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Football, history, and the nation in Southeastern Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Catherine Baker Open the ORCID record for Catherine Baker [Opens in a new window]
Catherine Baker*
Affiliation:
School of Histories, Languages and Cultures, University of Hull, Hull, UK
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Email: cbakertw1@googlemail.com
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Extract

In October 2014, Serbia's European Championships qualifying match against Albania was abandoned after a drone flew onto the pitch in Belgrade with a banner showing Kosovo as part of a Greater Albania, provoking a fight between both teams and their fans. While the flight of the drone was a technologically novel reminder that the nation's territorial space is not two-dimensional but three-dimensional, the subject of a politics of verticality and volume (Weizman 2012,12; Elden 2013), the imagery of its invasive entry and violent ejection from the symbolic territory, and the battlefield of the nation underlined a point that could have been made at any point since the institutionalization of international sporting competition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: that controversies over sports, between and within nations, reveal the deeper conflicts about territorial and cultural boundaries that are the very process of constructing national identity. Yet all this has taken place within a framework of supposed internationalism and sporting fraternity; indeed, it is the very structure of organized, scheduled competition between nations that makes these sporting encounters regular and possible.

Type
Introduction
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 44 , Issue 6 , November 2016 , pp. 857 - 859
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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