Overview: From the transnational spread of sport to the provincialization of sport in Europe

In the 19th century, there was a transnational spread of various forms of physical exercise. German gymnastics ("Turnen") and Swedish gymnastics had already expanded beyond their countries of origin into Continental Europe and the USA in the early 19th century. The "Sokol" (Falcon), founded in Prague in 1862 and inspired by ancient Greek physical culture and German gymnastics, founded fraternal societies in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Galicia, the Prussian part of Poland, and the USA, later expanding into the Russian Empire.¹ British "sports" spread to continental Europe through students, boarders, teachers, merchants, and tourists, leading to the formation of local and, during the "Belle Epoque," national sports organizations.² From the late 19th century onwards, bilateral and multilateral cross-border sports contacts took place without British involvement.

This development led to the need for international sports organizations to promote and at the same time regulate this sports exchange, ensuring the observance and development of the rules and regulations.³  The formation of these organizations around 1900 was part of a general trend toward multilateral problem solving through international congresses and the establishment of international offices and associations. This trend was necessitated by the expansion of cross-border economic interdependence and the globalization of technical progress. In the beginning, international sports organizations were often European entities with, at best, a few American affiliates.

Typically, these organizations also considered it their role to establish international competitions (world and European championships). By the mid-20th century, these events had become focal points of transnational activity.⁴ Various media waves created a location-independent, transnational public sphere: In addition to the press, radio reports, and film newsreels in the 1920s, as well as films of major sporting events (e.g. of the Workers' Olympics of 1925, the Winter Olympic Games of 1928, and – monumentally filmed by Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) – the Olympic Summer Games of 1936). After the first local television broadcasts during the 1936 Olympic Games, a close symbiosis developed between international sports and the rise of television from the 1950s onward (first during the 1954 football World Cup), which played a significant role in the emergence of cross-border cooperation among television stations.⁵

At the same time, there was an early onset of commercialization and various forms of politicization. The fact that international sports organizations were largely based on national federations led to conflicts over the recognition of individual associations before 1914 and to the temporary exclusion of the defeated nations of the First World War from international sports after 1918. In addition, "national teams" became representatives of their countries, leading to both manifestations of international friendship and symbolic resolutions of political conflicts.⁶ Other aspects of politicization included the emergence of ideologically driven international sports organizations and the propagandistic staging of major international sports events by fascist regimes (such as the 1934 football World Cup in Italy and the 1936 Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin).⁷

The post-Second World War era was marked by the Cold War, which was symbolically played out on cinder tracks and sports fields, occasionally leading to boycotts of international sporting events.⁸ It also saw the expansion of international sporting organizations and their competitions to include the newly independent states of Asia and Africa in the wake of decolonization. As a result, the "international" aspect of transnational sport, which had previously been concentrated mainly in Europe and only a few non-European areas (predominantly populated by people of European extraction), increasingly diversified into a "global" aspect, characterized by East-West and North-South divides, and a "provincialized" European aspect. This shift was reflected in organizational structures, competitions, and perceptions of international sport.

Revival of the Olympic Games

The revival of the Olympic Games was a milestone in the internationalization of sport. It had various local or narrow national antecedents: From the 17th to the mid-19th century, the Cotswold Olympics were held at Chipping Campden, during the French Revolution there were the Olympiades de la République in Paris, from 1850 the Wenlock Olympian Games in Shropshire, and from 1866 the National Olympian Games took place in London. After Greek independence, "Olympics" as national Greek sporting events and commercial exhibitions were staged in Athens in 1859, 1870, 1875, and 1888/89. The archaeological exploration of ancient Olympia in the 1870s gave significant impetus to the idea of reviving the Olympic Games on an international scale. In 1894, the French educator and historian Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937)[] founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which initially had a strongly aristocratic character, and organized the first Olympic Games of modern times in Athens in 1896. Coubertin's guiding principles were the reconciliation of nations through sport, the pursuit of records as a symbol of social progress, and amateurism.⁹

