not-everyday experience. However,
a radical distinction reappeared in their reconstructions of the stadium space
dimension. From the perspective of the political and football notables, the football and the stadium space was reconstructed with two main features: (a) as a
more or less politically and ethnically homogeneous space and, therefore, with no
real sources for possible fan tribe aggression and possible future fan conflicts, and
least of all of clashes with genuine Croatian police, and in the hope of football
stadiums acting as an enlarging mirror of the new Croatian political and ideological conciliation, homogeneity and unity, inherent to an idealized community
of destiny beyond any serious internal tensions and conflicts, with expectations
that the football culture would help to cement social stability, borrowing
Russell’s argument (1999: 19); and (b) as basically their legitimate space, with
their ownership upon it firmly established, their control becoming finally unchallenged and consequently as a public stage where their actions — both political
and in sport — would be acclaimed and revered. From the perspective of the fan
tribe the space was reconstructed as divided in a manifold way: (a) it was seen as
a stage for their emerging and appearing in public as specific social actor; (b) it
was divided in theirs and not-theirs, and, therefore, as an open space for new
cleavages, new rivals and contenders to emerge, that is, as an arena potentially
susceptible to expression of new animosities and new fan tribe clashes; (c) it was
basically vertically separated in two sections: fans’ territory on the northern and
eastern terraces, and the notables’ section, reduced to the official stand and its
neighbourhood; (d) as the conflict over the name of the club intensified, the stadium space was reconstructed as a preferred site of fans’ carnivals, aimed at
inverting publicly the dominant political hierarchy, and, in the final analysis,
(e) as the space of radically contended ownership, demonstrating that the political notables might own the stadium but only as an empty construction with
practically no spectators and fans, and not an alive stadium with cheering crowds.
A further difference may be noticed in reconstruction of identities and
identifications relevant to football. In the perspective of political and football
notables, acting as the only legitimate representatives of the social system, the
identifications in football were to be legitimately de-constructed, redesigned
and reconstructed using the means of authority and power at the disposal of the
political, ideological, communicative, cultural, educational and other institutions
of the system, which meant basically from above and by design. At the same time
such identities were to be of an ascriptive, mono-dimensional, non-equivocal and
total nature. They were reconstructed primarily in confrontation with some
selected ‘Others’. Therefore, such identities operated in the way described by
Hall: ‘through their careers, identities can function as points of identification and
attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to render “outside”, abjected’ (1997: 5). In the final analysis, the construction of identity was
based upon the fact of ethnic belonging so that it was the national belonging as
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such that defined the individual and group identity, turning the practicalities of
identity into a matter of destiny. Therefore, for notables, the fans’ identification
with ‘Croatia’ seemed to be secured in advance quite normally and naturally.
Reconstruction of identity from the fan tribe’s perspective was a construction
from below, based upon individual decisions, constituting a sign of voluntary
consent and dissent. Therefore, it was an identity which might be changed and
revoked. It was also an identity which could be pluri-dimensional. It was a distinction between the identity focused on ‘who-ness’ and the identity focused on
‘what-ness’.4
A deep difference is to be underlined concerning violence in football, existing in the respective perspectives of the political and football notables’ group
and in the perspective of the fan tribe. From the notables’ perspective fans’
aggression and their inclination to violent behaviour was to be reconstructed in
an ambivalent and contradictory way. Namely, their aggressive and violent
behaviour before the 1990s was considered to be fully legitimate and welcome
for three main reasons: (a) as a way to make their protest against the Croatian
club’s subordinate position publicly visible, and as a way of subverting and
inverting the previous illegitimate hierarchies, political as well as football; (b) as
a legitimate way of affirming in an undeniable manner their peculiar national
Croatian identity, their autonomy and subjectivity in politics as well as in football being made visible by violent acts primarily in confrontations and clashes
with Serb fan tribes; (c) as a defence against old regime police harassment and
repression. Therefore, they considered the stadium to be a public space with
warranted impunity. However, in the 1990s the fan tribe’s aggressive and violent
behaviour was seen as illegal, illegitimate and meaningless. The then Deputy
Minister of Interior declared in a TV debate that there were no reasons at all
for fans to resort to violence in the independent Croatian nation state. Football,
basically a zero-sum game and a game in which it was not enough to participate
but it was essential to win and inherently susceptible to motivate violence, had
presumably lost its connections to violence owing to overall anti-communist and
nationalist political and ideological changes. Furthermore, the stadium space
was now denied the privilege of being a public space supplied with legitimate
impunity. Therefore, the later eruptions of fans’ violence were interpreted either
as a sign that a part of fan tribe had gone crazy or rather as politically suspect and
subversive actions.
