The politics of ‘no politics’ in Pula, Croatia: an ethnography of the Demons football fan group

Abstract

When a football fan group claims to be non-political, what does this mean, and what are the broader implications? This article examines such claims in a European context, through an ethnographic case study of the Demons, a small fan group in Croatia who follow Pula’s main club, NK Istra 1961. The literature on ‘ultras no politica’ is first reviewed. Interview material and ethnographic descriptions of group activities then form a springboard for a discussion of themes relevant to fan groups the world over: terrace atmosphere & group hierarchy; gender, sexuality & race; the role of the internet, social media, and branding; and violence and illegality. In the final section, I discuss and interpret the group’s ‘no politics’ positioning as: (i) a strategy for managing diversity, (ii) a rejection of party politics, and (iii) a foil that has facilitated a Croatian nationalist position among younger group members.

Keywords:

• Croatia
• football fans
• politics
• ethnography
• ultras

Introduction

In early 2018, a series of graffiti messages sprang up across the city of Pula. These messages sent a clear, harsh message to the regional government, describing the ruling party as gravediggers for sport in Pula. At that time, the city’s main football club, NK Istra 1961, was in dire straits.¹ The players had not been paid for several months and, without fresh investment, the club faced automatic relegation because it would no longer meet the necessary legal requirements demanded of top-league clubs in Croatia. Simply put, the club needed an investor to secure its future – and fast.

Fans organizing a graffiti campaign to send messages to the city council is an act many would regard as political. Here, the fan group demanded that the regional government invest in ‘rescuing’ the club; the regional government refused, and a local business tycoon bought the club until Spanish investors later stepped in.² Yet the Demons had prided themselves for many years on assuming a ‘no politics’ stance. This contradiction between their platform and their actions throws open some important research questions, of interest to scholars researching football fandom and ‘no politics’ platforms in other contexts. How did the group understand ‘politics’ and ‘ultras no politica’? What role did a ‘no politics’ platform play within the group? And under what circumstances did they abandon their ‘no politics’ platform – either implicitly or explicitly? To answer these questions, I use ethnography to generate a ‘thick description’ of the group. I detail the contexts in which the group operates in order to reveal the practical logic underpinning some of these ­apparent contradictions.

First, I survey the literature on ‘no politics’ positionalities among ultras groups, which enables me to draw comparisons with other contexts that emphasize the unique qualities of the Demons’ cultural setting. I then introduce the ethnographic methods used. Next, I offer a brief overview of the Demons’ historical relationship to football in Pula from their founding in 1992 as general context. The main part of the article then tackles group themes encountered in the field research before discussing the ‘no politics’ platform directly. I argue that in this context, a ‘no politics’ platform acted as (i) a tool for managing political and subcultural diversity, (ii) a rejection of party politics and commonplace understandings of politics in the post-Yugoslav region as a corrupting influence from ‘above’, and (iii) a foil that facilitated a Croatian nationalist turn among some younger group members.

Organized fandom and apolitical stances: a literature review

During the 1960s, the Ultras Movement in Italy (Podaliri and Balestri 2002) had ‘extreme’ left and right variants. Somewhat later, the ‘ultras no politica’ trope emerged there, purportedly among Sampdoria fans, amid a desire to banish politics from the terraces. It likely came about as a reaction to a perceived excessive politicization present among the earlier generation (Spaaij and Vinas 2005, 80). This ‘no politics’ stance became stronger towards the end of the twentieth century, particularly as a new generation of fans eschewed the radical political positions of the early ultras and sought to promote an ideology of the ultras: a specific lifestyle centred around passion, living for football and for match day (see Doidge 2015; Doidge and Lieser 2018). A likely precondition was the emergence of a fan solidarity cutting across political identifications, combined with an organized component to fandom and an exclusivist emphasis on ‘passion’ and football as part of an ultras ‘way of life’. In this arena,

over and above social origins, motivations and subjective stimuli, and different life styles, the same rules and norms were valid for all the young fans. And this culture imposed a sort of monopoly on the use of violence, orienting it towards external enemies alone, and within the stadium end group managed to silence the various personal opinions in the name of common group faith. (Roversi and Balestri 2000, 189)

A small number of groups have embraced ‘ultras no politica’ as a slogan for a variety of reasons. We might therefore consider it a shifter (Silverstein 1976) or floating signifier (see Mehlman 1972), akin to, but less established than the Against Modern Football trope (Numerato 2015; Perasović and Mustapić 2018; Šantek and Vukušić 2016; Vukušić and Miošić 2018; Webber 2017). Consequently, understanding the meaning of ‘ultras no politica’ entails comprehending its use in a particular context. The concept may extend – particularly in the case of hierarchically organized groups, common among the ultras tradition (see Testa and Armstrong 2010) – to being a platform to which all group members must subscribe.

