‘Over the border and the gates’? Global and transnational sport¹

¹Dylan Thomas, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, Collected Poems 1934–1952, London: J M Dent, 1959, p. 102.

In his introduction to a Sport in Society special issue, about a decade ago, Klein (2007) warned fellow sport studies scholars against misdirecting their energy towards winning recognition for their work from the respective parent disciplines. Only within two disciplines, he contended, could case studies from the world of sport receive more respect than they were usually accorded – studies of gender and globalization. Incidentally, earlier that year, Giulianotti and Robertson (2007) edited a special issue for the journal Global Networks, assembling ‘leading mainstream scholars’ to examine, with a focus on sport, the new angle of globalization studies – transnational history. Transnational networks are hardly any new and unnoticed progeny of global connections. Concepts such as the Atlantic Empire, the British World and Overseas History have been around for a century, but the range of entanglements that underwrote these histories, set up by agents as diverse as navigation companies and touring sportspersons, have only started to be explored in the last few decades (Bridge and Fedorowich 2003). Although scholars have lamented the dearth of ‘the trans-national (as opposed to international) treatment’ for sports in Europe (Young, Hilbrenner, and Tomlinson 2011), compared to other disciplines, a global turn flourished early in sport studies, probably due to the inherently international nature of sport.

The global ‘diffusion’ of sporting ideals, the nation’s role in international competitions, sport and diplomacy, development of mega-events (World Cups) and recurring tournaments (Tennis Opens), international sport administration, media coverage and finally, migration of elite athletes have drawn substantial scholarly attention since the 1980s (Taylor 2013a). The concepts of ‘flows’ and ‘boundaries’, so integral to the recent debates on global and transnational history, have found its way into sport studies since the beginning of the 2000s (Maguire 1999, 2005; Millward 2011; Rowe 2011). Nearly all of these works dwell on the contemporary landscape of sport, and only a few examine the beginning of sport’s ‘globality’ from a long-term perspective (Bale and Maguire 1994; Dyreson 2003; Keys 2003; Taylor 2006, 2013b; Huggins 2009; Collins 2013). On the contrary, quite a few studies on circulation and appropriation of sport to have not used any of these frameworks (Odendaal 1988; Hibbins 1989; Nandy 1989) can yet be considered as the precursor to the recent output due to thematic similarity. This lack of a theoretical approach to long-term history, except for among the articles from a Journal of Global History special issue, edited by Taylor (2013a), has restricted all theoretical flourish in studies of sport’s global issues to the realm of the recent.

Understandably what transpires at a sport event sometimes takes a backseat to its mediated meanings, which is particularly true for transferred codes. This is where the process, which implies a flow of events in time, is prioritized over anything that is fixed in time. The importance of studying single moments in the process cannot be overridden, especially as it is a chain of moments/events that empirically supports any process. Most of the research on sporting transnationalism have been informed by events and not processes. Despite the comparatively recent emergence of this analytical method and short-term structuring of research questions, the historiography of studying sport from a transnational perspective is surprisingly diverse. This is particularly evidenced in the outpour of research on athlete migration, which has received by far the maximum attention (Maguire and Pearton 2000; Maguire and Falcous 2010; Carter 2011; Agergaard and Tiesler 2014). Transnational fandom too has been a popular topic, with research involving actors and dynamics as diverse as English football clubs in Norway (Hognestad 2006), European football in Nigeria (Onwumechili and Oloruntola 2014), Italians settled in Sydney (Ricatti and Klugman 2013), South American migrants in Spain (Müller 2014), marketing a local team to Lusophone migrants in America (Moniz 2007) and local fans’ response to foreign owners (Bi 2015).

The eight articles in this volume take a step towards bridging the worlds of history, sociology and international relations. They cumulatively explore more than 150 years of the development of several modern sports – baseball, basketball, cricket, football, handball, ice hockey and lacrosse – across the two Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe, some analysing a century of events since the mid-nineteenth century and some only a few years in the very present. The sheer variety and compositeness of scopes and methods among what is a relatively small collection of articles delimit some of the hitherto vague perimeters of the theories of sporting globalization. They avoid being over-determined by either the nation state or the connected world as the substantive core around which human society is ordered. They respond to, in varying degrees, the assumptions of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ (Beck 2002) and ‘methodological glocalism’ (Giulianotti and Klauser 2012). Beck’s (2002, 19) ideas of ‘the implosion of the dualism between the national and the international’ and ‘the incongruity of borders’ resonate with some of the articles, while others refer to existing hierarchies that defy the drive towards cosmopolitanism. Thus, the articles are rather invested in constructing stories of entanglements and convergences, from within and without the nation state, in which the national and the non-national are not mutually exclusive (Sassen 2000).

Events involving simultaneous action performed by multiple actors across several sites have periodically emerged from the crucible of theory as comparative, connected, international, world, global, transnational, transcultural, intercultural and many other, some quite obscure, sorts of history. These perspectives frequently overlap. The fan frenzy for David Beckham in China as a self-contained national phenomenon can be explained as global or international fandom. The diffusion of the Beckham ideal, defined by addition of charisma and glamour to sporting excellence, into the Chinese popular culture market is an example of transnational and transcultural dispersion of celebrity culture. At the same time, the Chinese experience can be contrasted and compared to any other spatial context for understanding appropriation from an intercultural perspective. In recognition of the plausible multiplicity of approaches towards analysing an event, it seems rather rewarding to consider these terms as complementary interpretative tools instead of as paradigms. The contributors to this volume have likewise integrated several approaches in their attempts to probe the complex connections constituted by networks, institutions, ideas and processes, considering geographically bounded, localized histories alongside transnational activities.

Global history is closely linked with globalization. Although it may not be actually ‘global’ in scope, it is a concept that examines particular regions connected by particular networks. Transnational history describes interconnectivity in a more qualified, specific way since the term global implies a ‘single system of connection’ and disregards the sheer diversity of the systems in interaction (Cooper 2001). Compared to international history, use of the term transnational generates ‘a sense of movement and interpenetration’ (Bayly et al. 2006, 1442). A transnational approach helps to track the movement of people and products at every recorded step (Clavin 2005). According to Isabel Hofmeyr (Bayly et al. 2006), movements, flows and circulation are not simply themes or motifs in transnational history, but are self-sufficient analytic methods which illuminate both historic events and processes at various spatial intersections. Nevertheless, the analytical methods of global history are much more complex than the universality the name suggests. In contrast with global history, existence of nations is a precondition for international and transnational history (Sachsenmaier 2011). Even though ‘cultural nations’ (Glatz 1993) may theoretically prevail over geopolitical nations in terms of global appeal, the latter are still undeniably important for organized sport (Polley 1998; Rowe 2003). Hence, the need for the umbrella term to be replaced by something that explicitly reflects, for instance, cross-border connections and yet does not deny nation states of their agency.

Colin Howell and Daryl Leeworthy’s article traces the parallel transfer of sports across the North Atlantic, destabilizing the British Isle’s position as the primary distribution centre of sport in the nineteenth century. They propose a borderlands approach, a concept well known in American history, as an alternative model for understanding asymmetric shifts from the periphery to the core. By no means do borderlands refer to a geographical boundary separating territories, neither is it the permeable membrane that allows diffusion to happen. It is more of a sieve that factors in the local circumstances of cultural exchange that underpin patterns of internationalization of sports. Based on a study of the transfer of lacrosse, a traditional tribal sport, and basketball, invented by a Canadian doctor, to Great Britain, the authors successfully repudiate the top-down approaches to sporting diffusion.

Britain’s importance in the diffusion narrative cannot be underestimated, but the agency of British actors in the process comes under scrutiny in Thomas Adam’s article. Adam investigates the transfer of football from English public schools to German and Argentine high schools, highlighting the significant modifications the game underwent due to the subjectivity of the personnel and methods of transfer, and the requirements of the receiving society. Football became indigenized in these countries to such an extent that its English origin disappeared in translation, almost denying the existence of any transfer as it happened. The study of Germany, in particular, illustrates the pitfall of applying common sense and taking the country of a sport’s origin as the nodal point of diffusion. In Germany, the person who masterminded the inclusion of football in the school curriculum had never travelled to England, and learnt about the game from German travelogues and the works of Thomas Hughes. Transplanted British people were instrumental in organizing football in South America, but a subsequent drive to enhance national identity led to a nationalist reinterpretation of the sport’s origin, thereby writing England out of the English game’s history. The internal development of the sport in Germany and Argentina followed different trajectories due to the circumstances of class and ideology, which again were quite different from how football evolved in Britain.