From the fan tribe’s perspective the violence was considered to be legitimate:
(a) as a way to break through the mass media silence and biased presentation of
their cause and make them talk about the fan tribe; (b) as a way of making their
resistance to notables’ moves publicly visible and politically relevant so it would
be taken more seriously into consideration; (c) as a legitimate defence against
the new police harassment and persecution at the orders of political and football
notables; (d) as a supreme act of their attachment to and love of the club and its
holy name; (e) as a way of reinforcing tribe’s homogeneity and unity; (f) as a
method of establishing and strengthening internal tribe hierarchy as an achieved
and not an ascribed and imposed one.
Against such a background, the continuity of the conflict seems to lose much
of its enigmatic nature.
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Structural Tensions: Expropriators vs Expropriated
There are some relevant ideas to be found in some sociologists’ investigation of
contemporary British football, and more particularly the recent eruption of fan
violence in it, that locate the violence in the background of structural changes
in British professional football, and in recent forms of reorganization of professional clubs. It was the structural changes that presumably caused some very
important tensions around the football. More particularly, it was hinted that there
had been a process of decomposition of the football club as an institution traditionally connected to a more or less precise neighbourhood with prevailing working class background. Such a change is considered to be caused by penetration of
capitalism into football and the subsequent commodification of football which
might be described as a kind of expropriation of the club from the social setting
to which it had traditionally belonged.
Such suggestions seem to be promising for the interpretation of the intensity
of the conflicts in post-communist Croatia provoked by the change of the name
of the Zagreb club. It might be plausibly argued that the change of the club name
symbolized the actual expropriation of the Zagreb club from those to whom it had
belonged, and emotionally at least in the prevailing fan tribe’s perception. And
such a perception was not completely wrong if one looks at the spectacle which
used to happen at the stadium every Sunday as a part of the football game. Such
an expropriation had some additional irritating features. Namely, the expropriation of the club was not carried out by the penetration of private capital into the
Croatian football and into the Zagreb club. It was carried out by political ways
and means at the disposal of the new political notables, with the same final results
except the crucial one: they did not invest their private capital and consequently
run all the risks of such a financial operation. However, there was no doubt that
such an expropriation included expropriation from the fan tribe too, as social
actors who had previously had some kind of legitimate role and voice in the
club’s affairs. Consequently, the Zagreb club, becoming for the political and football notables definitely ‘theirs’, had practically ceased for the fan tribe to be
‘theirs’ as it had used somehow to be before. Therefore, there was nothing very
strange in the firmness and ensuing increase of intensity of conflict between the
political and football notables and the fan tribe. It was somehow a conflict
between expropriators and expropriated ones. In a sense it was a rare conflict
over whose the football game had been indeed, since the planned and attempted
exclusion of the hard core tribe members from the stadium as a public stage and
the tribe’s reaction to it might be interpreted as a symptomatic case of disputed
ownership over the stadium and the respective spectacle.5 There was, of course,
nothing surprising in the determination of notables who had become actual
owners of the club to defend their new ‘property’ as their dearest toy by using all
means at the disposal of an arrogant authoritarian political ‘elite’: from mass
media to police.
Therefore, the intensity of the protracted conflict turns out to be not so
enigmatic as it must seem when the whole problem is seen as conflict about a
trivial affair.
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Nation State vs Civil Society
It is argued further that some promising ideas have been elaborated in the
discourse on civil society and ought to be borrowed to deal with some of the
enigmas remaining. The notion of civil society has been used with at least three
main meanings in the current discourse (Alexander, 1998). The meaning relevant
for the purpose of this analysis is the most restricted one, insisting upon the
fundamental distinction between the state with economy included, on one side,
and the civil society described as consisting of a peculiar combination of
associations mostly of NGO type and social movements acting within the public
sphere (Öffentlichkeit in Habermas terms), on the other, but not necessarily
cherishing the ideas linked by Diamond (1994) to civil society.6
These ideas seem to be promising when applied to the conflict provoked by
the change of the name of the Zagreb club and more particularly to the matrix of
BBBoys behaviour if two crucial facts are taken into account. First, the state and
state politics involved in the conflict were basically authoritarian, with even some
autocratic attributes, and also a nation state which was acting as a nationalizing
state (Brubaker, 1996: 83–4) by trying to establish control over all important
spheres of social life, sport and football included, due to their attractive emotional
charge and their spectacular nature as well as their capacity to produce political
mobilization in an apparently non- and pre-political way, excluding the need for
a political debate. Second, sport and football seemed in post-communist Croatia
to be one of those social spheres in which the state and state politics were
permanently in direct touch with the civil society and confronted with some kind
of autonomy of the civil society, owing primarily to the state attempts to colonize
sport and football with its preferred contents and to instrumentalize them for the
state’s political purposes.