Among Ultras Dynamo fans in Dresden, Ziesche argued that this group’s apolitical positioning is now

an illusion many ultras – and DU – have succumbed to. In leaving these societally relevant areas and debates untouched or … even in confronting them by an anti-stance, the scene is open to reactionary, discriminatory, right-wing positions. (Ziesche 2018, 9)

Ziesche argued that such a position is an illusion here. He thus makes a claim – which I agree with and discuss in (Hodges and Stubbs 2016) – about the inherently political nature of social reality. Furthermore, he argues that it is a dangerous illusion that opens the door to reactionary positions (see also Doidge and Lieser 2018).

If a ‘no politics’ platform is a depoliticizing strategy, the contours of that strategy nevertheless vary across fan contexts that, in turn, link to historical features of the local context, the current political and social environment, and the options available to fans in a particular moment. In relation to humanitarian actions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where funds were gathered to support people in need, the anthropologist Čarna Brković analysed what she termed ‘depoliticization from below’ (2016), which could be understood as a ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott 2008) in engaging with authorities politicized along party and ethnic lines.

In Pula, however, a different variety of ‘depoliticization from below’ is at play among football fans – a variety that seeks a distancing from politics and a way of managing specific forms of local subcultural and national (ethnic) diversity in order to find a niche in the local environment without the fan group damaging their reputation on the wider Croatian ultras scene. My chosen tools to examine this dynamic are ethnography and in-depth interviews, methods I will now discuss in more detail.

Methodology

I used two qualitative research methods – ethnography and semi-structured interviews – to complete this project.³ The core fieldwork was completed in 2018–19 alongside a larger project looking at the social provision, sports, and (sub)cultural life linked to the Uljanik shipyard over the last thirty years. The main fieldwork period (four months) was from March to July 2018, when I lived in Pula and attended games for the second half of the football season after the winter break. In early summer 2018 I conducted eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews with long-standing group members, which I recorded and transcribed. Finally, I attended matches during a second short field visit in autumn 2019.

This research is the final piece of a much larger body of research into the Croatian fan scene. This began with an activist ethnographic study of a group I was previously heavily involved in – the White Angels, an antifascist group who followed NK Zagreb and were unusual in promoting LGBTQ+ rights on the top-league terraces in Croatia. Later, I conducted interviews with members of GNK Dinamo Zagreb’s Bad Blue Boys and made terrace observations on match days. I chose to study the Demons as this group offered a fresh perspective through not being based in Croatia’s political centre (Zagreb), and they were unusual in visibly promoting certain forms of diversity (including diverse national identifications) on their terraces, alongside a ‘no politics’ platform.

I conducted the research in my mid-thirties, which aligned me with the older section of the active membership. I interacted rarely with the younger membership outside of match days. Moreover, I disliked the stronger tendency towards Croatian political nationalism present among some of the younger members, and some of these members were suspicious of my presence as an outsider writing about the group.

Pula and football

Pula is a medium-sized city (in Croatian terms) of roughly 60,000 people. It lies at the foot of the Istrian peninsula and is sandwiched between Italy, Slovenia, and the rest of mainland Croatia. The city, Istria’s largest, is heavily reliant on tourism, to which many residents attribute a specific multicultural diversity and openness (see Božić, Vrbančić, and Orlić 2012). These qualities fall within regionalist mainstream opinion in Istria, which ‘Others’ more eastern parts of Croatia as less open and multicultural (Ashbrook 2008). In the political arena, a regionalist party – the Istrian Democratic Assembly – have dominated for many years and have allegedly gatekept access to a wide range of jobs (Hoffmann et al. 2017), a practice people in Croatia widely accuse the mainstream political parties of. Pula is well-known for its industry (especially shipbuilding), tourism, and its military heritage; it was previously an Austro-Hungarian military port, and it later housed the Yugoslav army.

The Uljanik shipyard, a big employer in the city, had its own sports infrastructure, which included a stadium, football league and athletics coach. Uljanik’s links to the Demons ran deeper than the members employed there. The shipyard previously owned Pula’s main football club, NK Uljanik. In 2004, this club reached the top league and the shipyard stated that they could not continue to fund the club because of the extra costs associated with top-league football – in ironic opposition to the possible automatic relegation on the cards fourteen years later.

