ABSTRACT
An increasing body of literature, both academic and ‘everyday’, argues that sport, and particularly the reporting of sport, plays an important role in ‘building’ nations, nation-states and national identities. I argue in this chapter that sport, particularly through the narration of international sporting events, shapes concepts (nation, national identity, nation-state and ultimately the inter-state structure) that construct the ‘inter-state worldview’2 – a dominant portrayal of how the political world is cartographically and socially/politically divided into competing states. This worldview is presented as being natural, commonsensical, civilized, modern (yet with historical antecedents) and the only feasible way of ordering political communities, in which the nation-state is often accorded quasi-sacred status. I argue further that such a picture, although questioned occasionally, remains as Cynthia Weber might argue, ‘essentially uncontested’,3 thereby excluding the articulation of alternative ideas of how to organize global political life. This is true throughout academia, where the inter-state worldview and its component parts have mainly been portrayed in an unquestioning manner.