Faced with such a situation, the behaviour of a fan tribe might be plausibly
interpreted as being motivated by four crucial motives:
(a) affirmation and protection of the autonomy of the fan tribe, belonging to the
sphere of the civil society but somehow threatened by being exposed to the
state and state political interventions into the life of the club which did
not permit any kind of autonomy in contemporary professional football in
general and in particular in the life of Zagreb club, with a specific political
mission ascribed to it by nation-state politics;
(b) affirmation and protection of the collective subjectivity of the fan tribe as a
long-existing social actor around the Zagreb club, in a situation when such a
collective subjectivity had been threatened by monopoly in decision-making
processes of the new political and football notables acting as exclusive
representatives of the nation state and of nation-state politics which did not
permit the existence of any other social actor claiming to act as a legitimate
subject in decision-making processes;
(c) affirmation and protection of the spontaneously generated identity of the fan
tribe, constructed and reconstructed in a long-term process upon the basis of
experience of the successive generations of members of the tribe, which was
now being threatened by political interventions from above aiming at the
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retailoring of identities as well as imposing a cleansing of collective tribe’s
memory and pre-prepared identities and identifications;
(d) protection of their right to act in public in the way they were free to choose
and invent, even in provocative and carnivalesque manner, with at least some
degree of impunity.
In such a context the tribe’s resolute resistance became reasonable: it was
their autonomy, their subjectivity and their genuine identity at peril, their very
self-hood. And their recourse to violent behaviour was a means to make socially
visible their autonomy as well as their subjectivity and their identity which they
were not willing to surrender. At the same time this was the background to the
fan tribe’s ability to outplay all the stratagems used by the notables against them.
There was, of course, a paradox in it since the fan tribe emerged as the
actual defender of the autonomy of civil society but the tribe was very far from
being a promoter of democracy, according to its prevalent mentality and its
behavioural inclinations.
Politics vs Subpolitics
There is another problem to be touched upon. It is the problem of relationship
between politics and football as it emerged in the transition in Croatia.
Everything that happened during the conflict between the political and football
notables and the fan tribe had from the very beginning political connotations
which became more and more visible in the vicissitudes of the conflict. It was
shown again that football grounds might function as big reflecting glasses or
megaphones through which what had been brooding in the intestines of the
society and/or creeping in the underground courses of public opinion might
become very visible. Therefore, it offered a rare opportunity to detect what was
really going on in the society at large in a way superior to some public opinion
surveys, analysis of parliamentary debates, party spokesmen declarations or some
TV and press reports and comments. It may be argued that the conflict between
the President Tu3man and the BBB fan tribe had an almost paradigmatic
relevance for the analysis of politics in situations of grave social crisis as had
erupted in at least some of the contemporary societies in so-called transition.
Some conclusions can be plausibly drawn from this curious drama. First, it is
evident that the fan tribe expressed their political attitudes not only within the
football setting but also moved directly from the field of football into the field of
politics by expressing political ideas and demands of wider scope and not only
within framework of their fan carnivals and utilizing the stadium as a political
stage. Therefore, their political behaviour was not limited to insults and slurs
against political notables on the terraces. For example, graffiti appeared in preelection time on the walls in Split and Zagreb saying ‘Bad Blue Boys + Torcida
= the defeat of HDZ’.7 Consequently, it seems very promising to interpret fan
tribe’s political behaviour by using Beck’s ideas on the possible role of subpolitics.
The sphere of subpolitics, according to Beck, differs from politics since, first,
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in subpolitics it is the social actors, situated outside the political and corporate
system, which come out on the scene of political articulation of social life (Beck,
1993: 162); second, subpolitics means basically the formation and articulation of
society from below (1993: 164); third, subpolitics is not open politically and
ideologically only on one side and only in one direction (1993: 159); fourth, the
secret and the strength of subpolitics is located in the explosive nature of the
small and allegedly trivial (1993: 166).