Since the Demons were founded in 1992 (they were originally called the Danger Devils), they had supported a second club (NK Istra), colloquially known as ‘the old Istra’. While NK Uljanik was troubled by its own success, several Demons were concerned about the fan group’s viability if their club continued its downward tumble. After a meeting with the management of NK Uljanik, leading Demons committed to switching support – a highly unusual move for a fan group – to NK Uljanik, provided that the club’s name were changed to include Istra in the title. As one of the group members described:

We had a meeting then, there were around ten people at that meeting, it was a difficult decision, but I think that if they had not decided what they decided then, the present-day Demons would not exist. I think it became unbearable for the group because – what happened with Istra? The old Istra became indebted and the real Istra went bankrupt. (DM2)

The next few years included a lot of changes, including repeated changes to the club name; they settled on NK Istra 1961 in 2007. Investors from Russia and later from the USA attempted to make a meaningful profit, but their failure to do so repeatedly plunged the club into crisis. A ‘struggle for survival’ became a leitmotif for this situation and the club’s dance above the relegation zone:

The group has to fight continually, there are always these struggles; the club has been dancing on a tightrope for years already, the struggle never ends. This is sometimes a struggle for survival [in the top league] or for saving the club, so it doesn’t die out. The club is continually on the edge of bankruptcy. (DM3)

Staying in the top league was a clear boost for the Demons, whose members enjoyed the banter, contact, and occasional organized fights with other well-known fan groups.

Negotiating access

As for negotiating access, when I first arrived in Pula, I obtained the mobile number for the group’s PR representative from a friend who I will call Layla here. Many of her family members had worked for Uljanik, and she was keen to help with my project. I agreed to meet a representative of the group, Stipe, at a game, and we went for a drink afterwards. Stipe was one of the older generation and was in his mid-thirties. After the first game, I met his friend, Ben, another long-standing member. My discussion of interviews with the Bad Blue Boys formed an important testing ground for my ‘fan credentials’ – not in the sense of being identified with a group, but as being identified as someone with an interest in the fan scene.

They later put me in touch with Marko, who led the group and worked at Uljanik. Through these three connections, I then started to meet a larger selection of group members, and after my attending several away games, I was familiar to most of the fans on the terraces. Towards the end of my fieldwork period, Ben put me in touch with eight group members (all in their thirties) who had previously been heavily involved, with whom I completed interviews. This cohort included group members who had been instrumental in promoting the no politics platform.

Most of the fieldwork interactions were either at football stadia, in cars on the way to or from away games, in coffee shops in the city centre, or – occasionally – in the fans’ social space, which was part of a complex of former army buildings known as Rojc (see Ivičić 2016; Kalčić 2012; Matošević 2021; Perasović 2012). This complex has a range of rooms housing all kinds of organizations, from artists’ ateliers to punk concert venues, coworking spaces, LGBTQ+ spaces, war veteran associations, a radio station, social centres, and football fan social spaces.

Group themes

Several themes emerged in the ethnography and interviews. The first set of themes concerns general features of group sociality, while the second set focuses on the groups ‘no politics’ positioning and the political realities that underpin it.

(1) Terrace atmosphere and group hierarchy

The terrace vibe at all matches I attended was very different to the GNK Dinamo terraces and the Bad Blue Boys. It felt much more relaxed, less pumped up, less hierarchical, and more fluid, with people coming and going. There was a leader, and he clearly took his role seriously. He would call out the names of people who were not pulling their weight, especially older group members. But it was relatively easy for me as an outsider from Western Europe to access the group and participate on match days. This included participating in choreographies with large banners covering the stand, or sang songs while most of the group sat down and a few waved large flags.

(2) Gender, sexuality, and race

At home games, women who were mostly teenagers or in their early twenties typically stood further back on the left-hand side of the stand (where the younger members stood). They formed maybe five to ten per cent of the crowd. Some women dressed in Demons T-shirts and participated in the chanting, but I did not see any leading the fan support. Women participants did not conform tightly to subcultural dress code, and were not the main audience. For instance, at one game, a stocky fan leading the terraces shouted, ‘Find a girl beside you and kiss her’. This comment acknowledged the female presence on the terrace and linked it to male heterosexual desire. His comment also assumed a primary (unmarked) audience of heterosexual men (the female fans were not meant to follow this instruction).

