Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 29 No. 2 March 2006 pp.

217
236 /

Consuming the nation: Holidays,

sports, and the production of
collective belonging

Jon E. Fox

Abstract
The purpose of this article is to explain how Romanian and Hungarian
university students in the ethnically mixed town of Cluj, Romania,
experience and constitute collective national belonging at national
holiday commemorations and international football competitions. Holi-
days and sports are important venues for the propagation of national,
and sometimes nationalist, sensitivities. But neither the resurgence of
nationalist politics in post-communist east Europe nor the nationalist
inclinations of past generations of university students guarantee that the
current generation will experience them
/ or themselves
/ in the same
national terms. While much has been written about the production of
holiday and sporting events, less has been said about the creative ways in
which their audiences consume them. My aim in this study is to shift
attention to the university students themselves and the modalities
through which they constitute (and subvert) national cohesion through
participation in (and avoidance of) holiday and sporting events.

Keywords: Nationalism; holidays; sports; collective belonging; symbols;

ethnography.

Introduction
Nationalist politics has emerged in east Europe with renewed vigour in
the wake of the changes that swept across the region in 1989
91. From
/

secessionist movements and minority rights regimes to xenophobic

demagogy and ethnic cleansing, nationalism has re-established itself in
the post-communist landscape as a language of political struggle, a
strategy of popular legitimation, and a principle for redrawing
boundaries.

# 2006 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
DOI: 10.1080/01419870500465207
218 Jon E. Fox
Transylvania, the multi-ethnic region of northwestern Romania, has
historically been a hotbed of nationalist politics. Situated at the
crossroads of competing Romanian and Hungarian nationalisms, the
region has played host to intense ethnic rivalries and violent conflict.
The changes in 1989 opened the door for the unfettered revival of old
nationalist grievances: Hungarian minority demands for increased
autonomy have been countered by Romanian nationalist calls for a
unified, and unifying, Romanian nation-state (see, e.g., Gallagher
1995).
The goal of nationalism, writ large, is to make the people national
(see, e.g., Weber 1976). But the extent to which nationalism resonates
with the people in whose name it purports to speak cannot simply be
deduced from its political privileging. This apparent renaissance of
nationalist politics in Transylvania and the region more generally does
not, in itself, explain when or how, if at all, ordinary people come to
see themselves in national terms. To understand nationalism’s popular
salience, the analytical lens needs to be refocused on the ordinary
people who supposedly make up the nation. This article aims to
specify the actual ways in which nationalism is engaged (and deflected)
by Romanian and Hungarian university students in the Transylvanian
town of Cluj.
Historically, university students in Romania have been seen (and
have often seen themselves) as the torchbearers of their respective
nations. In the interwar period, Romanian student nationalism paved
the way for the emergence of the Iron Guard fascist movement
(Livezeanu 1995). More recently in 1990, student protests over
Hungarian minority education in the ethnically mixed Transylvanian
town of Târgu-Mureş quickly spread and turned violent, claiming the
lives of several people. Since those heady days following the revolution,
however, nationalist conflict has retreated from the street and the
public square to the town hall and the editorial office, from banners
carried in demonstrations to banner headlines printed in newspapers.
This domestication of nationalism has not silenced the public
expression of national sentiments; it has, however, shifted it to more
contrived settings. National holiday celebrations and international
sporting competitions have taken their place as key sites for the
collective experience and articulation of the imagined community of
the nation. My interest here is in the ways in which sports and holidays
provide platforms for Romanian and Hungarian students to experi-
ence and express collective national belonging.
Events like holiday celebrations, the Olympics, and the World Cup
break up the banality of everyday life at regular intervals. Those in
attendance, ritually united through the public performance of national
symbols, are invited to momentarily share in the heightened aware-
ness of national belonging. These mass rituals, laden with national
 Consuming the nation 219
symbols, are occasions for the crystallization of national cohesion
(on the integrative function of symbols and rituals, see Turner 1967,
pp. 22, 48
50, 58; see also Kertzer 1988, pp. 8
12, 61
76; Durkheim
/ / /

1995 [1912], pp. 231
4). Yet the particular style of community that is
/

imagined by those in attendance (Anderson 1991, p. 6) does not

necessarily follow from the seemingly unambiguous national designs
intended by the events’ architects. The literature on nationalism has
devoted significant attention to the cultural production and promul-
gation of national (and nationalist) meanings and solidarities in and
through holiday commemorations (see, e.g., Mosse 1975; Gillis 1994;
Spillman 1997) and international sporting events (see, e.g., Hobsbawm
1983; Eriksen 1993b). But its focus on the modalities of cultural
production does not systematically attend to the actual ways in which
such forms are popularly negotiated or understood by those in
attendance.
Properly understanding nationalism’s popular consumption calls for
a methodology more suitable to the task: ethnography. This article
draws on participant observation data collected at Romanian and
Hungarian national holiday celebrations and the European Cham-
pionships football tournament in Cluj, Romania between 1999 and
2000 to identify the practices and processes through which national
cohesion is constituted
and undermined
by the students them-
/ /

selves. As isolated events, it is difficult to gauge the quality and

significance of the students’ experiences. But in comparative perspec-
tive, relative differences in the content, intensity, and modality of the
students’ engagement of these events are drawn into sharper relief.
There has been a resurgence of nationalism in east Europe. But what
that resurgence means for ordinary people requires an empirically
grounded examination of the consumers, not just the producers, of
nationalism.