Even when the British did take the initiative to introduce sports to a country, the intention was not always justified by the outcome. As Christian Koller shows in his comparative analysis of the import of football and ice hockey to Switzerland by British students, tourists, and merchants and homecoming Swiss migrants, the sociocultural context determined the image and clientele of these sports. Football and ice hockey’s success story in Switzerland contradicts Maarten Van Bottenburg’s (2001) argument about the games stemming from German tradition having been more popular than English games in the German-speaking region. Despite the involvement of social elites in the propagation of the sports, local appropriation reinvented their nature. Football became the sport of the urban, working-class Swiss public, whereas ice hockey represented a rural, alpine Switzerland. Yet, unlike the cases of German and Argentine football, Swiss football and ice hockey retained British character and vocabulary, thereby manifesting another aspect of cultural transfer – selective appropriation, which is not necessarily resistance but rather reinscription.

The theme of reinscription is examined further by Souvik Naha in the context of cricket’s contested location in the Indian public sphere following the country’s independence from British rule. While cricket did never run short of followers, its practice continued to be opposed even half a century after the British left India as the sport retained its Englishness unlike football and hockey, which lost their foreign roots rather quickly. Naha tries to solve the conundrum by examining how journalists collectively transcribed cricket into an identifiable, transnational sport by selective translation of the game’s English discourses. This had arguably pitched cricket as a game of the leisured, disciplined, moral, elite class, which could be garbed as imperialist and capitalist. This was both cricket’s appeal and disgrace. The narrative of resolution, or rather the lack of it, of the transcultural dilemma apparently guided much of the mediation of Anglo-Indian rhetoric exchange, which the author analyses with reference to Bengali cricket writers.

Cultural brokering was not exclusively yoked to transfer of sport codes but could be seen in the realm of sport administration too, particularly during the massive reorganization of global sport bodies after the Second World War. The article by Philippe Vonnard and Grégory Quin analyses the role played by South America in creating a geopolitically inclusive outlook among European football administrators, leading to the reorganization of FIFA and formation of UEFA as a representative European institution. The dialogues between South Americans and Europeans about governing a game invented in Europe, in which the former gradually prevailed over the latter, indicate what can be termed as a first wave of decolonizing Western sport. Grounded in the period of building international organization and cooperation, facilitated by new technology, these dialogues, occurring for about half a century across Europe and South America, bring out vividly the emergence of a connected, cosmopolitan bureaucratic hierarchy in world politics. The production of difference was no longer a prerogative of the modern West. The ‘rest’ could now exercise it, with the West consigned to adopting the perceived difference within its systems, just as the European administrations ordered themselves both in opposition and according to the knowledge produced in South America.

The next article, by Felix Jimenez, discusses the emergence of sport mega-events as a site of international activism against injustice. Whereas Vonnard and Quin talk about the balance of power within sport administration, Jimenez examines the interplay of power between sport/national administration and civil society. Human rights had become a watchword for post-war generations, which had found in sport a venue for protesting violation of humanity, such as the global protest against South Africa’s racial discrimination policy (Cornelissen 2011). Jimenez analyses the representation of the 1978 Football World Cup in the German media, demonstrating conflicting attitudes towards the ethical role of sport, flow of information from Argentina to Germany, international social movement’s (Anmesty) mobilization of sports as part of a ‘repertoire of collective action’, and the nexus between international sports and the global expansion of human rights in the 1970s.