The social space at Rojc and trips to away matches were comparatively homosocial environments, with some casual misogyny present (for example, car-horn honking on the way to an away game – a form of harassment). This was a big contrast with the White Angels where such behaviour was occasionally present but heavily policed by long-standing members.

As for non-heterosexual sexualities, jokes were made about ‘fags’, which aligned them as ‘less male’, and, as mentioned, there were chants with homophobic (HNS pederi/nogomet ste sjebali) or anti-Roma (Mamiću/Cigane) themes. On two occasions I discussed the White Angels’ open stance towards LGBTQ+ people. On the first occasion, with two long-standing members in a pub, these members said that individual group members would be okay with such a position, but not the group as a whole. On the second occasion when I discussed it in the social space at Rojc, a heavily involved member said, ‘Yeah, we are ethnically diverse but homophobic’.

On the terraces, I heard all kinds of insults. Some were political, for instance, they shouted ‘Tuđman is fucking you up’ (‘Jebo vas Tuđman’) at the Dinamo goalie Livaković. I heard the phrase Ustaše (a reference to the Second World War axis government active across most of the Croatian mainland) used as an insult to describe the behaviour of a referee who made strict, unfair decisions.

A Dinamo player with an Algerian background (Soudani) was called a ‘monkey’ on one occasion, which, like the Tuđman comment, was designed to provoke a reaction from the player. Baiting the goalie was an especially common pastime, given how close the stand was to the pitch.

(3) Marketing, branding, and reputation

The Demons have a Facebook page and Instagram page, and pictures of them regularly featured on sites about the Croatian Ultras scene, which was important for recognition as ultras. Some of the older members mentioned how these forms of social media had taken over much of the role that internet forums (popular in the 2000s and early 2010s) had taken. One member said, ‘You can have a massive number of people on the terraces, but if you don’t have a picture on Facebook and if you haven’t put it on the internet, then people think you don’t exist’. The use of social media was linked to the increased presence of women at game too. Younger male members (those aged roughly 18–22) would boast on Facebook and Instagram and display pictures of themselves at games, and then women fans would come along to see what the fuss was all about.

As with other ultras groups, branding was also important in consolidating a sense of belonging to the membership. Core members set up a makeshift table outside the stadium before games, and they would sell scarves and other merchandise there. Specific fonts were used and T-shirts were designed that drew on transnational cultural references, for example, to Awaydays, the UK (2008) film about casuals culture (with a subtext about gay attraction) in Liverpool. In jest, one of the members complained about there being a lot of transnational references. ‘Why not draw on local Istrian traditions, like partida?’ he said, mentioning a word in the local slang for a football match. Stickers were popular and were stuck up around the city and at away games to mark territory. The group also had membership cards.

More broadly, they were viewed as legitimate participants in the Croatian ultras scene, although other groups viewed them as less serious, partly due to their relatively small size, and partly due to their different stance on the Homeland War and ‘no politics’ platform. To give one example, a friend from Zagreb arrived and made an ironic comment about how freely the Hajduk fans were walking around by the stadium; a situation that would not have been acceptable outside Dinamo’s stadium in Zagreb. ‘Istra and Rijeka have a soft reputation because of this’, he said.

(4) Violence and illegality

The Demons engaged in occasional organized fights with other fan groups. During fieldwork, I heard of one such fight with the Bad Blue Boys. This was part of the credentialling necessary for participating in the ultras scene. Those groups that declined were emasculated, as in the following comment related to fans from a small town in eastern Croatia:

Our lads offered them a fight, there were fifteen of us. They say, ‘let’s go fight in a ferka, with our bare hands’, and they declined, saying, ‘We aren’t Russians and Polish who go fight … what do you want, for us to lie down while you beat us’.

I mean, be prepared for a fight, if you’re not prepared, agree to a ferka, and then we’ll go to a ferka. Then they entered Pula with four vans or three vans and a car. There were around forty of them, and they attacked seventeen of ours. And they beat up one of ours who never gave in. He got up and attacked them a hundred times; they beat him up three times and he would get up again. And then they created a kind of mythical victory out of this.