Setting and methodology

There are approximately 1,500,000 Hungarians in Transylvania (20 per
cent of the regional population and 7 per cent of the country’s overall
population). Cluj, the setting for my study, is claimed by both
Romanians and Hungarians as the historic and cultural capital of
Transylvania. The city, with a Hungarian population of just under 20
per cent, has played host to a succession of highly visible nationalist
struggles over language-use, autonomy, education, and the meanings
and uses of local space.
Students in Cluj have been surrounded by, and, in the case of a
debate over the establishment of an independent Hungarian university,
at the centre of, these struggles. Most students are enrolled at either the
Babeş-Bolyai or Technical Universities, the city’s two main universities.
220 Jon E. Fox
The officially ‘multicultural’ Babeş-Bolyai (with a full-time enrolment
of 20,000 students) is essentially two universities in one, with parallel
Romanian and Hungarian tracks of study in thirteen of its eighteen
faculties. Two-thirds of the 4,000 Hungarian students at the Babeş-
Bolyai conduct their studies in Hungarian tracks (the smaller
Technical University, with an enrolment of 8,000 students, including
about 1,500 Hungarians, does not offer instruction in Hungarian).
Hungarian students, who typically speak Hungarian among them-
selves (Romanian students do not speak Hungarian), also tend to self-
segregate in their informal social relations (Fox 2003).
The findings presented in this article are drawn mainly from
participant observation data collected at Romanian national holiday
observances on 1 December 1999, Hungarian national holiday
commemorations on 15 March 2000, and four televized European
Championship football matches in which the Romanian national team
competed in June 2000. At each event, I closely followed developments
from start to finish, talking informally with young people in the
crowds (both strangers and acquaintances), and later reconstructing
my observations in detailed fieldnotes. In addition, I use data from
fifty-one interviews (conducted with approximately equal numbers of
Romanian and Hungarian students) and a survey (N1,200 with a
/

Hungarian subsample of N400). Both the interviews and survey

/

were used to explore different ways in which nationalism is implicated

in the lives of the students. All fieldwork was conducted in Romanian
and Hungarian. Translations are my own.

Holidays
The quotidian academic and social routines of the students rarely
intersect with the sort of nationalist rhetoric and imagery favoured in
post-communist political rhetoric. National holidays, however, provide
them with contrived occasions for the collective commemoration of
the nation. These commemorations are orchestrated dramas designed
to elicit heightened national awareness. They do not belong to the
realm of the mundane, but rather punctuate everyday rhythms at
regular, fixed intervals (see, e.g., Mosse 1975, pp. 74, 204).
National holidays are thus important sites for the mass expression of
national belonging. Ritual-like ceremonies designed and performed to
ignite the passions of those present into near trance-like states
what
/

Durkheim (1995 [1912], pp. 218
20) terms ‘collective effervescence’ and
/

Turner (1969, pp. 132
6, 153) calls ‘spontaneous communitas’

/ /

generate and enhance communal awareness. When most effective, the

experience of cohesion induced through these ritual ceremonies
transcends their momentary instantiations, temporally uniting the
community across more mundane domains of life as well (see, e.g.,
 Consuming the nation 221
Spillman 1997, pp. 130
2). Most accounts of identity formation
/

through commemoration, however, have surprisingly little to say about

the supposed bearers of those identities, the ordinary citizens in
attendance at such events. National symbols are depicted as unpro-
blematically engendering national cohesion (whether ephemeral or
enduring) (see, e.g., Bodnar 1992, pp. 13
16; Spillman 1997, pp. 91,
/

130
3). But while such accounts acknowledge that symbolic meanings
/

are inherently ambiguous and multivocal (see more generally Turner

1967), the variation they typically describe is still national (Bodnar
1992, pp. 14, 234
7; Spillman 1997, pp. 34
7, 99
101; Dennis 2002,
/ / /

pp. 10
11).

/

National holidays are, of course, important occasions for the

legitimation and dissemination of national meanings. But the actual
meanings engaged, digested, ignored, or rejected cannot simply be
inferred from the nominally national properties of the holidays
themselves. I want to explore the variation in the meaning and
cohesion that Romanian and Hungarian students derived from their
participation in (and avoidance of) the two most important Romanian
and Hungarian national holidays in Transylvania: 1 December and 15
March, respectively.