At the same time radical politicization of football fan tribes may be plausibly
interpreted as a kind of degradation of democratic politics owing to the fact that
typical patterns of fans’ thinking and behaving within the stadium and match
setting were transferred into the field of politics and used for political purposes at
the expense of the discursive and deliberative nature of democratic politics. The
same change happens when the notion of football as a kind of war is transferred
to politics, which is conceived of as having essentially to do with foes, and/or
when spectacularity of football is turned into the spectacularity of politics at the
expense of the rational and discursive content of democratic political processes.
Second, it seems that a plausible general suggestion for a promising solution
to the problem of the relationship between politics and football is to be found in
Giulianotti’s argument that ‘football seeks to serve many functions and many
masters’ (1999: 16). It may be argued that this ambiguous political function of
football was confirmed very clearly in some more recent football events in
Croatia. The first one was the qualification match between Croatia and
Yugoslavia, which, through the enflamed atmosphere created and induced
systematically from above, was tuned to serve by overheated national homogenization the important electoral purposes of official politics and the party in
power which was otherwise losing political support on mass scale. The second
one is the recent match between ‘Hajduk’ and ‘Croatia’ which served, according
to the atmosphere at the stadium and more particularly the almost unanimous
politically coloured chanting, anti-government electoral purposes by manifesting
popular rejection of the party in power. The third one is more recent, and it is to
be found in politically relevant actions by the fan tribe since the victory of the
opposition parties at the parliamentary and presidential elections in January 2000.
It is now clearly challenging the political moves and measures of the new postTu3man government by using slogans and symbols of the more radical nationalist right and even provoking disorder and causing violent clashes with the police
under the command of the new government. Therefore, it seems plausible to
argue that football may be serving many different masters, but not all the
possible masters in the same way. There is some kind of elective affinity between
modern football fandom mentality and the types of masters and political causes
it might serve best. Such an affinity appears between fandom and primarily that
type of politics which is conceived and practised upon a friend/foe distinction.
Drifting to a Political Defeat
There is no doubt that the public conflict over the change of the club name set off
a chain of events, of actions and reactions of the social actors involved, with
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increasing political relevance. It became very probable from the beginning that
there was, due to the logic of the course of events, politically much more to lose
than to gain for the President and the political and football notables. Therefore,
their obstinate engagement in the conflict might seem to a neutral observer as
quite surprising as well as unwise, as moving willingly along a road that might
have clear politically counter-productive effects for them. Moreover, their
recourse to repressive police violence against members of the fan tribe may seem
also to be politically too risky for them.
Two easy and consoling interpretations of their actions may be suggested:
one is focused upon the impact of the traits of Tu3man’s authoritarian personality, and the other one upon the impact of the still existing heritage of the
communist political culture, not yet radically dismantled and substituted by a
democratic political culture. However, it is argued here that a closer look indicates that there was a kind of logic in their seemingly not quite wise and prudent
behaviour and in their rapid recourse to police repression and harassment.
Primarily, it was the logic inherent to or built into their nationalist orientation and
practice, both of the President Tu3man and his political party, as well as the logic
of the situation.
Operating with the nationalist political philosophy, the crucial conviction of
which was that, due to belonging to the same national entity and to the same
cultural community, everybody wants and wishes basically the same thing
(Schmitt, 1996: 63), and believing that the nation state8 and its politics were the
only legitimate institutional expression of such a political unanimity — of a
centuries-long dream of Croatian people — for the nationalist political notables,
including the late President of the Republic himself, it was quite normal to react
as they did to the challenges of the fan tribe’s initial public refusal and then
resistance to accept their political moves in football. It was quite natural that they
could not tolerate the fan tribe’s autonomy and their autonomous collective subjectivity, as well as their identity, since their political philosophy could hardly
tolerate in general any aspect of civil society as an autonomous social sphere
beyond the control of the nation state. Furthermore, nationalist political philosophy considered the nation to be some kind of community (Gemeinschaft).