Not all members participated in these organized fights. Sometimes, there were incidents related to rivalry with other groups. Rijeka fans were the main rivals, as if you travel to any other city outside Istria, you have to pass through the city of Rijeka. When attending away games, and especially when returning late at night, the fans I shared a car with expressed fears of inadvertently coming across sačekuše (ambushers), that is, a group of Rijeka fans waiting for them at a service station. There were also fears of police following them or stopping them, especially on the motorway area near to Rijeka, and unmarked cars did clearly follow us on some occasions. On one occasion, returning from a game in Zagreb, the group took a break at a service station near Rijeka. Some of the younger lads started play sparring. One pulled out some chocolate bars and crisps stashed inside his coat sleeve and offered me one. Then we had to move on quickly as a police car had pulled up beside our cars in the parking lot.

One member recounted how they used to ‘smuggle’ pyrotechnics over the border. This was dangerous to do by car, but in a bus, it would be much easier, as all the luggage was rarely checked. However, he was caught on two occasions. Once, all the items were confiscated, but the police officer suggested that they could be retrieved a month later. When he went to pick them up, they laughed, refused to hand them over, and told him he was lucky he hadn’t been sent to prison.

Another motif that came up in more than one interview was the act of throwing a tear bomb at a football match: the first one a fan group threw after Croatia’s independence. The following account also hints at how Istra fans were perceived by others during this period:

We passed through Učka – to them we’re Italians, Serbs etc. … here’s one example, Sisak, where the first tear bomb was thrown; it shouldn’t have been thrown, they thought it was a smoke bomb. Okay, it was me. I couldn’t go [to the game], so I gave them it: ‘Here’s a smoke bomb, set it off’, but it was a tear bomb. And then it was chaos there, it was in the newspaper (Dnevnik) – Italians from Istria have arrived in Sisak, which was at threat of war, to – I don’t know – cause a load of shit. (DM3)

Besides organized, agreed-upon violence with other groups, the Demons had a bad reputation in Pula during the 2000s when there was a skinhead incursion in the group and a conflict with members of the punk subculture. The sociologist Ben Perasović discussed this in his article ‘Pogo on the Terraces’. The early years in the first decade of the twenty-first century were particularly dark, as the following quote from Perasović’s research conveys:

It was a real nightmare … those skins … not really skins but neo-Nazis, crazy and stupid guys, football fans. They terrorized kids. They would come and find a few punks drinking in the park and they would beat them up badly.

(Slaven, aged thirty, member of punk band, in Perasović 2012)

This culminated in a stabbing and death in Pula that was linked to a skinhead contingent who had founded a Blood & Honour group, with some overlap with Demons members. In the words of two fans:

I think that all dragged out at Šijana [a Pula neighbourhood] … they all pretended to be skinheads and made the Hitler salute and then, well, they didn’t like punks. But a few key people in the group were punks. (DM3)

Ultimately the shift towards a ‘no politics’ stance in the group involved moving away from this dark period.

The politics of ‘no politics’ in Pula

In contrast to the Bad Blue Boys, who include Croatian nationalism in their group platform, the Demons are unique in Croatia in subscribing to a ‘no politics’ platform, referred to as ‘ultras no politica’. This ‘no politics’ initiative began with a banner made for the Demons’ fifteenth birthday in 2007. A member called Boris, a graphic designer, made this banner. In his words:

We made that banner because we weren’t interested in politics; we were interested in the terraces, choreographies, pyrotechnic performances [bakljade], attacking fans from opposing teams and so on. So, that’s why we made that banner, which then became a real hit. We took it to all matches everywhere for years.

This platform became popular within the group. So far, I have given a general description of themes relevant to the group, which is important for understanding more general group features and their position within the regional fan scene. Now I will move to answer the research questions posed in the introduction, namely, how did the group understand ‘politics’ and ‘ultras no politica’? What role did a ‘no politics’ platform play within the group? And under what circumstances did the group come to pursue political goals? In each section, I consider one possible role that this platform may have achieved:

(1) ‘No politics’ as a tool for managing political and subcultural diversity

The timing behind the emergence of the ‘no politics’ platform was partly a reaction to the subcultural violence typical of Pula’s alternative scene in the early years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. A ‘no politics’ platform also encouraged participation from a wider range of members (given that keeping the group going has often been a major concern), while the Italian reference was a nod to Istria’s proximity to Italy with its ultras culture. The slogan negotiated certain forms of diversity (ethnic and subcultural) present among the membership. As a leading member described:

Throughout history, Pula’s politics has changed so many times that there is such a big mixture here, and in Pula it cannot and dare not pass. So, Pula never had a developed identity, a political unity. It has always respected diversity and others. You respect your own, but don’t hate others. … Ultras No Politica can only pass in Pula and only with that politics can we get a lot of people on the terraces. (Marko, my emphasis)

