Consuming the nation: Holidays, sports, and the production of collective belonging

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. Holidays 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.