Therefore, it was operating with a distinction between the awareness of the
authentic and permanent national interests and the current and changing public
opinion, similar to F. Tönnies’s distinction between a substantial and lasting will
of the community (Wesenswille) and a contingent, fragmented and changing
public opinion (Kurwille). It was a presumed privilege of the nationalist party and
its leader to act in accordance with the substantial and lasting will of the nation
as a community of destiny, while other political and social actors had to do only
with what belonged to contingent and changing public opinion. Finally, the
nationalist political philosophy operated with a specific philosophy of history as
progressing towards its final stage conceived of as culminating in the building of
an independent nation state and a world of independent nation states. The knowledge of the direction in which history has been allegedly moving was thought of
as the privilege of the nationalist political and intellectual elite, enabling them to
act in accordance with it and legitimating their political actions in terms of such
presumed accordance. Therefore, it was quite natural within the perspective of
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their political philosophy that they had to interpret fan tribe’s actions in public
confrontation with their wishes and goals either as some kind of national immaturity and irresponsibility or rather as a visible result of a political plot against the
independent Croatian nation state and its stability. Furthermore, there was an
inclination built into the nationalist political strategy to resort to violence as to a
legitimate means for implementation of its crucial political objectives which, due
to their very nature, could not be implemented under the existing historical and
social circumstances other than by recourse to organized political violence. It was
the supreme location of such political objectives in the hierarchy of social values
which was used to legitimate recourse to political violence when the probability
of realizing such objectives by other means was rather low. Therefore, for the
President and his entourage it was the very nature of the highly situated crucial
political objectives of their nationalist political strategy, considered to be challenged and somehow put at stake by fan tribe actions, which both compelled and
obliged them to act as they actually did, even resorting to violence.
The situational constraints may be detected in their belief that the independent Croatian nation state was located in an essentially hostile environment so
that it should behave as a besieged fortress. Therefore, every single political item
built into its structure (for instance the President’s personal preference for a football club), ought to be defended resolutely if and when challenged.
It may be claimed that the enigmas described at first do not now seem to be
so enigmatic. The apparent senselessness of a quarrel and a conflict about such a
presumably trifling affair has been unveiled as a drama, played upon stadiums
and the squares as a public stage, with a very serious social and political background and important political consequences.
Some Tentative Conclusions
There is no doubt that the curious drama has proved to be a very recent case
demonstrating that football is more than just a game (Russell, 1999: 15). And this
is particularly valid for the turbulent social world of at least some contemporary
societies in the so-called post-communist transition, burdened by a grave and
protracted social crisis. Football has proved there, more than elsewhere, to be
more than just a game, in many ways.
First, football has become the site not only for reinforcement of some key
social and political identities but also for de-construction and reconstruction of
important social and political identities somehow in crisis, as well as in creating
in a new key some social and political identities. At the same time, football has
emerged as a potent vehicle generating and regenerating, mapping and remapping, territorial and other loyalties, as well as rivalries and animosities including
political ones but mostly in an allegedly pre-political and non-political way,
making it most able, therefore, inundate the world of everyday life.
Second, football has proved to be a locus for expression of large-scale social
rifts and cleavages, particularly in a situation of stagnation, recession and
aggravating social crisis, persisting behind the officially defined scenery of an
idealized homogeneous national community as a community of destiny
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(Schicksalgemeinschaft) or a society advancing to full democracy. It is rather
useful to take the category of underground society and to locate the fan tribe
partly in it
. . . in order to understand the simultaneous acting of different policies of symbols, myths,
values, political beliefs and knowledge which grew under communism and are still
characterizing post-communist transition, either affecting or encouraging the further
democratic transformation of these societies. (Bianchini, 2001)
Third, football has become an arena for the visible shift in the traditional
role of a fan tribe to the role of a political actor, with the fan tribe taking over an
opposition political role in challenging existing powers while opposition political
parties remain docile and satisfied with acting as a token opposition, not daring
to contest publicly the nationalist ideology which had long served as the basis of
legitimization of the powers that be.
Fourth, football has become a social field in which the latent mass social discontent may obtain its first political articulation and expression, as well as a locus
where it becomes visible how an apparently insignificant dispute in football
affairs, owing to the arrogant behaviour of political and football notables, may
initiate a chain of events with more and more counter-productive effects for them,
and it may release politically contesting social forces more and more difficult
to control without the recourse to repression and violence. It has been demonstrated again that football and the football stadium do take over the role of a
political arena where and when there is no pluralism of political parties and no
other way to express legally and legitimately some autonomous political attitudes
and requests, but also occasionally where and when there is political party
pluralism and a functioning multi-party parliament with a rigid distinction,
imposed from above, between political ideas and values considered to be
legitimate and ones considered to be non-legitimate and a closed political
horizon, leaving no room for alternative and autonomous initiatives (Sugden and
Tomlinson, 2000).
