Introduction

While specialists in nationalism have paid a good deal of attention to central aspects of culture such as language and religion, they have paid remarkably little attention to that other aspect of culture around which nationalism so often coheres in the modern world, namely, sport. Analysis of the relationship has suffered from inadequate conceptualisation as well as ideological bias. There is also an unfortunate tendency in the literature on this question to treat sport as a mere reflection of politics.

In realist international relations theory, if nationalism permeates international relations, then we should expect the conduct of sport at the international level automatically to reflect this state of affairs (Kanin, 1981). From Marxisant perspectives sport provides a ready vehicle for diffusing nationalist ideology to the masses and diverting them from their true interests. Thus the celebration of the American nation in the 1984 Los Angeles Games has been interpreted as promoting American ideals and values in a nationalist mode that helped to conceal and mitigate the effects of major divisions in American society (Lawrence and Rowe, 1986). References to sport and the nation in the British mass media are taken to represent the hegemony of ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995) and successive Conservative governments in Britain are held to have used sport for ‘nationalistic purposes’ (Houlihan, 1997).