ABSTRACT
A shared sense of history binds the people of any nation together. Nationalism, after all, is fascism’s underpinning ideology. National identities, in turn, will include some of the following shared characteristics: language, religion, culture, a sense of history, a desire for sovereign statehood, and a territorial claim, and so on. The one thing that people can be certain about when considering the historical relationship between sport and nationalism is that sport, like nationalism, is imprecise and contingent and varies greatly according to time period and geographical location. The features of sport that make it a suitable vector for nationalism are easy enough to recognize. Sport is ritualistic and is thus easily embedded in national traditions. The relationship between sport and nationalism had its first flourish in the early nineteenth century and had both political and cultural origins. The dominant model eventually adopted in international sport was contests between teams representing nation states rather than nations per se.
