Just when one thinks that the vulgar nationalism at the Euro is exhausted with the match between Croatia and Albania, Turkey and Austria happen, a kind of centuries-old historical derby in the Balkans, and a new problem is created.
Namely, although football stadiums in Europe, i.e. organized fan groups from the mid-eighties at the latest, have become gathering places for radical right-wingers and nationalists, with the exception of fans of a very small number of clubs, such as the Italian Livorno, the German St. Pauli, Spain's Rayo Vallecano or Mostar's Velež, the phenomenon of using the field itself to express nationalist messages has almost become an exclusively Balkan phenomenon in recent times.
Because, if we exclude the former Lazio football player, Paolo di Cani, who was also an undisguised sympathizer of fascism on the field, the practice of expressing extreme political views by the actors themselves on the pitch was an excess everywhere, except in our area.
Therefore, the current case of Turkish football player, Meriha Demirel, who celebrated his goals against Austria with the symbol of an extreme nationalist organization, anti-Semitic and imperialist orientation, the 'Grey Wolves', which is why he will probably miss the rest of the Euros, can serve to remind us of others in the last ten years. Starting with Mirlind Daku, a football player from Albania, who was also punished at this Euro, after the match with Croatia, because he led a cheer in which he cursed Serbs and Macedonians. At the last World Cup, the match between Serbia and Switzerland, which Serbia lost 3:2, largely because it got into nationalistic tensions and got burned in them, is a classic example of what I'm talking about. Because from the beginning, tension was felt between the two Swiss footballers of Albanian origin, Shaqiri and Xaka, and the Serbian national team, heightened by the fact that Shaqiri celebrated his goal with the symbol of the Albanian eagle at the last meeting between these rivals, so in that game he scored again with a provocative celebration, so the coach of Serbia, Dragan Stojković Piksi visibly cursed the mother of Šiptarska after the tie and the whole match went in the direction of nationalistic tensions.
The case of the former Croatian national team player, Joe Šimunić, who, after the successful completion of the qualification for the World Cup in Brazil, took a megaphone on the lawn of Maksimir and started, unprovoked, chanting the Ustasha salute 'Za dom spremni', due to which he missed the World Cup, after the Fifa penalty and with, which is important for the end of the story, the absolute support of the Croatian Football Association.
With the exception of socialist Yugoslavia, there was no modernist, emancipatory state project in the Balkans that generally offered a view into the future, much more than into the past.
Behind these examples, which are not the only ones, but were the most visible, we are left with two questions and one potential answer.
First, what is it that drives people who are evidently successful players, with international careers and existentially situated people, to such outbursts of nationalism, even if they are representatives of other countries? And secondly, why is it only the Balkan areas where the unfaithful past explodes so publicly in stadiums and where there is general dissatisfaction with borders, visible only in the matter of Russia's relations with its neighbors?
The potential answer to both of these questions is related, and concerns education, family, media and state education, which in recent decades has exploded in the direction of settling historical accounts and the desire to return the old glory, borders, etc.
This happens because, with the exception of socialist Yugoslavia, there was no modernist, emancipatory state project in the Balkans that generally offered a view into the future, much more than into the past. And even that simultaneous look into the past in the SFRY, that is, the National Liberation Struggle that gave legitimacy to that state, told the story of the joint struggle of all Yugoslavs for the liberation of the country from fascism, but also for class and national liberation. All other projects, and even Ataturk's project of creating the Turkish nation, which was indeed modernizing, but at the same time hardcore nationalist, were precisely and exclusively nationalist and told the story of their own nation as a victim of its neighbors and the past. That is why, in the specific case of Turkey, the ideology of neo-Ottomanism and Turkish soft-power imperialism, which was ideologically defined and described in the book 'Strategic depth: the international position of Turkey', by the former Erdogan's foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, fell on him so perfectly. And which Demiral just manifested at the Euro.
In other words, all these national team members behave as they do on the field with these gestures, convinced that they have the support of the entire nation, that is, they speak on its behalf. And as long as that belief is based on the right feeling that they are really expressing what a good part of society thinks, it will happen.
In the end, the only accident is that this is still mainly a phenomenon of Balkan football and football players, but it could very quickly become established as a practice in the rest of Europe, and even in the West, which thought it had left those historical controversies behind. And all UEFA's political correctness and draconian punishments will be in vain when things go in that direction, for which it is enough to look at the events surrounding this year's Eurovision or the results of the recent European and national elections.
Certainly, whoever survives will talk.
Bonus video:
