SPORT 1913 - 2013

part one_CHAPTER 5

gies adopted by the WSM. We can roughly re- fer to seven phases: The first embraces the period included be- tween the foundation of the ISO (Gent 1913) until the reconstitution of the movement as ISOS after the 1 st World War (Lucerne 1920). The second concerns the period from 1920 to 1933 (9 th Congress held in Liege), when the Socialist sport organization (the ‘fourth force’ of the workers’ movement) is already facing the effects of the Fascist threat and of the political divisions inside the old working class’s parties. The third period from 1933 to the 2 nd World War represents the hardest one in the history of the organization, which was obliged to be firm in its defence, being at the same time deprived of the support of democratic mass movement in the countries submitted to reactionary regimes and totalitarian control. It is however the period in which solidarity within the Social Democratic and pro-Labour parties was enforced and the Trade Unions ac- quired an increasing influence in most of the democratic countries. In 1946, CSIT was born in Brussels as the third ‘reincarnation’ of the WSM. This season of very re-foundation would be concluded in 1963 (Helsinki Congress), giving birth to an organizational structuration of the movement focused on decentralization and support to technical disciplines. In the second post-war period, we can identify four more phases:

In the fifth phase (from Helsinki to the Tel-Aviv Congress in 1978), the WSM may be the first one to focus its attention on the start- ing experience of sport for all as connected to Welfare policies (DaCosta and Miragaya, 2002; Heinemann 2003). This innovative perspective will be in- creasingly adopted in the sixth organizational period, from the Lisbon Congress (1981) to the Vienna meeting in 1996, including the IOC’s official recognition of the CSIT (1986) as a full member of the Olympic system. This is also the period in which the WSM experienced and promoted a courageous enlargement of the movement in order to include new sports ac- tors and political subjects. It forced the CSIT to face both international contradictions and conflicts, and infra-organizational stress re- vealing high rates of inner differentiation in the worldwide sports organizations and con- sequently asking for a renewed and stronger leadership role. The last season could ideally start with the Eilat Congress in 1998 and be provision- ally concluded in the Rio de Janeiro meeting held in 2011. It is important in our perspective to underline some emerging trends in this phase. In fact, the WSM expresses an increas- ing attention towards the phenomenon of sport for all as a new right of the citizens, to be included in the Welfare agenda. This cru- cial revising of the organizational original mission led to a sharper differentiation with a more traditional approach to the topics. It particularly implied a clear differentiation

with the North American representation of sport for all as a social practice exclusively re- served to minorities’ inclusion, to disabled people and/or to strictly health-oriented ac- tivities. It means that the CSIT, recognizing sport for all as a crucial component of the non-profit system (Anheier 2000; Porro 2001a, 2005), contributed to liberate it from an obsolete role and to anticipate innovative trends that have been stated, for example, in the EU White Paper on sport (2007) and, more officially, in the EU Lisbon Treaty and in the so-called de Coubertin programme (2008). At the same time, in a period of globalization leading to a process of change and decreasing power of the old ideological apparatuses, the WSM located itself more and more inside a broader system of political relations with pro- gressive and democratic partners, which did not necessarily belong to the traditional So- cialist organizations. So the present situation of the movement can be summarized as a twofold perspective: on the one hand, the CSIT engages itself with a renewed Welfare regime including sport in an ideal chart of emerging citizen rights and as a promoter of social capital (Putnam 2000). This approach strongly emphasizes the European roots of the movement according to a renewed representation of social citizen- ship. On the other, it is in this period that the CSIT enlarged its membership and enforced its international role as an organizational ac- tor at world range. After the Congress held in Rio de Janeiro in 2011, nine extra-European

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