1 December
Romania’s most important national holiday, 1 December, commem-
orates the post World War I unification of Transylvania with the
principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia to the south. On the morning
of 1 December 1999, local politicians and public officials gathered on a
makeshift stage in front of a statue of Avram Iancu, an 1848
revolutionary and icon of the Romanian struggle for independence
from Habsburg (and Hungarian) tyranny. The town’s then ultra
nationalist Romanian mayor presided over this formal observance,
where patriotic speeches and a wreath-laying ceremony were hemmed
in by national flags and a military marching band in full regalia. The
mood of the crowd, numbering about 200, oscillated between
solemnity and tedium. This was a ‘serious and reverential’ ceremony:
the veneration of national history in liturgical form as a counterweight
to the non-national banality of everyday life (Mosse 1975, pp. 75
81, /

106
7). In form, the event was ideally suited for the experience of
/

collective belonging. Those partaking in this display of national

reverence were ritually induced to symbolically unite in a community
of co-nationals.
But the community that was physically present was limited to
almost exclusively old men. The absence of young people in the crowd
precluded their experience of shared national belonging. The same
could not be said for the national celebration which took place in the
222 Jon E. Fox
evening in the same square. The festival-like atmosphere that evening
provided a sharp break with the solemnity of the morning observances.
The evening event began with a military marching band double timing
it to the square to the tune of a lively nationalist march. The band was
followed by revellers who quickly filled up the square, joining the three
thousand or so onlookers already assembled and awaiting the
fireworks. The evening culminated with a lengthy and crowd-pleasing
fireworks display. The mood throughout was festive: national songs,
flags, and colours were transformed from sacrosanct objects of
veneration into party paraphernalia used to enliven the celebration.
This was the celebratory counterpart to the day’s earlier reverential
ritual. National holidays can be occasions not only for solemn
commemoration, but also for festive celebration, replete with parades,
music, and fireworks (Brubaker and Feischmidt 2002, p. 707; see also
Bodnar 1992; Gillis 1994; Spillman 1997; Dennis 2002). In the
communist years, thousands of happy peasants and workers were
assembled for Cântarea României (Singing of Romania), a mass
spectacle of choreographed song and dance intended to symbolically
unite the nation (Petrescu 1998). Since the changes, these elaborate
ritual performances of the nation have been replaced by much more
modest and informal national holiday celebrations. Where in the past
thousands of peasants danced to capture the national imagination,
now fireworks are called into the service of the nation.
But while such events all provide nationally defined parameters for
collective experience, the content of that experience need not be
unambiguously national. The students I talked to in 1999 described
their experience of the 1 December festivities in varied terms. Most
identified with the fireworks more than the celebration’s national
justification: ‘usually people just go in the evening for the fireworks,’ a
history student explained, ‘especially young people who are looking
for a reason to go out to a bar or just get away from home’. Just as
Christmas carols, Bible stories, and Nativity scenes have become
secularized and commercialized seasonal accoutrements, national
flags, songs, and fireworks displays have also been denuded of their
officially sanctioned national meanings. They adorn their events
without necessarily conveying explicitly national content for those
who encounter them.
Romanians may not have felt particularly Romanian at the event,
but its overall Romanian framing and raison d’être did symbolically
exclude those self-identifying as Hungarian from partaking in the
event. The following day, the headline in Szabadság (1999a), the local
Hungarian daily, read ‘We don’t have anything to celebrate in common
today.’ Two Hungarians I met for dinner that same evening expressed
their disaffiliation by hurrying past the assembling crowds and
ducking into a nearby (Hungarian-owned) restaurant. Their physical
 Consuming the nation 223
distress, embodied in their rushed gait and disapproving glances,
betrayed their experience of national alienation. This was not their
holiday, they explained, it was their ‘gyásznap’
‘day of mourning’:
/

1 December marks the day Transylvania was taken from Hungary and
awarded to Romania. But while the Romanian national holiday could
potentially raise the oppositional national self-awareness of Hungar-
ians, their non-attendance denied them any collective experience of
that awareness.

15 March
Every year on 15 March, Hungarians in Transylvania reaffirm their
symbolic and affective attachment to their putative national homeland
by commemorating Hungary’s 1848 declaration of independence from
the Habsburg Monarchy. By citizenship, Transylvanian Hungarians
are Romanian. But by ethno-nationality, they generally regard
themselves as part of a greater cultural nation of Hungarians that
defies contemporary political boundaries. Hungarians in Hungary and
the neighbouring countries share the same national symbolic reper-
toire: the flag, the anthem, the pantheon of national heroes, and the
folk traditions. In the communist years in Romania, public display of
these symbols (including their commemoration in Hungarian national
holidays) was forbidden (Brubaker and Feischmidt 2002, pp. 726
7). /