After the premiere, the next Games were held in Paris in 1900 on the occasion of the World Exhibition, then for the first time outside Europe in 1904 in St. Louis. In 1906, "Intermediate Games" were held in Athens on the tenth anniversary, followed by the Games in London in 1908 and in Stockholm in 1912, while the Games planned for Berlin in 1916 could not be held because of the war. The first Games of the modern era were attended by 241 (all male) athletes from eleven European countries as well as the USA, Chile, and Australia. By 1912, there were already 2,407 athletes (including 48 women) from 21 European countries as well as the USA, Canada, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Egypt, and Japan. Women remained largely excluded and were admitted to only a few disciplines (tennis and golf) in 1900. The strict amateur principle also effectively excluded members of the lower social classes, who could not afford to take several weeks off work without pay. In the same way, members of colonized peoples remained largely excluded. At the 1904 Games, there were even "anthropological days" outside the official program, in which – in the style of the colonial racist Völkerschauen – indigenous people from North America, Argentina, Central Africa, Japan, and the Philippines competed (without appropriate training) in various athletic disciplines. The organizers’ declared aim was to prove that the "white race" was not only intellectually superior, as was generally assumed at the time, but also physically at the top rung of humanity.

The first Olympic Games of the interwar period in 1920 in Antwerp exhibited the consequences of the First World War, as the defeated nations were barred from participating.¹⁰ In Germany, this led to the first “Deutsche Kampfspiele" (German Combat Games) in 1922, a kind of nationalistic counter-Olympics. Russia had abandoned "bourgeois" sports after the October Revolution. On the other hand, in acknowledgement of its contribution to the Allied war effort, British India was allowed to enter its own team for the first time. In 1924, the first Winter Olympics were held in Chamonix. By the 1936 Summer Games, participation had grown to 3,961 athletes (including 328 women) from 28 European and 12 North and South American countries, as well as Japan, China, the Philippines, British India, Afghanistan, Egypt, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

After the Nazi orchestration of the 1936 Winter and especially Summer Games and the war-related cancellation of the 1940 Games in Sapporo and Tokyo, the Olympic movement resumed in 1948 with the Games in St. Moritz and London. This period also saw the Soviet Union join the Olympic movement, which also transformed as part of the Cold War dynamic.¹¹ Over the next four decades, the two superpowers would compete neck-and-neck at the top of the Olympic medal count. The number of Asian and African teams also increased. The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), organized as an alternative to the Olympic Games in Jakarta in 1963 and in Phnom Penh in 1966, did not manage to establish themselves permanently.¹² On the other hand, African sports federations succeeded in excluding the apartheid states of South Africa (1964) and Rhodesia (1972) from the Olympic Games.

International sports federations, regulations, and championships

The creation of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) coincided with the formation of numerous international federations for individual sports, including ice skating in 1892, cycling in 1892/1900, soccer in 1904, ice hockey in 1908, skiing in 1910, and athletics in 1912. These federations monopolized international sports involvement in their respective disciplines, the standardization of rulebooks, and the organization of world and European championships (sometimes in a peculiar mix of cooperation with and competition against the IOC). Typically, they recognized only one member federation per country, thereby attempting to unify the sports structures within each nation. In some disciplines, the first international championships were held at the turn of the century; for example, the first world championships in figure skating occurred in 1896 in St. Petersburg.

The development of an international sports organization up to the mid-20th century can be briefly outlined using the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) as an example:¹³ FIFA was founded in 1904 by seven exclusively continental European national associations. The English Football Association (FA), which considered itself the leading body, did not even respond to the invitation to the founding meeting. By 1914, FIFA's membership had grown to 24, with the first non-European members being South Africa in 1910 and Argentina, Chile and Canada in 1912. From the beginning, there was a vision of a major international tournament, but initially it did not materialize. Instead, FIFA decided to recognize the winners of the Olympic football tournaments as amateur world champions. Because of conflicts over amateurism and the status of the Bohemian Football Association – which was admitted to FIFA in 1906 but expelled two years later under pressure from Austria and Germany – a rival organization, the Union Internationale Amateur de Football Association (UIAFA), existed briefly. In 1911, the UIAFA organized a European championship which included teams from Bohemia, England, and France.

The ultimate authority on the rules remained largely in British hands.¹⁴ They were established by the FA in 1863 and had prevailed over the years in Great Britain against various competing sets of rules. In the run up to a tournament between their national teams in 1882, the football associations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland formed the International Football Association Board (IFAB), which was to be the sole authority on rule changes. FIFA recognized the supremacy of the IFAB in matters of rules and was represented on the board from 1913. Nonetheless, it had only two of the ten members until 1958.

