Sport, Statehood and Transition in Europe

Comparative perspectives from post-Soviet and post-socialist societies

Ekain Rojo-Labaien, Álvaro Rodríguez Díaz, Joel Rookwood, Ekain Rojo-Labaien, Álvaro Rodríguez Díaz, Joel Rookwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367500436
• eBook ISBN: 9781000065978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Políticas europeas

This book examines the political significance of sport and its importance for nation-state building and political and economic transition across thirteen post-Soviet and post-socialist countries, primarily located in Eastern Europe.

Adopting a critical case-study approach, building on historical and comparative frameworks, the book uses sport as a symbolic lens through which to examine the transition of Eastern European countries to the Western capitalist system. Covering a wide geographical area, from Poland to the Caucuses and Turkmenistan, it explores key themes such as nationalism, governance, power relations, political ideology, separatism, commercialisation and economic development, and the symbolic value of mega-events.

Sport, Statehood and Transition in Europe is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport policy, the politics of sport or political science.

1 Interpreting sport and transition in post-socialist and post-Soviet Europe

States, nations and markets

Álvaro Rodríguez-Díaz, Joel Rookwood and Ekain Rojo-Labaien

This book focuses on the nature, organisation, meaning and impact of sport in various ex-Soviet and ex-socialist countries of Europe. Our intention is to convey and interpret the transition and the present social, political and economic situation of these countries, viewed through the specific prism of sport. This is based on the dual premise that sport is inside society and society is inside sport. The nature of sport policy of each country, its organisation and application, adopts specific meanings that serve to differentiate the respective society. For some, the USSR represented a strong centralised state that brought together multiple internal nationalities and ethnic groups under a common culture based on Marxism-Leninism (MacClancy, 1996). Soviet sport, which was accessible across all demographic divisions, also served as an adhesive for uniting citizens of different nationalities. The promotion of sporting discipline was also used as a tool for demonstrating the superiority of the socialist system over its capitalist counterpart. In the Cold War the confrontations between the USSR and the USA were projected onto elite sport, and the ranking of medallists, reduced to competitions between countries, served as a metaphor for East/West rivalries (Riordan, 1977).

In 1990 there were nine socialist states in the European and Eurasian continent, which expanded to 24 following the fall of the Iron Curtain. Only five preserved their former frontiers. The breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia was the primary instigator of the shattering of those territories. The new European ‘jigsaw puzzle’ required a new geopolitics in which international relations were to become much more multilateral and uncertain. Some former socialist states, such as the Baltic countries, Poland and Romania, soon aligned themselves with the European Union (EU), embarking on a process of Europeanisation and Westernisation. At the same time, most former Soviet republics adopted political positions situated further to the east or in the Caucuses, maintaining their alliance with Moscow. In the post-Cold War period the two blocs were reorganised in a way that effectively coincided with the same bipolar criterion as to whether or not a country was a member of NATO. In that game of negotiation involving resistance and concessions, sport as a universal, popular and ‘relaxed’ narrative became an amicable instrument of diplomatic negotiation (Murray & Pigman, 2014).

Nearly all the new post-communist governments tried to direct their national projects according to Western criteria, democratising their political system and transferring the power of the state to the market, to a greater or lesser extent. The transitional decade of the 1990s proved particularly devastating for these governments, as they had to confront a double change: their political system towards democracy and their economy towards capitalism. In addition, the 15 former Soviet republics also had to socialise their citizens with a specific national identity in order to build a state that was rooted in society (Chatzigianni, 2018). To that end, they unpacked traditional symbols and applied a distinctive culture to varying degrees, disseminated through their genealogical language and, when applicable, underscoring their religious affiliation and difference.

The transition to capitalism was irregular and unequal, with legal gaps and overlaps that in the economic field served as a breeding ground for the oligarchic class, which arose thanks to the rushed privatisation of public companies, set in contrast to the generalised spread of poverty to varying degrees of severity. Of the scarce resources available, few were committed to organising popular leisure, which led to the reduction of public budgets which sport had enjoyed in the socialist era (Girginov, 1998). In a prioritisation of elite sporting success, the newly formed states did however continue to support their athletes in particular sports, following Soviet tradition in the process. This support was made on the understanding that international sporting success was an important symbol for strengthening the respective process of nation-state building.

Post-Soviet evolution was also a process of balkanisation or post-colonisation, interspersed with regional wars in which the Russian Federation intervened militarily, directly or indirectly, against some of the new republics opposed to Moscow. The justificatory motive centred on the defence of the rights (including on linguistic lines), of the excluded ethnic Russians in regions like Transnistria (Moldavia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Georgia) and Crimea and the Donbass (Ukraine). Other parallel conflicts were also apparent in this respect, including that of Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In addition, two wars were fought in Chechnya in the Russian Federation. In many cases these were religious struggles in another guise, signifying ethnic-cultural conflicts that broke out intermittently. The outbreak of war halted democratic and economic development in regions such as the Caucasus in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. The nature of sports policy, participation and performance were often impacted by such confrontations.

