The Denationalization of Sport

The concept of denationalization was first used in the 1970s in economic studies as a synonym for privatization. For two decades, most of the articles in which the notion has been employed referred to the sale of State-owned companies. More recently, the concept has come to be used among others, such as deterritorialization, transnationalism, post-national, etc., as a means to circumvent ‘methodological nationalism’ or ‘state-centrism’ which has been dominant in the social sciences for many years. ¹ Neil Brenner has defined the latter approach as the tendency to conceptualize ‘space as a static platform of social action that is not itself constituted or modified socially’ and state territoriality ‘as a preconstituted, naturalized, or unchanged scale of analysis’. ² The increasing importance of phenomena such as the development of transnational corporations, the intensified deployment of information technologies, the advent of ‘a consciousness of the world as a whole’, ³ the formation of transnational communities of migrants, etc., has encouraged researchers to develop concepts allowing them to transcend the limits of state-centric based theories. As in the case of deterritorialization, latent in the notion of denationalization, there is the idea that the territoriality of state is an historical construction that is not the ‘natural’ container of economic, political or social life.