Since the changes, however, Hungarians in Transylvania have gathered

every 15 March for the public affirmation of their shared national
symbols.
In Cluj in 2000, the day’s events began with an interfaith service in
the town’s biggest and oldest Catholic cathedral.1 The church, built
when Transylvania was an autonomous principality ruled by Hungar-
ians, is situated in the town’s central square. Both the church and the
equestrian statue of Matei Corvin (Renaissance era king of Hungary)
in front of it give the square a distinct Hungarian flavour, a
counterpoint to the Romanian (and Romanianized) Avram Iancu
Square where the 1 December commemorations take place (on the
national symbolism of the two squares, see Feischmidt [2001]). The
interior of the cathedral was also dressed for the 15 March occasion,
its massive pillars draped with Hungarian flags and the altar decorated
with flowers in the Hungarian national colours. The church service
that day combined religious sermon with national homily, and
concluded with the singing of the Hungarian national anthem (which
conveniently doubles as a hymn). It was not only what those in
attendance observed, but how they were invited to observe it, as
Hungarians, that encouraged their collective national experience of the
event.
224 Jon E. Fox
After the service, the large crowd, (over-)estimated by the local
Hungarian press at several thousand (Szabadság 2000), spilled out
into the surrounding square. From there, local political and religious
leaders led a solemn procession up the street to the building where
Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s most famous national poet, lodged in 1848
before meeting his death on a nearby battlefield. Those in the crowd,
mostly middle-aged and older, wore red, white, and green ribbons
affixed to their lapels; a few came dressed in traditional peasant
costumes. Their modestly displayed Hungarian national colours
contrasted with the camouflage blue uniforms of the Romanian
gendarmes on hand to monitor their activities.
A small plaque, a remnant of an earlier age (when Cluj was part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire), marks the building where Petőfi slept.
Beside it is a much larger plaque added more recently that
memorializes the Romanians who lost their lives in the 1848 revolution
(fighting against the Hungarians).2 As the crowd gathered, local
Hungarian politicians read salutations from the Prime Minister of
Hungary, followed with their own speeches. Wreaths were placed at the
foot of the building and a Hungarian flag, surrounded by four
Romanian flags already in place, was hung from a flagpole. The crowd
quietly dispersed.
The Hungarians’ 15 March commemoration was analogous to the
Romanians’ 1 December morning observances. Both were character-
ized by the same combination of reverence and ritual, designed to
convey the solemnity of the occasion. The Hungarian commemoration
was, however, much better attended. As in other domains of local life,
the Hungarians’ minority status translated into a heightened national
awareness (cf. Brubaker and Feischmidt 2002, pp. 718
28). Conspic-
/

uous Romanian referents
flags, plaques, and gendarmes
were

/ /

reminders to Hungarians of their own oppositional national belong-

ing. The 15 March holiday provided them with an occasion for
symbolically displaying and asserting their own Hungarian belonging
against the backdrop of their default Romanian surroundings. This
infused the event with a greater sense of drama and urgency for many
Hungarians.
These heightened sensitivities were conveyed in a history student’s
description of his attendance of the commemoration.

Zsolt:3 On 15 March, our national holiday, we had Latin class, and

the [Hungarian] professor didn’t want to let us leave, but
we all decided to skip anyway, and we went to the church to
listen to the holiday Mass . . . She thought
and maybe she
/

was right in a certain sense
that our first obligation [was

/

to the class], and then, only after that, should we go to the

commemoration. But we said, ‘‘c’mon, it’s 15 March, this is
 Consuming the nation 225
our holiday, and this is when the holiday Mass and
commemoration are,’’ and so we decided to go . . . I don’t
know, maybe we should have stayed in class, but . . . us
young people, we felt like we had an obligation to take part
in the commemoration . . . so we did.
Jon: But whose . . . idea was it?
Zsolt: It wasn’t anyone’s idea in particular, the whole thing just
happened spontaneously, it was 15 March and so everyone
said, ‘‘okay, let’s go to the commemoration’’, and then
most of us just went. There were a couple that went off
somewhere else, who knows where, but most of us went to
the church for the holiday Mass . . . A national holiday, it’s
an uplifting kind of thing.

Zsolt and his classmates were drawn to the event as Hungarians to

solemnly commemorate (not celebrate) ‘their’ national holiday. Those
in attendance were focused not on fireworks but on nationalist
speeches and symbols. For students like Zsolt, the holiday’s national
form was inscribed with national meaning: they experienced their
national holiday as Hungarians.
There are many ways to experience collective national consciousness
through holidays, from partaking in sacred rituals to watching
fireworks, from reciting nationalist poetry to waving the flag. The
national properties of these events provide explicitly national para-
meters for the organization of diverse experiences and varied symbolic
interpretations (Berezin 1994, p. 1242; Cerulo 1995, p. 2). But staying
away from holiday commemorations altogether precluded any such
experience of collective national belonging. Zoltán, a Hungarian
computer science student voiced a sentiment shared by many of his
classmates: ‘I don’t really have time for it, . . . it doesn’t interest me’. To
be sure, holidays can be observed indirectly through activities such as
shopping and backyard barbecuing (Dennis 2002, pp. 219
21, 281
2).
/ /

They can also be purposefully subverted or rejected in individual or

collective acts of defiance. But most students in Cluj kept their
distance from these public manifestations out of simple indifference.
Holidays did not break up the monotony of everyday life, but occurred
alongside it, without attracting much attention. The nominally
national forms of these holiday celebrations were thus severely
hampered in their capacity to foster national meanings or solidarities
among students in Cluj.