Marko also explained the background to this position:

The [Ultras No Politica] banner emerged because of the group, the people in the group. As we’d been depicted in the media on several occasions as right-wingers and fascists. And then what has been happening a lot recently began to happen to us, where the media use their people, and then they want you on their side – one day they say you are with them, with this party, then another day with that party. And we made that banner to demonstrate to everyone that we are apolitical, that political parties don’t interest us at all, that the name of the club and our group is most important. And we wanted to demonstrate to everyone that we don’t pay attention to whether someone is a Bosnian, Serb, Albanian – what’s important to us is that people respect the group rules and support that club. And what they are in their private life, that’s their thing and it doesn’t interest us. (DM2)

This comment should be interpreted against the backdrop of the subcultural conflict in the early years of the new millennium. While group members took this platform seriously, even nominally leftist group members were ambivalent about symbols such as the swastika:

There were always people who had right-wing beliefs or left-wing ones. There were fewer on the left. This was a great story, I don’t know what the year was, but one lad was a skinhead, he had one, two, three swastikas on his back, his stomach, here and there. And when we arrived in Karlovac, it was scorching. We’d all stripped down to our belts. I asked him ‘why don’t you strip’. And he replied that he won’t take off his shirt because the group is Ultras No Politica, and he has swastikas and doesn’t want to start something. My view of him grew so much that you can’t believe it. (DM6)

Several members keenly pointed out how the group was unique in being so open to (post-Yugoslav) ethnic diversity, with several core members not having a ‘Croatian’ background; indeed, one long-standing member moved to Pula from Zemun during the 1990s, while other members had Bosnian backgrounds or Italian surnames. Despite the group’s diversity, there was no overt Italian influence; even the group members with Italian surnames emphasized Croatian belonging.

Ultras No Politica was more than a slogan, however; it also functioned as a platform mediating tensions between the diverse membership in Istria, a region that emphasized diversity of cultural background. The no politics platform mediated ethnic identifications in a context where such identifications were tightly linked to the new national projects of the post-Yugoslav states. The platform thus also made a statement directed at ultras elsewhere in Croatia: it requested recognition as ultras and offered a solution for perceptions in other parts of Croatia that Istria was less Croatian and politically suspect because of its reputation as left-wing given the right-wing stance dominant on large parts of the Croatian fan scene. Within Pula, the platform sought to widen the appeal of the subculture, extending it in a fuzzy way to include punks and others, while still managing the diversity of membership. This explains the statement that it could only pass, but also needed to pass in Istria.

(2) ‘No politics’ as no party politics

In their terrace support, the Demons draw on tropes of local patriotism. This resonates with the ideological focus of the regionalist political party, the IDS, who counterpose their regional, ‘European’ local patriotism – in line with the regionalist ‘New Europe’ (see King 2000) – with the Croatian Democratic Union’s authoritarian nationalism. Local patriotism sidesteps questions of nationality, and here, local hierarchies of participation in the group. One older member I interviewed was particularly enthusiastic about Istria’s regional autonomy. He related this to Istria’s semi-peripheral positioning, saying that for ‘them on the other side of Učka’, in a reference to the mountain range that separates the Istrian peninsula from the rest of the Croatian mainland, ‘We were ‘Italians, Serbs’, and that Istria would be financially better off if it had more autonomy. He said:

I’m the kind of person who says as a joke, ‘I’d introduce visas on the Učka border’. We all laugh, but I really do think that. I’m that kind of guy, to put it simply, and I always have been ‘samo Istra’ [just Istria]. I love Croatia, my grandma is from Dalmatia, my wife is from Slavonia, and I say to her, even today when we fight, ‘Will you go to your relatives and then ask for a visa to enter?’ (DM1)

I could make a parallel argument to the Bad Blue Boys’ situation in Zagreb here, wherein the Demons’ orientation towards local patriotism echoes the political mainstream in the region (see Hodges and Stubbs 2016), while the ruling elite keeps a safe, deliberate distance from the group because it is like an unpredictable, autonomous cousin.

