Sport in modern Europe: creating a comparative history, c. 1880-1990

Is it possible to speak of a 'European model' of sport in the way we can of a British or American one? Is there a distinctive cluster of activities, practices and values we can call 'European' or is Europe just too diverse to have a common sporting culture? There are good histories of the economy, society and politics of Europe but far less on cultural aspects such as sport or popular music. There is, for example, no authoritative general history of sport in Europe in any language. Yet sport is arguably the most important shared form of popular culture across Europe. Our research network will address this striking gap in the cultural and political history of Europe.
Surprisingly, even the bare bones of the remarkable story of European sport remain largely untold. There is a growing body of serious historical research on sport, but it remains firmly fixed within national frameworks. The common themes as well as the different research agendas of Scandinavian, French, German and Italian sport scholarship, for example, are not apparent. There is a critical mass of research but it has not yet been reviewed, evaluated and advanced. Histories of sport in Europe are largely histories of a particular sport in a local, regional or national context. The study of European sport is further split in two ways: (a) in terms of approach and method; this division has been largely between history and social science, notably sociology and cultural studies; (b) from the institutional perspective between those working in specialised departments of sport and physical education and those outside 'sports studies'. The network will create a forum for exchanges between different nations, different disciplinary perspectives and traditions and different institutional affiliations. The organisers have identified leading subject and area specialists covering most of Europe (including Russia) from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, and aim to explore this topic and disseminate their discussions widely in electronic and conventional published forms.
A core group of network members will meet regularly to steer the activities of the network throughout its three phases, and to facilitate the symposia that provide the culmination of each phase. The focus of the first phase will be to establish the broad traditions of interpretation and historiography which form the basis for the current state of knowledge. This will include considering the category of 'Europe' itself, in historical, geographical, political and economic terms, and establishing its distinctiveness with reference to the British, American and other models of sport.
In its second phase, the network will consider how, from its roots in Britain, organised sport spread rapidly across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The cultural transmission of British sport was subject to both supplementation (e.g. cycle racing, volleyball, handball) and to appropriation by the nation-states of Europe, especially in the interwar period where there was a conjuncture between the democratising of sport and the emergence of totalitarian ideologies and regimes of left and right. This second phase, and its accompanying symposium, will illuminate these patterns of diffusion and ideology in European sport, with special reference to the use of sport by Fascist regimes.
The third phase examines post-war European sport in terms of the political division of Europe, the rising affluence and patterns of leisure consumption in Western Europe, the influence of European integration of sport, and the impact of global media and commercialization. In these contexts, it will explore the tension between the preservation of distinctive national cultures and pressures for convergence.
In these three phases, the network will establish the foundations for the writing of a comprehensive study of sport in Europe.