After a significant decline during the First World War, FIFA began to quickly grow again after 1918. By 1924, it already had 35 member associations, and a decade later the number had risen to 44. But even in the inter-war period, there were still prominent non-members in Europe. The associations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland withdrew from FIFA in 1920, believing that FIFA was not taking a hard enough line against associations that violated the ban on playing the war’s losers. The British returned to FIFA in 1924, but departed again four years later due to disputes over professionalism. The Soviet Union stayed away for ideological reasons. In the 1920s, the most important international competition was the Olympic football tournament. From modest beginnings, it grew into an unofficial world and European championship. In the first post-war tournament in 1920, 14 teams participated; in 1924, the number rose to 22. In 1928, when the losers of the war were allowed to compete again, 17 teams took part. The first post-war tournament, in which Egypt was the first non-European team to participate, was won by Belgium, but European dominance ended in 1924 and 1928. Both tournaments were won by Uruguay, whose dark-skinned star José Leandro Andrade (1901–1957), the son of a former slave, was regarded by the European public with a mixture of exoticism and thinly disguised racism.

Despite its expansion, FIFA's organizational structures remained modest and were largely confined to continental Europe. Even in the early 1930s, FIFA had no full-time staff and no permanent administrative headquarters; it was largely run by an honorary secretary general. His financial speculations brought the organization to the brink of ruin with the onset of the Great Depression, prompting a degree of professionalization in 1931. With the appointment of the German Ivo Schricker (1877–1962), FIFA employed its first full-time secretary general, who set up a small office in Zurich. The association's financial base remained limited. Its main sources of income were membership fees from national associations and a one percent levy on the gate receipts of international matches. In the 1930s, more than a hundred international matches a year guaranteed FIFA a relatively stable income, but during the Second World War it faced serious financial difficulties. At the helm of the association was a voluntary president, supported by an executive committee that consisted almost exclusively of Europeans. The committee met every few months to discuss the most pressing matters of the day. Fundamental issues were decided by the bi-annual congress, in which all member associations were represented.

FIFA's leadership tried to keep political influences as far away from the association as possible, though they were not always successful. FIFA remained heavily dominated by Europe. The "other continent" of America, however, organized the first World Cup in Montevideo in 1930, which received little attention in Europe. Although the hosts invited about 50 countries, only nine teams from Latin and North America and four from Europe accepted the invitation. Moreover, in South America, the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (CONMEBOL) had been founded in 1916 due to the turmoil of the war in Europe, which would later become a model for other continental associations after the Second World War. Beginning in 1938, South Americans were given a permanent place on the executive committee. With the two World Cups in 1934 in Italy and 1938 in France, as well as the two "FIFA Matches" in 1937 (Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe) and 1938 (Continental Europe vs. England), FIFA organized major events that contributed to the further development of the game in Europe. In the 1934 World Cup, of the 16 participating teams, twelve were from Europe and three from the Americas, plus Egypt. Four years later, twelve European teams, two from the Americas, and the Dutch East Indies participated.

After 1945, the structure of FIFA underwent significant changes. The start of decolonization increased the number of non-European members. Questions about a new composition of the committees emerged with the return of the British associations, while the entry of the Soviet Union in 1947 created a strong Eastern Bloc faction within FIFA. Against this backdrop, debates began about a reorganization along the lines of "continentalization." This structure would interpose continental associations between FIFA and its member countries, which would determine the composition of FIFA's committees. This idea came to fruition in 1953/54 through an alliance between the South Americans with their decades-old continental confederation and the Western Europeans. The latter wanted to prevent the institutionalization of a Soviet bloc within FIFA, which, together with the newly decolonized states, threatened to dominate the older football nations. Until the last quarter of the 20th century, Europe continued to dominate the allocation of World Cup places, and FIFA did not organize women's tournaments.¹⁵ One consequence of "continentalization" was the formation of a European group within FIFA in 1954 and, in the same year, the establishment of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).¹⁶ With its membership extending across the Iron Curtain, UEFA was a clear exception in the European integration efforts of the 1950s. The key to UEFA's rapid independence from FIFA in its formative years was the introduction of European tournaments: The European Cup for Champion Clubs, launched in 1955 at the urging of sports journalists, the European Cup of Nations, started for the first time in 1958 as a precursor to the European Championship, and the European Cup Winners' Cup, which began in 1960, led to the stabilization of international European football competitions. These tournaments enabled UEFA to independently promote its activities, especially in the rapidly growing field of television broadcasting.

Ideological sports organizations and their international events

In contrast to and in competition with the IOC and the international sports federations, which considered themselves politically and ideologically "neutral" (although this did not exclude politically motivated boycotts against member countries), a number of explicitly ideologically determined international sports organizations emerged before and immediately after the First World War. As a consequence, corresponding movements were built up in individual countries. In 1911, the Union Internationale des Oeuvres Catholiques d'Education Physique was founded, followed two years later by the International Socialist Association for Sports and Physical Culture.