The final two articles emphasize the contentious politics of immigration in the making of sporting cultures. Sine Agergaard’s article is about the impact of political opportunist coaches and journalists on immigrant East-European players in Danish women’s handball. It is difficult to understand what the best interests of a team are till the policy pays off. The insistence of coaches to disengage foreign players as a measure of developing domestic talent proved to be counterproductive, and efforts were made to reinstate those foreign players. However, more important to the story is the background of growing anti-immigrant sentiment in recession-hit Europe that largely informed the policy. Any effort to integrate foreign athletes being a far cry, the compulsive reactionary behaviour of administrators and its translation into public opinion by journalists expose the persistence of sacrosanct, fiercely protected national cultures even in these transnational times.

David Rowe further complicates this interplay of the local and the global by inspecting what the symbolic bond of sport mean to culturally and linguistically diverse immigrants looking to integrate into Australian society. On the one hand, contemporary sport, even quotidian and non-competitive, is increasingly becoming cosmopolitan; on the other hand, it does not cease to articulate the nation’s centrality to organizing and practising sport as part of daily life. Taking a cautionary position, Rowe delegates researchers the responsibility to read the context carefully before cantering into the tempting task of erasing borders. The interviews in his article reveal, if anything, that collective belonging is as fluid as movement and is always multi-oriented towards past and present, home and away, across tangible and intangible borders.

The nation’s importance to connected history is evident in some of the contributions to this volume. Howell and Leeworthy are sceptical about the location of boundary but cannot deny its existence. The articles by Agergaard and Rowe, respectively, examine the contrasting situation of the denial of cultural similitude to migrant athletes in Denmark and the drive towards self-assimilation of migrant professionals through participation in local sport in Australia. On the contrary, the nation takes an abstract form in Naha’s article. It acknowledges the transfer of cricket from England to India, but both the nations are more textual than corporeal. Geographical territory is replaced by an ideological plane in which the struggles over a cultural attribute of the contentious ‘English’ nation are played out. Nations are important for structuring international sport organizations, as Vonnard and Quin argue, but finally it is a global power elite which represents and bends nations to its will. Hence, placing the nation in a history of global encounters is tricky. The judgement about the superfluity or essentiality of a national scale should better be left to the context.

Actors stand perhaps ahead of the nation in the hierarchy of importance in cultural encounters. They too display agendas and characteristics which are hard to reconcile to any given theory. In contrast with the British connoisseurs whose promotion of public school sports during Swiss holidays is an example of the revolutionizing of the pattern of sport education in a non-colonial context, Germans brought football to their homeland almost without involving British personnel. Football flourished in Germany despite the country’s antagonism towards the British, so did cricket in postcolonial India. Cricket was played in Switzerland nearly as widely as football till the early twentieth century before inexplicably losing its footing, and almost disappearing after the Second World War. Evidently, the polyvalent nature of sport transfers speaks against a standard explanatory model of diffusion. Hence, the constellation of methodological viewpoints in this volume – Howell and Leeworthy’s borderlands approach, Adam’s theory of intercultural transfer, Naha’s emphasis on agents of encounters, Agergaard’s adoption of the theory of landscape of practice – prioritize reading the particularized context of action, rejecting the universalizing susceptibilities that global history perspectives occasionally succumb to. Jimenez’s article is a reminder of the peril of taking the global for granted while taking about international organizations and events, such as enlistment of sport mega-event as a site of resistance. Does the protest by Germans, partnered by Amnesty International, against domestic problems in Argentina, qualify as a global event? While it certainly does not in the scale of participation, the form of protest was institutionally anchored in an international media–sport–human rights discourse too deeply to be deglobalized. The ideational space of the protest was, hence, more global than the physical space.

Finally, the key features of this collection are how cultural elements are introduced to sport, how changes are perceived, how sporting practices and institutions can be defined at geopolitical and other levels, how we might conceptualize the perimeter of judging the national–transnational or the local–translocal paradigms, and how we could complicate the understanding of sport/knowledge transfer by ascribing different degrees of importance to origin, process, purpose, outcome, personnel and network. Though not too global in scale, the articles try to cover as much of the canvas it has been possible under restraints of number. The global, as has been pointed out repeatedly, can very well be seen from within the limits of a parochial commonplace.

Souvik Naha
Institute of History, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
[email protected]

Notes

¹ Dylan Thomas, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, Collected Poems 1934–1952, London: J M Dent, 1959, p. 102.