Sporting competitions
Low student turnout for holiday commemorations becomes more
apparent when viewed in comparison to the enthusiastic crowds on
226 Jon E. Fox
hand to watch the Romanian national football team compete in the
2000 European Championships.4 If only a trickle of students made it
to the commemorations, throngs of them were glued to television sets
in cafés, bars, and dorm lounges across Cluj every time Romania
paired off against a contender. But while the teams themselves were
nominally defined in national terms by the international profile of the
competition, the students’ allegiances to those teams were not always
experienced in the same unambiguous national terms.
In an age when national celebrations generate tepid interest at best,
sporting events attract the exuberant and uncoerced support of
multitudes of fans around the world. Like holidays, international
sporting competitions are arenas for the display of national symbols
and the alignment of national allegiances. As Eric Hobsbawm (1991,
p. 143) observes, ‘The imagined community of millions seems more
real as a team of eleven named people;’ the team becomes the physical
embodiment of the nation (Archetti 1999, pp. 59
70, 170
3). The
/ /

explicitly international profile of the European Championships, World

Cup, and Olympics, combined with the national flags, songs, and
colours through which allegiances are expressed, seem to point to a
clear link between sports and nationalism (Hobsbawm 1983, pp. 300
/

1, 1991, pp. 142
3; Ehn 1989, pp. 57
60; Eriksen 1993a, p. 111, 1993b,
/ /

pp. 10
11; Bairner 2001, pp. 1, 17). But the meanings derived from
/

those symbols do not simply follow from the national platforms

through which they are conveyed (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1990; MacClancy
1996). Indeed, many scholars have pointed out how sporting
competitions engender, reinforce, and give expression to varied
masculine (Mosse 1985; Archetti 1999), working class (King 1997;
Armstrong and Giulianotti 2001), regional (Duke and Crolley 1996;
Sugden and Bairner 1999; Hargreaves 2000), global (Archetti 1999;
Bairner 2001), and sectarian (Armstrong and Giulianotti 2001; Sorek
2003) meanings and forms of affiliation. The apparently national
symbols wielded by spectators in international competitions do not
unequivocally symbolize national belonging.
These competitions, as they were played on television sets through-
out Cluj (and the rest of Europe), were followed with intense interest
by the students. During the matches, the entire city became eerily
quiet, broken only by the din of television sets emanating from living
rooms, dorms, bars, and cafés, all tuned in to the same broadcast.
Disembodied cheers, groans, yells, jeers, and chants of ‘Hai Româ-
nia!!!’ (‘Let’s go Romania!!!’) dotted the aural landscape in near perfect
unison. Students arrived sometimes hours in advance at their preferred
sites to claim prime seating. They crowded around tables and placed
their chairs in improvized semicircles around the televisions as they
drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and snacked on pretzels, chips, and
sunflower seeds. Apart from occasional commentary and guttural
 Consuming the nation 227
outbursts, chatter was kept to a minimum. The Romanian national
colours (red, yellow, and blue) were de rigueur: some wore football
jerseys, while others draped the flag over their shoulders, painted their
faces, or accessorized with scarves and hats emblazoned with the
national colours. All eyes were transfixed on the action; the mood was
electrifying.
The real revelry began after Romania tied with Germany and later
defeated England. Without the benefit of official coordination,
thousands of fans spilled out of the bars, cafes, dorms, and apartments
and descended on the centre of town on foot or piled into (or onto)
cars, shouting, yelling, waving flags, singing, dancing, honking horns,
banging pots and pans, all the while chanting ‘Hai România!!!’ They
spontaneously congregated in Avram Iancu Square, where some of the
more enthusiastic (or inebriated) fans stumbled, jumped, and dived
imprudently into the water surrounding a fountain. Other fans
brandishing Romanian flags cleared out small swaths of the crowd
with the sweeping arc of their jubilant waves. Exploding firecrackers
added to the cacophony of yells, chants, and pots and pans responding
to wooden spoons. The carnivalesque atmosphere combined exuberant
celebration with a more menacing undertone of unleashed aggression.
In stark contrast, the collective sentiment rapidly turned dour when
Romania suffered a last minute loss to Portugal and, later, elimination
at the hands of the Italians. The crowds leaving the bars resembled
impromptu funeral processions: heads were hung low and the mood
was grim, interrupted by occasional outbursts of frustration and anger.
Flags waved fervently during the match were draped limply over
shoulders; chants were exchanged for curses; and trashcans became
unwitting targets of passing kicks. Collective euphoria gave way to
collective anguish.
Win or lose, Romania’s performance in the European Champion-
ships inspired far more widespread and impassioned engagement than
any holiday commemoration. The 1 December fireworks display was a
distant runner up to the football tournament in terms of participation,
spontaneity, and enthusiasm. And the students’ interest transcended
the matches themselves: throughout the tournament, they closely
followed developments in the newspapers, on sports talk shows, and in
conversation with one another (Ehn 1989, p. 65). In bars, between
classes, and in dorm rooms, football dominated the lives of the
students for at least several weeks.5
A number of observers have remarked that only war is capable of
stirring passions as much as sport (Eriksen 1993b, p. 11; Billig 1995,
pp. 122
5; Bairner 2001, p. 17). But just as wars nominally between
/