Reflecting the split in the labor movement after the First World War, two competing umbrella organizations appeared in the sports arm of the labor movement. In 1920, the Socialist Workers' Sport International (SASI) was founded in Lucerne, and in 1921, the Red Sport International (RSI) was founded at the third Comintern Congress in Moscow.¹⁷ Initially, the SASI positioned itself as "neutral" among the conflicting currents of the labor movement, but became increasingly aligned with Social Democracy. At its peak in the early 1930s, it had 1.8 million members, about two-thirds of them in Germany. The fascist dissolution of its largest national sections in Germany and Austria in 1933-34 led to a decline and dormancy of its activities during the Second World War. In 1946, the SASI was revived in the form of the International Workers & Amateurs Sports Confederation (CSIT). The RSI sought to build a proletarian revolutionary sports movement as an alternative to the existing structures of international sport. Its relationship with the SASI followed the Comintern's shifting strategies in dealing with non-communist workers' organizations. At its peak in 1931, the RSI had some 280,000 members outside the Soviet Union. It was disbanded in 1937 in accordance with the Popular Front strategy.

In 1925, the SASI organized the first Workers' Olympics in Schreiberhau (winter) and Frankfurt (summer)[]; this was followed in 1931 by the Workers' Olympics at Mürzzuschlag and Semmering (winter) and Vienna (summer). The event in "Red Vienna" was not only the highlight in the history of the workers' sports movement with 25,000 participating athletes from 17 countries and competitions in 117 disciplines, but it was also the largest international sports event to date[].¹⁸ From 1932 to 1934 there was a European Workers' Football Championship, and the last Workers' Olympics were held in 1937 in Janské Lázně (winter) and Antwerp (summer). The Workers' Olympics were not just sports events, but also included extensive cultural programs and large demonstrations for peace, international friendship, and socialism[]. For example, in 1931 there was a mass festival play with 3,000 participants depicting the development of the workers' movement and the collapse of capitalism, as well as a five-hour torchlight procession "For World Disarmament and General Peace" with 100,000 people on Vienna's Ringstrasse.

The RSI organized international Spartakiads in 1928 in Oslo (winter) and Moscow (summer).¹⁹ The second edition was supposed to be held in Berlin in 1931, just before the Vienna Workers' Olympics, but was banned by the police and could only be carried out partially in secret. The RSI then planned a major World Spartakiad in Moscow for 1933, for which the largest sports facility in the world was to be built. However, it was repeatedly postponed because of organizational problems and finally canceled.²⁰ A workers' football world championship to be held in Moscow in 1936 also failed to materialize. On the other hand, that same year, a second international Winter Spartakiad was staged in Oslo.

In 1934-35, the Comintern shifted its stance in response to the global fascist threat. It reversed its position on the Social Democrats, previously labeled "social fascists," and adopted the popular front strategy of cooperation between Communists, Social Democrats, and the democratic bourgeoisie. In 1934, the first major anti-fascist workers' sports event, attended by both Communists and Social Democrats, took place in Paris, featuring a multi-day meeting with a large parade.²¹ In 1937, the RSI – recently and secretly dissolved by the Comintern Presidium – and the Soviet Union participated in the SASI's Workers' Olympics in Antwerp. With the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 these collaborations abruptly came to an end.

In 1921, at the 12th Zionist Congress, the Maccabi World Union was founded. It united various organizations of the Zionist Maccabi movement, which had developed since 1898 inspired by Max Nordau (1849–1923), whose concept of "muscle Judaism" aimed at preparing the "new" Jewish people for the settlement of Palestine. In 1929, the European Maccabi Games were held in Prague, and in 1932, the pre-war concept of "Jewish Olympics" was realized with the organization of the first Maccabiah in Tel Aviv, in the British Mandate of Palestine.²² Some 390 athletes from 18 countries competed in 16 events. The second Maccabiah was again held in Tel Aviv in 1935. This time, 1,350 athletes from 28 countries participated. Ignoring a ban by the British authorities, who feared provoking the Arab population, the opening parade marched through the streets of Tel Aviv, and after the games, despite an immigration ban, many athletes remained in Palestine, including almost the entire 350-member Bulgarian delegation. Fearing a repeat of these events, the British authorities subsequently banned the third Maccabiah planned for 1938. The first Maccabiah Games in the newly established State of Israel were held in 1950.

