SPORT 1913 - 2013

part one_CHAPTER 5

WSM’s Mission and Its Developments Each of the original mission components, however, has to be located in its historical context. An opposing attitude toward the power, for example, is more or less shared by the majority of the mass sport organizations acting in the first decades of the 20th century. It derives from a self-representation empha- sizing the differentiation between the mass sport practices and the élite leisure activities investigated by Veblen (1899), Risse (1921) and later by Bourdieu’s (1979) theory of habitus and Elias’s (1986) analysis of the relationship between Western civilization and sportiza- tion. This attitude is shared by all the main ideological groupings emerged as a political effect of Nation building, industrialization and sportization: the Christian mass organiza- tions as well as the Nationalistic and the So- cialist ones. These movements exerted a cru- cial role beside the political or social mass organizations they belonged to. Mosse (1974) described the Turnvereine as one of the main pillars of the German Nation building. Arnaud (1994, 1997) investigated the development of the French workers’ sports organizations in preserving and updating the ‘Republican Ide- ology’ in France. Fabrizio (2009, 2011) showed the influence of the Catholic sports organiza- tions in promoting a counter-cultural opposi- tion to the new born liberal State in Italy. Only the Socialist sport movements, however, in- cluded the question of equality in their de- clared goals. This had a special meaning for the growth of sport at large in Western Eu-

tive integration as defined by Otto Kirchheimer (1976) in his analysis of the cri- sis of the Weimar Republic and the causes of the Nazi and fascist uprisings in Western Eu- rope. In other words, the movement accepted to participate in the development of sport practices promoted by the States and strong- ly encouraged public intervention in favour of a democratic enlargement of sport citizen- ship. It also anticipated some of the issues which would become crucial after the War, such as the full integration of women in the sport system. At the same time, the move- ment has continued for a long time to per- ceive itself, its mission and its mass organi- zations as the expression of an alternative representation of society in opposition to the ‘bourgeois’ one. So, while the communist ISR (Internationale Sportive Rouge) tried to give birth to a completely autonomous sports net- work opposing the ‘élite Olympism’, ISO and ISOS aimed at being recognized as an actor of the wider Olympic network. For a long time, this question represented one of the contro- versial issues debated inside the internation- al Olympic system. In fact, it was only in 1986, exactly sixty years after Coubertin’s statement mentioned above, that the CSIT was acknowledged as an official component of the Olympic system. This controversial re- lationship – regarding the attitude toward the political institutions on one hand, and the organizational membership in the Olym- pic system on the other – encourages us to emphasize the original sociological character

rope, contributing to free sport from the aris- tocratic imprinting of the first sportization age and drawing a line against the instrumen- tal use of mass sport practices applied by the reactionary regimes between the two wars (Bolz 2008). This role of the WSM in overcoming the boundaries of the early sportization – includ- ing the representation of sport practice as a privilege for élite sportsmen – can explain the favour showed by Coubertin himself, who in 1926 exalted WSM as the virtual pro- ducer of a new pedagogy, since “…the ‘bour- geois’ pedagogy has failed and the world is waiting for this innovation” (letter from PdC to Jules Devlieger, Chairman of Labour Sports, Lausanne August 5 th , 1926, quoted in Deveen 1996, 32). This relationship between a popular sport movement, the philosophy of Olympism and its organizational network can enlighten an- other interesting and peculiar aspect of the workers’ sport. Until the 2 nd World War, its attitude toward bourgeois governments and politics in general, can be extended to the of- ficial sport organizations themselves. WSM aimed at being inserted in the international competitive network but at the same time it did not renounce to promote a different and more socially oriented pattern of sports prac- tices. It means that, like the Social Democrat- ic parties and the pro-Labour mass organiza- tions between the two wars, its Weltanschau- ung can be inserted in the typology of nega-

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