I was taking a train from Austria into the former Yugoslav nations last June and had the pleasure of sharing a car with a bunch of chain-smoking, half-shaven, working-class Croats on their way back from Berlin where they watched their country's football team loose to Brazil 1-0 in their first game of the World Cup. They spent about two hours arguing with each other - and by arguing I mean screaming at each other - about who actually won the war against Serbia from 1991 to 1995. Nowhere else in Europe had I found such determined nationalists with such a sense of national pride and hate of another country. We won our fucking country! ... No, we didn't get enough! they yelled back and forth at each other in Croatian (as I was told by the one guy who spoke almost fluent English). These working-class Croats nearly filled the entire train as they returned to their economically struggling country after a trip to the expenses of a World Cup match. Little did I know that this passionate, football-crazed nation would really be crazier than I could imagine.
I decided to spend a couple days in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, before continuing to Italy. Coincidentally, I was there during the Australia-Croatia football game, which was an elimination match by virtue of how the first-round bracket shaped up. Coincidentally, most of the people at my hostel were jolly Aussies who were getting ready to head to the city center to watch the game on a big screen. So I went with these new mates of mine to the center. The Croats were generally amicable. There were at least 1,000 of them in the center - all passionately singing national songs in their national garb. The ten Aussies, plus myself and a Brit, were all lumped together and stuck out like a sore thumb, not least of which was due to the fact the Aussies decked themselves out in their national garb. Every goal scored by Croatia sent the Croats into frenzy, and every goal by Australia sent the out-numbered Aussies into frenzy, drawing the anger of a bunch of Croat fans quickly "getting on the chop." The game ended 2-2, and these "chopped" Croats who just watched their team get eliminated (by virtue of a tie-breaking rule) were not too happy. Beer, beer bottles, spit, and harsh language all came reigning down without mercy on the English speaking crowd. The police surrounded us as people were assembling to fight and they escorted us onto the metro and back to our hostel through the stares of many angry fans.
As an American, this seemed like the most absurd thing that could ever happen to me. To the Englishman with me, this was life as normal in Europe (just think English football hooligans; he was used to it). I know Americans are crazy - too crazy - about sports, but a riot assembling? Come on. I guess Americans do riot from time to time over sports, just not soccer. I ultimately think that the craziness we see in European football fans is not anything that absurd when considering how crazed almost all peoples are about sports. But Croatian fans seemed different. They acted like they had a chip on their shoulder. While Germans, the English, and Italians will all get drunk and talk smack and riot, I got the feeling being around those fans (I never saw them at their most extreme moments) that they do it out of pride but also because they enjoy the thrill. They like to drink, fight, and defend their teams. But Croats, they seemed like this soccer stuff was all business. We are a very proud people. We are a small country, but very proud. This small nation has not been fully independent for hundreds of years (until Yugoslavia broke up in the early 1990s). We are small, but in 1998 we were third in the world. We are small, but we are strong. Maybe it is a continent-wide phenomenon, but the look in the eyes of those angry fans was something I will never forget; that argument on the train is something I will never forget. I found a pure nationalism in Croatia that I failed to find in the other European nations I visited - a type of nationalism that is not just about winning or losing, but about life as a whole, in an everyday and extraordinary sense.