International Tournaments and Competitions, Protests, and Special Events

Not all international sporting events were organized by the international federations themselves. Since the Belle Époque, there have been numerous events organized by local or national sports organizations, newspapers, or various commercial organizers. Notable examples from before 1914 include a series of football tournaments in Turin, sometimes considered the forerunners of the World Cup. The 1908 Torneo Internazionale Stampa Sportiva and the 1909 and 1911 Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy featured competitions between Italian, British, Swiss, German, and French teams. In cycling, the newspaper L'Auto organized the first Tour de France in 1903, followed six years later by the Gazetta dello Sport with the first Giro d'Italia.

In 1923, the first Spengler Cup took place in Davos, marking the first major ice hockey tournament with German participation since the First World War. It was explicitly conceived as an event to reconcile the formerly hostile nations. Already by the turn of the century, top ice hockey teams, including those from Berlin and London, had regularly come to Davos. In the early 1920s, efforts were made to revive this tradition in the service of international understanding and to promote tourism. Thus, the first Spengler Cup invited teams from formerly warring countries, including the University of Oxford team, the Berlin Schlittschuh-Club, and a Viennese team. This policy was continued in the following years.²³

The professionalization of top-tier football in several Central European countries in the 1920s and the need to generate spectator income led to the creation of two Central European competitions in 1927: the Mitropa Cup for club teams and the Coupe Internationale Européenne for national teams.²⁴ The driving force behind these early antecedents of the competitions organized by UEFA after the mid-century was the Austrian association secretary Hugo Meisl (1881–1937)[]. The Mitropa Cup started with teams from Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia; later teams from Italy, Switzerland, and Romania were added. The top matches attracted to the stadiums up to 100,000 spectators. The Coupe Internationale Européenne was played four times from 1927 to 1938 in a league system between the national teams of Hungary, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland. The one-time Coupe des Nations, held in the summer of 1930 in Geneva to inaugurate the new Charmilles Stadium and featuring eight top European clubs, overshadowed the upcoming World Cup in Montevideo in the European media.

The politicization of central international events of "non-political" sports federations by the regimes of the host countries in the 1930s also led to counter-movements. Within the context of the anti-fascist workers' sports meeting in Paris in 1934, a tournament was held that was declared the "Workers' Football World Cup" and explicitly directed against the FIFA World Cup in Italy. Two years later, leftist circles in Catalonia planned the Olimpiada Popular in Barcelona, supported by SASI and RSI. It protested the exploitation of the Summer Olympics by Nazi propaganda after the largely unsuccessful international boycott campaign.²⁵ This counter-event, however, could not take place due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Since the 1920s, international sports competitions had been held to protest the widespread exclusion of women from the Olympic Games – they were only allowed to compete in golf, tennis, archery, swimming, and figure skating.²⁶ In 1921, the "First Women's Olympic Games" were staged in Monte Carlo. In the same year, the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale was founded, which existed until 1936 and organized the Women's World Games four times between 1922 and 1934. Pressure from these events led the IOC to allow women's athletics in the 1928 Olympic Games.

Various special international competitions were also established from the 1920s onwards. In university sports, the Confédération Internationale des Étudiants, founded in 1919, organized various international events during the interwar period. During the early Cold War, Eastern Europe and the West had competing events until the International University Sports Federation (FISU) successfully organized the World University Games from 1959. In sports for disabled athletes, the International Games for the Deaf (known as the Deaflympics since 2001) have been held regularly since 1924. The first Stoke Mandeville Games for the Paralyzed were staged in 1948, leading to the creation of the Paralympics in 1960. In 1968, the first Special Olympics for people with mental disabilities took place. It was initiated by Eunice Shriver (1921–2009), a sister of John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), following the disability of her sister Rosemary (1918–2005) due to a lobotomy. In military sports, the "Inter-Allied Games" were held in Paris in the summer of 1919, a kind of celebratory sports event marking the end of the world war. The games followed the Olympic program, but were open only to war participants from the victorious powers and their allies.²⁷ In 1948, the Conseil International du Sport Militaire (CISM) was established and began organizing military world championships in various disciplines. In 1958, the only special international sports organization of the Eastern Bloc was created, the Sports Committee of the Friendly Armies, which organized the Spartakiads of Friendly Armies.

After the predominantly European origins of international sport in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the mid-20th century thus witnessed a globalization of both the structure and functioning of international sports organizations and major sporting events against the backdrop of the Cold War and decolonization. As a result of this development, Europe became provincialized within the larger global sport system, assuming a standing of one continent among others.

Christian Koller