nations need not be experienced as national wars, international

sporting competitions can give expression to varied and at times
contradictory interpretations and allegiances (see, e.g., MacClancy
228 Jon E. Fox
1996; Giulianotti 1999; Sorek 2003). The European Championships
had all the national trimmings of other international sporting
competitions. Fans displayed their national colours, sang their
national songs, and rooted for their national teams. But dressing
football up in national colours did not guarantee that it would be
experienced by its spectators in the same national terms.
What, then, does it mean to wave the flag at a football match? Is it
an unequivocal show of support for the ‘nation’ the team nominally
represents? Or is the flag the symbol of the state (or country), inviting
all, irrespective of ethno-national affiliation, to identify with it (see,
e.g., Duke and Crolley 1996; Sugden and Bairner 1999)? Or,
alternatively, is it simply the (coincidentally national) banner under
which generic (non-national, non-state) allegiances to the team are
expressed? If national flags were unambiguously national, then it
might seem that those waving them were unambiguously nationalist.
But not all fans wielding national symbols at football matches wield
them in other domains of their lives (Ehn 1989, p. 58; Bairner 2001,
pp. 16
17). Research in Cluj has shown that the current generation of
/

students is largely indifferent to the concerns and claims of nationalist

politics: they do not mobilize around nationalist issues, support
nationalist politicians, or even talk about nationalist politics in the
course of their everyday lives (Fox 2004).6 It would thus be dis-
ingenuous to suggest that these students suddenly become nationalist
while watching the European Championships, only to retreat to
national indifference (or outright rejection) in other areas of their
lives. It was not the national dispositions of the students that changed
as much as the meanings of the national symbols they deployed.
The national accoutrements on display at the matches ultimately
symbolized diverse meanings and forms of affiliation.7 Fans could
potentially identify with the flag, for instance, in either ethno-national
or political terms. Romania was at once a state (and country) to which
all citizens belonged (irrespective of ethno-national affiliation) and a
nation to which only those who self-identified as Romanian in ethno-
national terms belonged (see Duke and Crolley 1996; Sugden and
Bairner 1999). National symbols wielded by the students also
conveyed support for their team. Just because the team, nation and
state shared the same symbolic repertoire did not mean that affiliation
with the team automatically translated into the experience of belong-
ing with the nation or state. Alternating admonitions, insults, praises,
and acclamations explicitly directed at ‘the Romanians’ and ‘the
Italians’ by Radu, Cornel, and Ion, students from the Technical
University, conveyed many different meanings. Fans for whom these
ethno-national, political and team affiliations overlapped found little
reason to pause to disentangle them.
 Consuming the nation 229
For Hungarians, however, these affiliations did not overlap. While
Hungarians could theoretically affiliate with the Romanian team as
citizens of Romania, they could not do so as members of the
Romanian nation. The national paraphernalia on display that
symbolically united Romanian fans simultaneously signalled exclusion
for Hungarian fans on ethno-national grounds. Since there was no
Hungarian team in the tournament, Hungarian students shifted their
allegiances to Romania’s adversaries.8 As one student put it, ‘It doesn’t
matter if Romania’s playing Tanzania, just as long as they lose’.
György, Csaba and Gábor three Hungarian theology students,
watched the European Championships together in their apartment,
joined by their mutual desire to see the Romanians lose. Their trio
of cheers, moans, and jeers filled the silences left by Romanian
fans watching the same matches in neighbouring apartments. The
Romanian students’ support was most obviously for the Romanian
team; Hungarian students’ support for Romania’s opponents was, in
contrast, an expression of their dis-affiliation with the Romanian
nation.9 These students could enjoy football together as fans; they
parted ways, however, as Romanians and Hungarians.
Ultimately it was the emotional intensity and simultaneity of the
students’ engagement of the matches that set their experience of these
allegiances apart from those occasioned through blander holiday
celebrations. Sports are distinguished from holidays not by their
national framings but by their effectiveness in inspiring synchronized
emotional reactions. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning (1986) argue
that sports serve as socially sanctioned outlets for aggression in
advanced industrial societies. From this functionalist perspective,
competitions are controlled dramas that provide ordinary people
with safe and satisfying means for the communal expression of
aggressive tendencies (1986, pp. 40
8, 63
71, 84
90).
/ / /

This drama, intrinsic to sport but largely absent from modern

holiday observances, is a key factor in explaining the heightened
experience of collective belonging (see Archetti 1999, pp. 113
27, 175