I asked one group member how he thinks the City of Pula and Glas Istre (the regional newspaper) behave towards the Demons:

That depends on what way the wind is blowing … We are pretty risky – as soon as there is a reasonably large number of us, we are a risky group. A fan group is really difficult to control because while those ten people who lead the group can make decisions, you will always have another hundred people who think differently and who will make their attitude known, which isn’t the group’s attitude. And that’s why politics doesn’t want to get mixed up with us. (DM2)

Despite this distance, there were some unwritten rules established with the local authorities. For instance, painting murals is technically an illegal act, yet the prevalence of murals suggested some informal agreement or compromise was in place. The group also had a social space in the cultural centre Rojc – a large, converted military barracks. As with the other organizations there, they either received the space free of charge or paid a nominal fee for it, which required goodwill on the part of the IDS. A musician who I interviewed argued that the IDS exert some control over the alternative scene through offering spaces for concerts and socializing at Rojc. He said that one year the antifascist festival was critical of the city authorities, while the next year it was sponsored by them.

In the nineties, one member also described how Croatia’s biggest political party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) had taken an interest in the group at one point:

Here’s one example. There was a meeting in the club in Jergović’s time – he was the president of the HDZ in Istria when Sanader was in power. I can’t remember if any of the other lads were with me, in his office.

‘What do you want?’ I asked. And there were HDZ membership cards on the table.

‘Join us, think about it, what do you need? Was anyone arrested? We’ll sort everything out so they’re released’.

This is what I experienced, it’s the truth. Of course, Jergović wasn’t at that meeting himself, the top-level person is never at that meeting; it’s always the second in command who will say the next day ‘I didn’t offer them anything’. (DM4)

These comments emphasize how various political parties have taken an interest in the group, just as has occurred in Zagreb. Yet because there is no on single narrative that cuts through the group in the way or to the extent that the Homeland War narrative and war mobilisation cut through the Bad Blue Boys’ positionality and platform in Zagreb, it makes sense that the group attempt to distance themselves from politics and establish a firm boundary in the group that distances the members from politics. This resonates with the anthropologist Jessica Greenberg’s (2010, 41) discussion of non-participation in politics as ‘an expression of complex and sophisticated responses to changing sociopolitical contexts’. Greenberg discussed Serbian students’ comments on NATO intervention in Serbia, and one of her students emphasized a binary between the elite political class (politika) and the ‘people’ (narod) who were relatively powerless to do anything about the decisions the political class made. Greenberg skilfully described how her positionality featured in these discussions through the presence of a perceived liberal Western ‘judging’ gaze – a topic I have also related to collective representations of Balkan football fans elsewhere (Hodges 2014). A similar dynamic is present here in using dominant associations with ‘politics’ as ‘elite politics’ to distance the group from politics in general and facilitate the creation of a ‘purer’ or ‘decontaminated’ ultras space that also allows for wider diversity of membership, and ultimately, for survival of the group in a context in which no single cultural or political narrative dominated.

(3) The demise of ‘no politics’ and the rise of Croatian nationalism?

If the Demons had taken a ‘no politics’ stance, then why – several fans from Zagreb asked me – did they include the Croatian flag on the terraces? When I asked about this, one Demon said this was just a nod to the national team. Some members recounted attending international games across Europe. Interestingly, this marked a contrast with the Bad Blue Boys who eschewed the national flag on the terraces as they (especially the urban-aligned members) associated it more directly with the corrupt nationalism of the HDZ. This association was likely stronger as Zagreb is a capital city and the political centre of power.

Yet the reference to the national team was not the whole story. When I was on the terraces, a younger grouping was slowly assuming a larger role among the Demons. More controversial graffiti and symbols connected with Croatian nationalism, such as the chequered crest with the top-left square coloured white (Bijelopolje, cf. Brentin’s (2016) article on far-right rituals), came to have an accepted presence in the group. I also noticed younger group members dressed at games in Operation Storm T-shirts – a reference to a military action that resulted in thousands of Serb-identified persons being forced to leave Croatian territory. Members also organized a procession through the city centre to commemorate the Vukovar massacre, a tragic event in 1991 that has been abused by nationalist politicians (cf. Ljubojević 2021).

In contrast to other ultras groups in Croatia, the visual messages on T-shirts and graffiti were relatively mild. The older members explained this in terms of ‘fashion’ – radical right-wing ideas are currently fashionable among many young people in Croatia – and these symbols’ presence in Pula links to a desire for recognition and legitimation among the wider ultras scene.⁴ However, these references could not draw on a historical tradition as they could in other parts of Croatia. For example, the Ustaše had never been in power in Istria.

