SPORT 1913 - 2013

SPORT AND PEACE

Introduction Sports have always had a complex, contradic- tory relationship to social conflict. For much of human history, the athletic competitions and tests of physical strength we associate with sports today have been directly linked to ag- gression, conquest and subordination. Among the classical Greeks, whose sacred games have given us the paradigm of the modern Olym- pics, ‘athletics were preparation for war, war preparation for athletics’. The skills and ideol- ogy of predatory masculinity that they glori- fied prepared men for combat and contributed to the system of misogynist slavery that en- abled the Greek city states (Kidd 1984, Golden 2011). The same could be said about the jousts and tournaments of the feudal period: the technologies, organizations and values they stimulated were inextricably bound up with medieval warfare and the process of creating and policing the class, gender, ethnic and reli- gious hierarchies of those societies. In the modern era, there has been a con- certed, on-going effort to reduce the violence of sports, a consequence of the larger process sociologist Norbert Elias (2000) called the ‘civilizing process’. Most sports today are sig- nificantly less violent and safer than their an- tecedents a century ago (Elias and Dunning, 1986). But they still encourage a martial spirit, exploit the ideologies of difference and in- equality, and fuel the passions of war. During World War One, sporting events in many countries were sites of intense propaganda and were used to recruit soldiers and workers

to the war effort; the symbolic ties of sport to the military are renewed in the ceremonies of major championships to this day. Sport also continues to contribute to other discourses of hatred and subordination, especially misogy- ny and racism (Coakley 2001). In the former Yugoslavia, the Red Star Belgrade football fans’ organization drove the militant Serbian nationalism that contributed to the genocidal civil war (Foer 2004). Yet during each of these same periods, sports have also occasioned truce and diplo- macy. The best known instance is the ‘Olym- pic truce’ of classical antiquity, which sought to ensure safe passage for athletes and specta- tors travelling to the Olympic Games, and pro- hibited the invasion of Elis, the city state where Olympia was located, during the period of the Games. Then as now, the Olympics were a site of backroom diplomacy between the as- sembled elites. The archaeologist Stephen Miller (2012) has even argued that the condi- tions of classical athletics, especially the nu- dity of competitors, contributed to the idea of isonomia , ‘the same law for everybody’, and the development of democracy. In the late nineteenth century, one of Pierre de Coubertin’s goals in creating modern Olympic Games was to spur the formation of international networks that would generate a critical mass of intercultural understanding that would serve as a brake on war. As Dietrich Quanz (1993) has shown, Coubertin was deep- ly influenced by the international peace move- ment. In the first winter of World War One, the

BRUCE KIDD / Canada

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