/ /

7; see also Kertzer 1988, pp. 39
41, 99
101, 179
81). The suspense of
/ / /

the competition ensured the simultaneity of the fans’ singular focus on

the matches and their synchronized reactions to their developments,
temporally and emotionally uniting them in a virtual community
of spectators. Describing an earlier era of nationalism, Benedict
Anderson (1991, pp. 34
6) explains how reading the daily paper
/

was ‘. . . an extraordinary mass ceremony’ characterized by ‘almost

precisely simultaneous consumption.’ This was the nascent nation
being imagined: ‘each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he
performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions)
of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he
has not the slightest notion’ (1991, p. 35).
230 Jon E. Fox
Since those early years, this simultaneity of experience has been
perfected through the televized broadcast of sporting competitions
(Moores 1993, pp. 86
8).10 Competitions such as the European Cham-
/

pionships are ‘media events’ that ‘electrify very large audiences * a /

nation, several nations, or the world. They are gripping, enthral-

ling . . . They are shared experiences, uniting viewers with one another
and with their societies’ (Dayan and Katz 1992, pp. 8
9, 12
13, / /

emphasis in original; see also Real 1979, pp. 175
8; Alabarces,

/

Tomlinson and Young 2001, pp. 554
5). The viewers’ communal
/

belonging is not confined to those assembled in cafés, bars, and dorm

lounges, but extends via the airwaves to others tuned into the same
broadcasts at the same time (Moores 1993, pp. 237
44, 1997, pp. 107

/ /

15; Rothenbuhler 1998, pp. 62
4). Transfixed to the action as it

/

unfolded on their television screens, students throughout Cluj

experienced excitement, tension, hope, and dejection at precisely the
same moments. These shared experiences united them in a spatially
dispersed imagined community virtually connected through television
and temporally bounded by the duration of the matches (Dayan and
Katz 1992, pp. 130
45; Rothenbuhler 1998, pp. 79
83).
/ /

And while most students watched the European Championships in

2000 on Romanian state television, other competitions in which
Hungary’s national team played (such as the Olympics or qualifying
rounds for the World Cup) were typically broadcast on Hungarian
state television as well. On such occasions, Romanian and Hungarian
students watching the same competitions on different national broad-
casts could be distinguished not just by their identification with
different symbols, but also by the medium that facilitated that
identification (see Löfgren 1989, pp. 16
17; Morley 1991, pp. 12
15;
/ /

Moores 1993, p. 87, 1997, p. 241). The explosion of national and

international emissions since 1989 has thus turned choosing a broad-
cast into a national activity.11 The experience of collective belonging is
engendered not just by the content the media transmit, but also by the
form through which they transmit that content. National media
provide national parameters for the experience of collective belonging.
But as the matches in 2000 were not broadcast by Hungarian
television, it was mainly the symbolic content of the matches (not the
national form of the media) that encouraged the experience of
collective belonging. Romanian fans were distinguished from their
opponents by the simultaneity and similarity of their collective
reactions to the ebbs and flows of the competition. And while
Romanians used the symbolic repertoire of the Romanian nation to
express support for their team, for Hungarians, that same symbolic
repertoire triggered their disaffiliation with the Romanian nation.
When Radu, Cornel and Ion cheered, György, Csaba and Gábor
jeered. Through the drama of the matches and the simultaneity of their
 Consuming the nation 231
synchronized reactions, the students were united into imagined
communities of football fans
those who rooted for the Romanian
/

team, and those who rooted against the Romanian nation. Football
was national in form, but not unambiguously national in the ways all
of its spectators experienced it.
The relatively staid commemorations of the Romanian and Hun-
garian national holidays were unable to generate either the turnout or
the drama necessary to meaningfully unite their followers in national
solidarity. The spectacle of the European Championships, in contrast,
instantaneously transmitted via television airwaves to football fans
everywhere, was considerably more effective in engendering this
heightened awareness of collective belonging. The students’ nationally
opposing football allegiances gave concrete expression to the nation-
ally segregated tendencies of their social relations. In terms of
spontaneity, enthusiasm, and participation, football, not holiday
commemorations, was the biggest (nominally national) game in town.

Conclusion
East Europe has witnessed a resurgence of nationalist politics over the
past fifteen years. University students, moreover, have historically been
responsive to, if not at the forefront of, nationalist movements.
National holiday commemorations and international sporting compe-
titions provided the current generation of students in Romania with
organized platforms for the collective expression and experience of
national allegiances. But the actual form these encounters took and
the meanings and cohesion they engendered cannot simply be deduced
from the events’ formal properties or the nationalist sensibilities of
students past.
A comparison of student engagement with holidays and sports
reveals important differences in content, intensity and modality. Taken
alone, student turnout for holiday commemorations might appear
significant. But the holiday crowds’ docility becomes readily apparent
when compared to the fervent display of allegiances witnessed during
the European Championships. Football supplied the drama and
television provided the conduit for virtually connecting large numbers
of students in the heightened awareness of collective belonging. No
longer are peasants paraded in synchronized song and dance for the
mass spectacles of Cântarea României ; gone too are the days of
collective anticipation, revolutionary fervour, and violent conflict that
surrounded the overthrow of Ceauşescu. Today’s students get their
national kicks watching football on television. It is sports, not
holidays, dancing peasants, or nationalist politics, that ignites the
passions of students in the public experience and expression of
collective allegiances.
232 Jon E. Fox
The precise content of those allegiances, however, varied. Holidays
and sports encouraged, but did not compel, engagement in their
national images. Nationally named and framed holidays were occa-
sions for nighttime revelry as much as national veneration. Interna-
tional sporting competitions encouraged overlapping allegiances that
were seldom easy (or necessary) to disentangle. The students were
united not only as Romanians and Hungarians, but as football fans
and fireworks aficionados, as men and women, and as young people
and students. The students were not just consumers of national
meanings; they were simultaneously their producers.
But while holidays and sports had the capacity to make the students
national, there is little to suggest that they made them nationalist.
Indeed, student indifference to nationalist politics more generally (Fox
2004) suggests that any experience of collective belonging neither led
to nor followed from heightened nationalist sensitivities. Holidays and
sports do share the same symbolic repertoire with nationalist politics.
But polyvalent symbols in different hands can be put to diverse uses
(Turner 1967; Kertzer 1988). Brandishing the flag in a show of support
for one’s football team is less of a momentary outburst of nationalist
pride than an expression of football fervour draped in the national
colours. Analyses that focus on the cultural production of such events
cannot adequately attend to the variation in the meanings appro-
priated, manipulated and constituted by those actually in attendance.
From afar, holidays and sports appear ideally suited for igniting
nationalist passions and engendering national cohesion. But on the
ground, passion and cohesion come in diverse and sometimes
inconsistent guises. National content does not follow unambiguously
from national form.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rogers Brubaker, Gail Kligman, Gregor
McLennan, and the anonymous reviewers of Ethnic and Racial Studies
for feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes
1. Most Hungarians are Catholic or Calvinist; most Romanians are Orthodox.
2. The English version of the Romanian plaque reads:

In this building were hosted in 1848
/9 during the development of the battle for
freedom and national unity GEORGE BARIŢIU and NICOLAE BĂLCESCU great
personalities of the Romanian Revolution. The attempt of the action taken by the
Romanian people for leading its sacred ideals unleashed a bloody repression led by
 Consuming the nation 233
Hungarian aristocracy while over 40,000 Romanians were killed, 320 villages were
burned and totally destroyed.

3. All names have been changed.

4. The European Championships are played once every four years between the top
national football teams across Europe. Romania tied with Germany, lost to Portugal,
defeated England, and then lost to Italy, after which it was eliminated from the competition.
Hungary did not qualify for the tournament in 2000.
5. Student participation in the European championships was also noticeably gendered.
Not only did men outnumber women two to one, they showed their enthusiasm much more
openly. Women were not mere passive observers, however; they, too, were informed and
emotionally invested in the outcome of the matches. But their more reserved comportment
visibly set them apart from the zealous displays of their male counterparts. This did not
prevent women from partaking in the experience of collective belonging, but it qualified it as
a gendered experience.
6. Moreover, football played locally in Romania, unlike in other countries, has not
typically been a platform for the expression of racist, nationalist, or xenophobic urges.
Student support for local clubs in Romania was fragmented. The Cluj team, notoriously bad,
had few supporters among the students. International tournaments provided the only
occasion for student support to congeal around a single team.
7. See Bourdieu (1990, p. 163) on this point. Sporting practice, he writes:

by virtue of its objective polysomia, its partial indeterminacy, . . . makes it available

for different uses. . . . A sport, at a given moment, is rather like a musical work:
it is both the musical score (the rules of the game, etc.) and also the various
competing interpretations (and a whole set of sedimented interpretations from the
past).

8. Romania and Hungary did meet in the qualifying rounds of the European Champion-
ships in 1998 and 1999. They drew in the first match in Budapest and Romania defeated
Hungary in the second match in Bucharest. Romanian and Hungarian allegiances clearly
coalesced around their respective national teams and even resulted in explicit nationalist
tensions and hostilities (see Szabadság 1999b; Adevǎrul de Cluj 1999).
9. In the 1980s, Lord Tebbit, a Conservative parliamentarian, accused ethnic minorities in
the UK of being disloyal for supporting the cricket teams of their countries of origin in
competitions against England. As recent immigrants to the UK, these minorities were
expected to display their good assimilationist intentions by rooting for England. But as
Hungarians never immigrated to Romania (Romania, in a sense, immigrated to them), there
is no strong expectation that they should support the Romanian team (or assimilate).
International football matches provided them with an opportunity to express and reinforce
their dis loyalty to the Romanian nation, even in competitions in which Hungary was not
playing. (I thank one of this Journal’s anonymous reviewers for bringing the ‘Tebbit test’ to
my attention.)
10. Moores (1997, p. 241) describes how television viewers, tuned in to the same
programming, are ‘invited to identify with a wider ‘‘general public’’, to imagine themselves
as members of a national community which then [becomes] reproduced through broad-
casting day in day out, week in week out, and year in year out’.
11. And indeed, survey results reveal that the students’ viewing habits generally
coalesce around national poles: while Romanian news, for instance, is watched by
three-quarters of Romanians and by less than half of Hungarians, Hungarian news is
watched by no Romanians but a third of Hungarians. Similar results were obtained for talk
shows as well.
234 Jon E. Fox
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236 Jon E. Fox
JON E. FOX is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University
of Bristol.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Wood-
land Road, Bristol BS8 1UQ, UK. Email Bjon.fox@bristol.ac.uk
/ /