These ideas were manifest in group discussions and banter. For instance, at an away game in Zagreb, one young member asked me what my nationality was and I jokingly replied, ‘half-English, half-Welsh’. Some of the younger group members made a joke out of this, saying, ‘Hi, I’d like to order a pizza, can I have half-margarita, half capriccioso’, with the implication that this sounds silly.⁵

More generally though, when I discussed nationalism with the older group members in the interviews, I encountered a distance I had not found to be present among the Bad Blue Boys. This related to Pula’s semi-peripheral positioning within Croatia. For example, I asked the group leader some questions about patriotism. He said he had patriotic views and tattoos, and emphasized that for him it meant ‘to not be ashamed of where you are from’. This is a view closer to a local patriotic viewpoint rather than the vanguardist, arrogant assertions I sometimes encountered in Bad Blue Boys’ narratives. And when he quizzed me about the UK, he said that nationality and patriotism is particularly emphasized in Croatia at present, including in the group:

We do have Croatian nationalism too. And I love Croatia, and I have five patriotic tattoos on me. I love Croatia and Croatia means the world to me, and my dad was injured in the war and now has a disability. Only sometimes, perhaps some other fan groups, other people who are more right-wing oriented think that we are against Croatia – this is ridiculous. It’s absurd. But we push this politics where we don’t pay attention to differences and that is the only politics the club and the group has. (DM2)

This narrative is not an uncommon one, but the comment that ‘nationalism and patriotism are particularly pronounced in Croatia at present’ created a distance and space that I did not encounter in interviews with fans in Zagreb, for example.

Another Demons member commented on young members’ use of right-wing symbols:

Now you know the new group, these young ones are constantly taking photos with their right hands raised [in a Hitler salute], which most of my team don’t approve of, I mean, we don’t care, but it isn’t nice to see … But all groups in Croatia also have Serbs and Muslims and I don’t know what. (DM6)

Both of these quotes demonstrate mitigation strategies taken to minimize the significance of far-right symbolic practices among certain ‘troublesome’ younger group members, while the group leader’s account of his patriotism is a fairly mainstream one in Croatia. At a later game, I saw certain younger members challenge Marko’s authority; he ended up giving them the microphone and asking them to lead the terraces. Sometimes, Marko ‘retrieved’ his authority by shouting that the younger members were being loud enough, and generating chants with his subgroup. There was a clear shift towards the younger generation becoming ever louder in both their views and terrace presence, however.

Conclusions

I have attempted to show here, through ethnography and interview material, that several forces are at play among the group, and these forces refract certain core aspects of the wider regional and Croatian situation. These forces include the Istrian focus on local patriotism, a desire to manage local nationally and subculturally defined diversity, a group desire to feel part of and recognized as members of the Croatian ultras scene, and a wish to distance themselves from institutionalized politics, which was framed as corrupt and elite.

The group’s no politics stance emerged primarily as a way of managing group diversity amid local tropes of Istrian multiculturality and tolerance. It gave them a unique mark on the Croatian fan scene that helped with their credentialling, amid claims that the group could not be taken seriously. In recent years, however, the generational shift and relevant prevalence of right-wing ideas among youth more generally in Croatia, meant that the group stance and platform had shifted and the ‘no politics’ approach was being displaced by a broader Croatian nationalist tendency – albeit somewhat muffled and distanced compared with observations of fans in the Croatian capital city of Zagreb. Further research, however, is needed to examine how this tendency has played out on the ground from the Covid-19 pandemic period onwards.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Hrvatska zaklada za znanost.

Notes

1 Istra is the Croatian spelling of Istria.

2 https://sportske.jutarnji.hr/nogomet/hnl/napokon-se-zna-ime-dobrocinitelja-koji-je-u-zadnji-cas-napravio-uslugu-hr-nogometu-hrvatski-klub-na-rubu-propadanja-spasava-nas-bogati-poduzetnik/7363011/

3 I obtained informed consent from all interview participants for this project, retained the interview transcripts, and have used pseudonyms throughout to preserve anonymity. Ethical approval was obtained for the ethnographic research and interviews as part of the broader DFG- and HRZZ-funded projects.

4 Radical right ideas were trendy among young people more generally, as they had absorbed many of these ideas from the postwar hegemony. Because they had not experienced the war directly, they took the ideas to new extremes.

5 In Croatian: ‘Dobar dan, želim naručiti pizzu, može li polu margarite, polu capricose’. The irony was lost that it is possible to order a half-and-half pizza.