ABSTRACT
The Olympic Movement was one of the most significant ‘invented traditions’ of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it remains the pre-eminent international cultural movement in global society as the authors enter the twenty-first century. It has been connected with processes of nation-building and internationalization since the early twentieth century, and is currently associated with processes of globalization. As an international cultural arena it has often been connected, both positively and negatively, with the politics of national identity, citizenship and rights. The Olympics pose a number of problems for the mainstream sociological analysis of citizenship which has derived from Marshall. A comprehensive analysis of the implications of the Olympics for citizenship would in principle need to address each of these levels – urban citizenship, national citizenship and ‘global citizenship’, together with their interconnections.
