Story is co-written with Mary Brown
When you go to a UNC-Chapel Hill v. Duke game, in any sport, the fans in the stands are very set on who they think is going to win, and who they hate. It is the most well-known rivalry in North Carolina for many reasons. But why and what makes it a rivalry?
Rivalry can be defined as an acute threat to one’s identity. In sports, the wins or losses of “our” teams are personal. A team loss poses a personal loss. People find their identity through where they live, who they believe in, and most of all who they cheer for on the sports field. As WCU sports management professor, Dr. David Tyler, explained, close rivalries are centered around similarities with few differences, but the other is still seen as starkly different.
Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill are located in the center of North Carolina, a mere 11 miles between their campuses. These people share much in location and language but hate each other due to their University of choice.
You can see this type of example in many sports, countries, and cities across the world, just like this ad from Manchester United and Manchester City that ran in 2012.
Rivalry and nationalism are connected and this story is about nationalism and how people use sports as a visual representation of nationalism in countries.
When patriotism for a team, or a country, becomes extreme, nationalism can arise.
Serbia is a small nation in the middle of the Balkans. Serbians are known for their sports rivalries and strong nationalist ideals – they are strongly cohesive and have great pride in their ethnic history and identity.
Dr. Jennifer Schiff teaches many classes concerning international politics, including Politics of Ethnic Conflict and Model United Nations.
Their modern history can be traced back to the 1800’s, but the historical background of the Serbs as a people began even earlier. The cohesion of the Serbian people contributed to their aggression in the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, after the breakup of former Yugoslavia. The genocide of the Bosnian Muslims occurred under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic. Since the end of the conflict, Serbia has been “somewhat restricted by the international community as a punishment, essentially, for their actions during the Bosnian genocide, but I have no reason to believe that that sense of identity and nationalism isn’t still there,” says Dr. Schiff. Milosevic was a “textbook definition [of nationalism] taken to the extreme.”
Dr. Schiff says that sports are possibly a way that you can express your national identity and it is something you can take a lot of pride in as a people.
“Nationalism is still present in the region. Milosevic believed very strongly in the superiority of the Serbs as a people who wanted to take the land of the Bosnians and wipe them off the map in the process, ” said political science and public affairs professor, Dr. Jennifer Schiff. “The Serbs have a long history of nationalism in this region, with many wars over many decades….the Serbs felt a very strong sense of identity with each other and a very strong sense of group cohesion, and what it means to be a Serb.”
Futbal (soccer) is the most recognized and important sport to the Serbian people, nationally. The two most popular clubs in Serbia are Red Star and Partizan located in Belgrade, Serbia, the country’s capital. It started immediately after the creation of the two clubs in 1945 and they have been dominant in domestic futbal since then.
Red Star and Partizan fans get into an ugly fight during a match. Photo by the DailyMail.
Here again, we see two teams in the same general area, people very much alike, but having an extreme distaste for one another on the simple grounds of their favorite sports team.
There have been many cases where people leave, bloody and arrested after a match because they get into physical fist fights.
Since the breakup of Former Yugoslavia, the region has used futbal as a proxy for avoiding another conflict in the region. Even though the country split around ethnic borders, large minority groups of Serbs remain in Bosnia in the region of Republika Srpska. This is due to the arbitrary borders that occurred when the country split. The people of Serbia remain a nationalist group and are able to use sports to establish a pecking order. A win could be interpreted that their country is better; different ethnicities backing different teams could serve as a representation of ethnic superiority.
“War helps determine a pecking order, who is better. We may not go to war with them to determine who is better….but matches become a proxy for who is a better country. We are not going to determine who is a better country by bombing each other, much…but instead, use sport as that proxy to figure who is actually better,” said Tyler.
When some sports rivalries in the East European region play, the past is revisited. Where wars seem to establish country superiority, sports are a stand-in. The “us versus them” mentality in these games are very apparent. States that appear as threat states, will be a more important game for the fans of a particular team. The game is a metaphor, a way to represent a conflict that may not occur, or one they lost in the past.
The story was written as an assignment in East European Media & Politics class and originally published on the class website East European Politics & Media.