It may also be plausibly concluded that the curious drama has confirmed
once again that contemporary football may be utilized both as an instrument of
the governing political actors for their political purposes and as a means of opposing and challenging them. More generally it may be concluded that football acted
as a specific enlarging mirror of the society at large and not a purely passive one
but an active one, which does not simply reflect society’s structural patterns,
internal structural tensions and contradictions but makes visible such tensions and
contradictions that might otherwise remain hidden and latent, accelerates their
public eruption and intensifies them, and also somehow transfigures the social
and political issues at stake. In this sense the football culture has proved to be a
social phenomenon by which social stability may be cemented but also by which
the incipient social and political crisis originally submerged into the underground
levels of social life and boiling up gradually and silently may suddenly erupt
on the public scene, stimulated by a seemingly non-political and trivial football
dispute. It is a typical case in which football becomes a field in which a national
crisis is played out (Kozanoglu, 1999: 122) by being managed or intensified. At
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the same time it has been disclosed how the social spectacle linked to football,
otherwise so important to nationalist politics, owing to its capacity to impose
or induce a virtual reality, may change its function by demystifying the virtual
reality so cherished by nationalists.
However, the curious drama, commented on here in sociological terms, may
be taken as a symptomatic case to examine the possible relationship between
football and football fandom and contemporary nationalism, taking nationalism
not primarily as a sociopsychological or cultural phenomenon but basically as a
political phenomenon which is focused upon the problem of power, either as the
problem of conquest of power or the problem of maintenance of power, as well
as on the problem of social inclusion and exclusion and of the ultimate grounds
for giving or denying some rights — human, constitutional, political, civic, cultural and so on. Therefore, nationalism as a peculiar case of the contemporary
turn to politics of identity has emerged in the region of former Yugoslavia
essentially as a political strategy with the fundamental objective of nation statebuilding as a nationalizing state. Therefore, Gellner’s definition of nationalism
seems to be adequate for describing resurgent nationalism in the region but also
for its recourse to violence and its relation to football fandom.9 One ought to
remember that fundamental nationalist objectives have been best expressed by
Gellner’s sociological formula ‘One nation, one culture and one state’ and by the
nationalist imperative of the congruence between the nation and the state borders
as well as by Mazzini’s political formula ‘One nation one state and only one state
for every nation’.
It may be argued also that the curious drama indicates that nationalist political strategies in societies in transition are not strategies capable of resolving a
grave social crisis at the lowest possible social and human price but that they
are themselves inherently crisis-generating and crisis-perpetuating political
strategies, aggravating the social and human price to be paid.
Two very general conclusions may be arrived at. First, the vicissitudes of
football and football fandom in the region of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s testify that organized fans do celebrate the football as a war metaphor as underlined
by Dal Lago (1990: 36), but also that their actions under certain circumstances
are deplorably not just metaphorical and purely ritual. They seem to be predisposed to slide easily from a war metaphor to real war, causing not purely
metaphorical victims. Second, sport and football seem to have two faces, like the
god Janus: one may be described by humanization of sport as an irreversible trend
of western culture, and the other one as its brutalization as well as the brutalization of all the social relations it comes in touch with.
Finally, it may be argued that this curious drama may be seen as a very
symptomatic case, demonstrating the plausibility of Harrison’s reversal of the
slogan of ‘Football as a metaphor of the society’ into the slogan of ‘Society
becoming a metaphor of football in operation’ (Harrison, 1988: 265).
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Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The term ‘fan tribe’ is used in a relative sense. It means, first, recognizing that there are radical
differences between traditional pre-modern tribes and the modern fan tribes, that is recognizing
that belonging to a fan tribe is radically different from belonging to a tribe by being a matter of
personal decision and option which ought to be consciously taken but also may be withdrawn,
revoked and changed, and which is not primordially given and preceding all personal choice. At
the same time they differ from the traditional tribes since their identity emerges as an intermittent and transitory one (Dal Lago, 1990: 108). However, at the same time there are many
similar features in the behaviour and mentality of the traditional pre-modern tribes and the contemporary fan tribes. This is particularly visible in the persistence in both of the typical ‘tribal
truths’, in celebration of their festivities, e.g. in chanting and singing, in dancing, in wearing
their tribe insignia, in painting their faces, in slurring their enemies, but also in frequent
invoking the interventions of gods and saints, in shaman-like behaviour of their chorus leaders,
etc. and also in their overheated solidarity and in the monopolistic relation to ‘their territory’,
etc. In this respect the argumentation elaborated by Bauman following Maffesoli seems to be
convincing (Bauman, 1997: 137). The substitution of the term ‘fan tribe’ with the term ‘fan
group’ misses something very important.
The interpretation of close and quasi natural links between nationalism and football fan tribes in
terms of opposition and resistance to the long existing national oppression may seem to be
promising for interpreting the behaviour of Croatian fan tribes during the late 1980s and 1990s
but it is evidently failing as the framework for interpreting the similar behaviour of Serbian fan
tribes. Consequently, it would suggest that sociology ought to operate with two distinct frameworks for interpreting similar behaviour: one for Croatian fan tribes and the other for Serbian
ones, which is not a convincing solution. It might be used, of course, but it ought to take into
account the typical nationalist belief of every nation in the region as being ‘a victim of a victim’
or the fact that ‘victim-hood becomes the soul of the nation’ (Samadar, 2001: 35). However, it
may be more promising if the relationship between nationalism and football fan tribes is to be
examined by taking seriously into consideration the fundamental political objectives of the
current and resurgent nationalism in the entire region as well as football in ‘promoting a partition of the world and particularly the fans’ one into friends and foes’ (Dal Lago, 1990: 31).
The role of the civil society in transition in the region of former Yugoslavia since the mid-1980s
has been at least ambivalent or contradictory. One conclusion is certain: the associations and
institutions which are generally considered to belong to civil society have played a contradictory
role in the vicissitudes of the Yugoslav crisis. Sometimes they acted as the vanguard of the
resurgent nationalism (drastic case of Serbia in mid-1980s), sometimes basically legitimizing
and supporting aggressive and authoritarian nationalist political strategies turned practically into
state politics (Serbia and Croatia in the early and mid-1990s), sometimes directly engaged in
autonomous repressive activities against dissenting and non-nationalist groups and personalities
(e.g. Croatia in the early 1990s), sometimes by being swallowed up by the national community
as an alleged community of destiny and, therefore, colonized by nationalist ideas and values
(Slovenia in the early 1990s), sometimes functioning as the site of dissent and anti-nationalist
opposition (e.g. Croatia and Serbia in the late 1990s). It means that the activity of civil society
in the 1990s could not be classified simply as the activity of ‘a respectable civil society’ assisting almost by definition a process of achieving democratic practices.
It is the distinction in answering the questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I?’.
The football notables with the help of police once tried to prevent the identified hard core
members of BBB tribe entering the stadium and the tribe reacted by a boycott of the next match
which was played before a practically empty stadium, with less than 500 spectators in a stadium
with an attendance capacity of 40,000 spectators.
It is worth remembering that sometimes civil society was conceived of in debates in the mid1980s in former Yugoslavia as the social field characterized by basic horizontality of actors
involved, of tolerance, of cooperation, of harmony, of non-hindered development and affirmation of individuality, in contrast not only to the totalitarian state but also to all kinds of conflict,
collectivism and traditionalism. The principles upon which the notion of civil society was
thought to be founded were spelled out thus: (a) autonomy in regard to politics and the state;
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7.
8.
9.
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(b) associationism as non-political affiliating and organizing; (c) contractuality; (d) pluralism,
social and cultural as well as interest; (e) individualism; (f) solidarity; (g) self-organization;
(h) privacy; (i) humanism and humanitarianism; (j) universalism and mundialism (Pavlović,
1995: 29–30).
It was suggested that a common political action by two fan tribes would lead to an electoral
defeat of the political party in power since 1990.
Ferrarotti has formulated a very critical point of view on nation state: ‘The Nation state has been
born out of a strict connection between people and ethnicity, and in this case the term “people”
(popolo) has been understood in its Latin usage, populus from populari that is “people in arms”,
ready “to plunder”, “to devastate”, “to destroy”. The Nation is a war machine, but also the basis
for a psychological identity’ (Ferrarotti, 1993: 135).
One has only to try and apply nationalism as defined by Gellner to the complex region of
former Yugoslavia, from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina yesterday to Macedonia today, to
notice its almost necessary practical consequences: ‘In brief, nationalism is a theory of political
legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not be cut across the political ones, and,
in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state — a contingency already formally
excluded by the principle in its general formulation — should not separate the power-holders
from the rest’ (Gellner, 1986: 18).
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