Write: Mentor Nazarko
Challenging parallels… with the world. Patriotism vs. football success
The German Der Spiegel calls the 1954 World Cup victory by the FRG the true moment of birth of the Federal Republic. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calls it the moment when Germany found itself again; German political scientist Arthur Heinrich called it- liberation from the guilt complex; the beginning of a new national self-confidence.Historian Hans-Joachim Teichler called it contribution to the normalization of the nationWhile the film "The Miracle of Bern" he calls it moral, family and national rebirth. This is why public perception of football is stronger than academic analysis. Surely Professor Artan Fuga, while in his informative style mocked those who on screens link football with patriotism after our defeat to Poland, was simply and only with colleagues who attacked footballers in big and superficial terms –inflator and deflator.
The topic of sporting success linked to patriotism is a challenging one, and Kosovo is probably the best world subject today. For those who say what connection do we have with the losing Germany, let's go to the comments about the crowd of one million on the Champs Elysées, when France won the 1998 World Cup, where we will find even more enthusiastic terms: the philosopher Edgar Morine wrote- What ecstasy for the newly found republican unity; while someone else called it The spontaneous July 14th of the Republic…
Kosovar sports won in 10 years, compared to politics that is not winning
10 years ago, Fadil Vokrri, a football legend for Serbs and Albanians, managed to get Kosovo into UEFA and FIFA, perhaps (?) using a little bit of his acquaintance with the leaders of the Serbian federation who put up weak resistance. The Russians tried to use the precedent of Kosovo's membership to request UEFA to allow the Russian republics of Georgia, etc., to join, which was rejected. As a result of the diplomatic masterpiece of Vokrri and Adem - footballers, their young compatriots, could immediately challenge Russia in the group matches and reach the 2018 World Cup that was taking place there. Would the Kosovo footballers and fans get a visa? Yes, because in 2015, former judoka Putin had accepted Driton Kuka and Majlinda Kelmendi despite their passports. Majlinda won in Kazan, Russia, raised the Kosovo flag there, and the Kosovo anthem was played in a hall where everyone present, including Putin, stood up.
10 years later, The sons of guest workers with the flag invented by the West, passed 100 places in the global football classification. They filled three representative teams with talent - Switzerland, Albania and Kosovo, and today they appear at the gates of the World Cup, this time in the USA. Serbia, the country that wanted to eradicate the Albanian race from its own country, with a famous football school in Europe, is swallowing the humiliation created by Manaj's goal in Serbia and the success of the Kosovars, complaining without dignity to UEFA why the Kosovars make the eagle sign in Slovakia. What happened in 10 years is truly a dream, created by a talented people who received freedom, but a long time ago and visa isolation: today this people wants repaid affirmation in the world's greatest showcase, football. This is the triumph of the individual of the Albanian race who, driven out by the Serbian invader, fleeing war or misrule, shines in Germanic systems, governed with discipline and vision. The talents of Kosovo, nurtured by their fathers, often simple workers, once products of the Yugoslav school of football, led by Swiss Germanic coaches, are giving a lesson not just to the abusers of their parents, but to all of Europe.
Kosovo today is the Cinderella of the continent in football. But while football and judo have come so far in 10 years or 27 years, based on the tradition of the former Yugoslavia, on the energy of independence and freedom, led by Germanic coaches, where has the policy of self-determination arrived, which ignores Western teachers? What has Kosovo's politics done in these ten years? It has neither helped itself nor... football. It continues to squander the Western gift of statehood, at first with the class of commanders who wanted to be eternal until some of them unjustly ended up in The Hague; and now with another group, captive to an amalgam of leftist theories, victimizing, challenging that West that created Kosovo, it continues to engage in a dialogue that never ends like this. He wants to share in the success of football with enthusiastic displays, emotional statuses on social networks, or awards, but he hasn't even built a stadium...
Kosovo football, as well as in Albania, has transcended politics.
He is giving her his own example, how to behave with the world, with the historical adversary, with unrecognized countries (remember Muriqi, what a Kosovo bellwether he is for Spain with his success).
Who defeated Serbia in peace: politics or football?
Who made Kosovo known in non-recognizing states - politics or football?
I already feel that the anti-globalist philosophers who command digital armies in the service of the government will perhaps orient the popular approvals of the network in a Pristina-centric way, to benefit by showing contempt for Tirana. Jealous neighbors will be invested in strengthening intra-Albanian differences, politicizing them, and continuing with the crying weapon of victimization of the Serbian minority. Kosovar politics will try to take credit that it does not have, and it simply needs to be told: if you followed or even collaborated with the sports model, of Majlinda and Driton in judo, of Zhegrova and Muriqi in football, or of Rita Ora and Dua Lipa in music, Kosovo's political and state affairs would be better off. Politics did not even build a new stadium, despite the gigantic promises to build it near someone's village, or the current indifference in the face of the demolition of the pre-independence stadium in Pristina.
Football's parallels with soccer... and the nation
Through the post-independence sports-politics parallel, we come to another big question: new state or national identity? Can the new state, the new society, maintain and how will it administer the greatness of an eventual success through qualification for the American World Cup? Something can be filtered as a start from the words of the president of Kosovo football, Agim Ademi, in an interview for Top Channel. Himself a footballer for Pristina in the 70s, assistant to the great Vokrri, also an entrepreneur with life experience in Switzerland, Ademi has so far demonstrated modesty, wisdom and iron discipline. He has never publicly opposed the Albanian Federation, although his mother has taken players. Now the opposite may happen, so Ademi, whose hour has come strongly, called on Albanians of all lands to identify with the Kosovo representative. He has wisely selected modest but tough Swiss German coaches who have shown the ability to reconcile difficult characters of players (remember Zhegrova in the reserves), or eventually managers and club directors. He has skillfully survived the pressures of politics that want to control him and that today only remains silent in the face of Adem's success, wanting to benefit from the energy that the success of a small people creates in a global competition with billions of viewers.
Kosovar football has fostered a strong sense of collective belonging, which could be the powerful beginning of a new national feeling. I am not referring to the social media fights similar to those between Lazio and Roma, but We Kosovars know how to play football better than you in Albania., etc., etc. I do not expect that, like Mandela, we will have Serbian players in the Kosovo national team, because the Serbs led by Belgrade will not accept this team as theirs. I do expect, however, that this differentiating success somewhere in parts of the nation, but also the conception of a new identity, may be embraced by internal Kosovar opinion engineers who want to ride it, because it resembles themselves as modern-day renaissance people. Apologists for the Kosovar nation as a political project will necessarily find superficial food to feed the crowds of social networks.
So football is not just football: Kosovo won the war in 1999, with its own blood and NATO weapons, so it is not like Germany in 1954, which lost the Second World War. If the losing Germany was reborn from football, what can a winning Kosovo achieve? If France in 1998, regained unity black-white-beur (multiethnicity), but what will Kosovo produce politically and nationally?
Let's wait for the match with Turkey - hopefully the weather holds up well, saving the boys the mud of the former Yugoslav stadium - and see what the collective avalanche of reason, and irrationality, will gather ahead...
t7 live
