Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s.

Gorman, Daniel

Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s, by Barbara J. Keys. Harvard Historical Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2006. xiv, 274 pp. $52.92 US (cloth).

While it is no longer true that diplomatic history focuses solely on the memoranda of foreign ministries or the to and fro of treaty negotiations, it has nonetheless proved difficult to successfully redefine a historical field that once took its importance for granted. The end of the Cold War removed the discipline's organizing principle, leaving its practitioners to search for a new role. Some have returned to traditional narrative history, combining political detail with character sketches and a novelist's eye for recreating the "feel" of an era, and forgoing explicit analysis of their material. Popular recent examples of this trend include Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919 and Adam Zamoyski's Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna.

More innovatively, others have incorporated developments from other scholarly fields into their work, notably internationalism and cultural history. Like most such "turns" in historiography, the recent attention to culture is not really new. Cultural historians have set themselves a broad remit, examining both community and social identities previously the purview of social historians and the various and sundry ways individuals and communities have constructed meaning out of their existence. Memory has become a popular topic here, but cultural history is an elastic concept, and diplomatic historians have used it to understand better both how political decisions were made (what political scientists term constructivism), and how they were received and interpreted by various constituencies. Sport as a medium of such cultural transmission has proved a particularly fruitful topic for diplomatic historians, providing as it does a nexus of nationalism, international rivalry, public spectacle, and cultural activity. This nexus is the subject of Barbara Keys's innovative Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s.

Keys's thesis is that international sport functioned as a locus of national identity in the transnational context of the interwar period. Like one of her inspirations, Akira Iriye's Global Community, Keys invokes globality in her title, but in reality portrays a process of internationalization. The book is better for this tighter focus, revealing that despite the dead hand of nationalism in interwar politics, the process of internationalization, begun in many fields in the late nineteenth century, continued. She reveals how sport itself became internationalized, and how the appearance of an international sporting governance structure in the 1920s and 1930s reflected a broader coalescence of international governance across many political and cultural fields. Keys begins by describing the rise of "physical culture" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, drawing on sociological concepts of space and the body. As the British "games ethic" began to supercede older, more individually focused, fitness phenomena such as Turnen, the German gymnastics system, sport became a portable cultural commodity. The result was the creation of mass international sporting competitions and the codification of standardized rules and regulations. The balance of the book shows how this transition defined international sport, and contributed to international politics, in the first half of the twentieth century. Chapters assess the framework of international sporting organizations set up before World War I (notably Pierre de Coubertin's International Olympic Committee and FIFA, international soccers governing body), the "Americanization" of international sporting culture, and case studies of the 1932 Los Angeles and 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the 1938 Joe Louis-Max Schmeling boxing match, and the Soviet Union's belated engagement with international sport in the 1930s. Keys focuses throughout mainly on track and field, boxing, and soccer, the first sports to become internationalized.

While Keys's stated topic is the internationalization of sport, the book largely "reads" sport as a canvas upon which political processes were projected. This is certainly one important, and, for the diplomatic historian, perhaps the most important, aspect of sport, but it is not why most people participate in or watch sporting events. It is also important to convey the physical essence of sport--it is above all something people "do." This is difficult for historians to assess, but we need to try, lest sport become "flattened" as simply another plane of experience upon which we map gender, racial, class, national, and other identities. Sport is also play, self-fulfillment, and physical satisfaction. It can provide for camaraderie, it has aesthetic virtues, and it is a vehicle for both community identities (see for example Patrick Harrigan's The Detroit Tigers: Club and Community, 1945-1995) and supra-state identities (see J.A. Mangans or Patrick McDevitt's work on sport and the British Empire), in addition to the national identities Keys details. Social historians' now generations-old injunction to reincorporate agency and experience into the study of what people did in the past has as much to offer the diplomatic historian as does cultural history. One imagines a work of international history that combines each of these approaches.

Keys draws on English, German, and Russian sources, a testament to this book's strengths as comparative history. She might have more effectively employed official records to show how politicians and policy-makers used or viewed sport as a political tool. The links she draws between the two are often circumstantial, though no less credible for that. There is also some repetition from chapter to chapter--we are told several times, for instance, that the standardization of rules helped sport internationalize. Here we come to a perennial difficulty for the historian of ideas or cultural processes: do such ideas or processes cause, or result from, exogenous factors? In Keys's case, greater attention to the history of sport itself might clarify whether rule standardization, for instance, preceded or resulted from political internationalization, or whether international sporting exchanges inspired, or followed in the wake of, other forms of international cooperation. These are all minor cavils, however, the sort produced by a strong and engaging argument. International history rewards ambition, and if such reach produces lacunae, it is more than compensated for by the new insights such work brings. Globalizing Sport is such an ambitious work. It is an exemplary example of the "new diplomatic history," and will provide inspiration for scholars seeking to incorporate cultural history into the study of international affairs.

Daniel Gorman

University of Waterloo