If you want, you can throw stereotypes around in this World Cup game. But they do not do justice to Swiss-Serbian relations – on the contrary.
Switzerland is home to Serbs and Kosovars: A man in a café in the Serbian part of Mitrovica.
The war in Yugoslavia began with a football game a year before actual hostilities began. At least that’s what a somewhat bold reading of recent history says. The game between Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb on May 13, 1990 degenerated into an orgy of violence. The police had to capitulate to the thugs from the fan sectors of the two clubs. The leaders later gained notoriety as murderous paramilitaries.
The unleashed crime when Yugoslavia collapsed thirty years ago still shapes the Swiss view of the Balkans, mixed with a portion of orientalism and skepticism about immigration. It is therefore easy to politically charge the game between Switzerland and Serbia. In the intoxication of football chauvinism, one’s own prejudices can be wonderfully confirmed.
When the two countries last met at the World Cup in Russia 2018, the two players Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka, who came to Switzerland as children from Kosovo, showed the Albanian double-headed eagle. The Serbian fans in the stadium had previously sung wild chants. However, the Belgrade tabloids only followed suit after the general outrage in Switzerland.
Swiss sympathy for Serbia
On the contrary, in Serbia, when it’s not against their own national team, there is sometimes a quiet pride in the Swiss players with a connection to the Balkans. “Naši”, “ours”, exclaimed a Serbian commentator at the 2014 World Cup, when the Swiss national team almost created the football sensation with an outstanding Shaqiri in the game against Argentina.
This close human connection between Switzerland and the former Yugoslavia has its origins in the boom. Well-trained dentists, nursing staff and engineers from all the constituent republics settled in Switzerland. When the Italian seasonal workers gradually stopped coming, Bern made an agreement with Belgrade in 1964. The Swiss companies received workers, the Yugoslav multi-ethnic state was able to prevent potential unrest in the poorer south for the time being.
Switzerland maintained a particularly close relationship with Serbia in the first half of the 20th century. The young federal state identified with the Serbian power of resistance against the Habsburg Empire. “For us, the Serbs are not a ‘gang’, but a people,” said Carl Spitteler in his 1914 speech on the Swiss position in the First World War. Archibald Reiss, criminologist from Lausanne, investigated Austrian war crimes on behalf of the Serbian government in 1915 and is still highly revered in Serbia today.
Only with the wars in the 1990s did the country receive the perpetrator label. The former admiration turned to contempt. Under the aegis of Micheline Calmy-Rey, the Federal Council finally pushed for Kosovo’s secession from Serbia and positioned itself clearly on the Albanian side. In Switzerland, Albanians and Serbs live in the same country. Many of them as Swiss. In the military, Berisha and Jovanović check the identity cards of the grey-haired colonels at the entrance to the security system.
Conciliatory point of the scandal game in Aargau
The different narratives about Yugoslav history are part of Swiss reality. Even when they have reached the top of society, the children carry the war of their parents and grandparents around, at a loss as to what the past has to do with their future. Instead of explaining occasional emotions with stereotypes, a serious examination of their stories would be necessary. Empathetic, tough, Swiss.
This debate is part of the ongoing work on Switzerland as a nation of will. This may also result in political opportunities to untie the Kosovo knot: with a common understanding of the historical context. Swiss soldiers, some with Serbian or Albanian backgrounds, are already succeeding in assuming a military mediation role in North Mitrovica, the focal point of the smoldering Kosovo conflict.
Incidentally, in Rupperswil in the canton of Aargau, a Serbian and a Croatian flag hang peacefully next to each other along the railway line. This late, conciliatory punch line of the 1990 scandal is also part of today’s Switzerland. So it’s not all that complicated.