‘Sporting citizenship’: the rebirth of religion?

Abstract

This paper considers the social significance and interaction between sport and the allied themes of citizenship, civic identity and social control in contemporary Britain. It is set against a backdrop of an emerging cosmopolitanism and politics of difference and is posed in response to renewed interest in notions of ‘Britishness’, ‘nationhood’ and ‘shared national identity’. In the context of the forthcoming 2012 London Olympic Games, the paper challenges the use of ‘sporting citizenship’ as a pedagogical device intended to rekindle notions of ‘civic patriotism’ and social cohesion across communities nationwide. The analysis questions the role of sport as a panacea for the perceived ills of society and means of social control, and further considers the extent to which the state pedagogy of ‘sporting citizenship’ can be conceived as the rebirth of a folk‐religion. Finally, the paper critically considers the implications of renewed ‘faith’ in sport as part of the Olympic legacy, post 2012.

Keywords:

• sport
• citizenship
• civic identity
• patriotism
• ‘Britishness’
• social pedagogy

Acknowledgements

Along with the two anonymous referees, I would like to thank Professor Heather Piper for her advice and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. Here, the confusion and conflation lay in the Government’s alignment of state citizenship with Britishness. However, when British number one tennis player Andrew Murray proclaimed: ‘I’m Scottish and I’m proud of it’ (summer 2007) or alternatively, ‘I am Scottish, but also British’ (Hodgkinson 2008), the notion of imputed Britishness, conflated with national identity, was effectively inverted. The salient point is that British identity can neither be imposed nor engineered by the state.

2. See Garratt and Piper (2003) for an account of the tensions between citizenship and subjecthood in the context of the British monarchy.

3. The term heterotopia has been coined by Foucault (1967) in connection with the definition and analysis of public spaces. It is a metaphor of dispersion and juxtaposition, to denote sites with no ‘real’ place: a simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.

4. A simulacrum is a copy without an original; in this case ‘nationhood’ is constructed as a ‘hyper‐real’ concept, a chimera attempting to recoup a lost‐cognition which is interminably deferred.