The processes of change in the former communist countries may not be considered strictly revolutionary as there was resistance to their respective integration into an open economy. As a result, the state often continued to hold a strong presence in many social organisations, including sporting institutions. Despite alterations to respective political regimes, the organisation of civil society remained largely unchanged in many cases. Consistency was also apparent in the moral forms of personal conduct, based on the values and norms of communist culture generationally rooted in the individual psyche, in what has been termed ‘Homo Post-Sovieticus’ (Greene, 2019: 181). For example, many senior sports officials who had been educated in the Soviet era continued to consider sport as subject to state monopoly. On the other hand, the need to achieve international success justified the important role played by public officials in sport management. Moreover, unlike Western countries, there was no tradition of private and independent sports clubs arising from social initiatives, which is why there was no solid counteroffer for socialisation in sport outside public tutelage. The absence of a broad middle class was another reason that prevented the formation of a network of sports clubs as an alternative to what the state offered.

The analysis of Hargreaves (1986), following the work of Antonio Gramsci, indicates that sports policies are often associated with dominant hegemonies. The supranational sporting organisations, the most powerful mass media and the upper echelons of political organisations helped build the ideologies which enabled the commercialisation of sport, to differing degrees. As a consequence of neoliberal processes, it was the major international (especially North American) corporations that financed contests and defined significant elite-level programmes (Donnelly, 1988). Clothing, fast food, videogame and telecommunications multinationals promoted the offer of top-level competitive sport according to their commercial interests. The market was linked to the political system of sport, at both the national and continental levels, and the majority of countries in Eastern Europe accepted that economic hegemony.

The neoliberal policies inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s came to fruition following the fall of the Berlin Wall, thus beginning a significant process of market globalisation. However, following the financial crisis of 2008 the economic power of the West weakened and its seemingly incessant progress slowed, while at the same time other Eastern countries, including former Soviet states, began to recover and show higher rates of growth than elements of the European Union and the USA. In the second decade of this century the unilateral world presided over by North America began to give way to an economic power centred more towards China (Downie, 2017), which together with Russia leads the common front of the five BRICS countries (Nayyar, 2016). The new geopolitics shaped a subsequent sporting geopolitics, in which hegemony in questions of top-level international competition shifted from the Anglo-American space to the Euro-Asiatic space, favouring a certain process of deglobalisation.

In various countries, sports mega events have also been used to legitimatise the central power and its leaders, who opted for sporting discourses based on ‘political persuasion’ (Tetlak, 2016: 115). The creation and hosting of lavish urban spectacles encountered limited opposition from local communities, and a lack of ‘reaction/resistance’ in contrast to the experiences in Western cities (Bélanger, 2009: 63). The autocratic control of some states, especially in the post-Soviet space, maintained a certain heritage of the communist sport model: statist, interventionist and aimed at high performance (Lankina et al., 2016). This model opened up a gap between elite and grassroots sport (Birchwood et al., 2008). In comparison to the West, the limited participation of civil society in government decision-making should be stressed. This was partly due to those citizens having inherited certain Soviet-Eastern features of subordination, such as the cult of the leader, in a social context that Marcuse termed ‘society without opposition’ (1991: 1). Those countries that as a collective did not want to be integrated into Western structures often maintained a regime with an authoritarian profile, which paradoxically could be categorised as a ‘democratically-elected dictatorship’. Question marks could be made against the degree to which such regimes should be considered genuinely democratic, however.

In general, the new nation-states that emerged from the satellite states and the breakup of the USSR moved towards applying the norms of neoliberal capitalism, albeit with different transitional processes that led to the formation of different models. Sport was subjected to a dialectic between the market and the state. Depending on whether the sport economy was market-based rather than state-based, we can identify three models of nation-states, which also correspond to a certain geographical grouping: neoliberal (in Eastern Europe), transitional (in South-eastern Europe) and presidential (in Eurasia). The structure of this book is divided into three parts which essentially corresponds to those three models.

The first section, Neoliberal sport in the post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe, represents countries integrated in Western structures, especially the EU and NATO, and is illustrated with chapters on Hungary, Poland, Croatia and post-Soviet Lithuania. Their political systems are recognisably democratic and their economies are openly neoliberal. However, their transition demonstrates friction between those state officials who had been socialised under the communist regime who tried to maintain their status, and new pro-Western actors who had to negotiate to accede to political power. For decades there was a dialectical overlapping of resistance and counter-resistance involving elements of the communist past and the new forces of liberalism. In spite of the countries cited under this typology being the most democratic of those analysed, democracy did not spread to civil society in the same way as in the West, a circumstance that is shown by the authors in their respective chapters.

In Chapter 2, Gyozo Molnar and Tamás Dóczi examine sport in Hungary, basing their analysis on the concept of transitology. They note that privatisation contributed to oligarchisation, and that the contradiction of maintaining organisations with methods from the past but with some Westernised ideas persists. In Chapter 3, Jacek Drozda, Krzysztof Jaskulowski and Piotr Majewski detail how in Poland the majority of the state clubs were privatised, but continued to maintain undemocratic methods in their organisation as a legacy of a centralist model of decision-making. However, as happened in other neighbouring states, they succeeded in importing other negative aspects of sporting cultures from Western contexts, namely football hooligan violence. Sunčica Bartoluci examines the violent transition experienced in Croatia in Chapter 4. Some particular sporting spectacles in this country became intertwined with campaigns for independence aggravated by football hooliganism, which saw ethno-religious tensions in Yugoslavia lead to prolonged conflicts. This contributed to Croatia’s sport policy, propagating a nationalist discourse that was certainly more exacerbated in comparison with other states included in this typology. In Chapter 5, Vilma Čingienė and Renatas Mizeras examine sport and transition in Lithuania, a country with a high level of popular sport practice, where the model of private sports club did not develop. This created difficulties for the advancement of grassroots sport, with the aggravating factor of a centralist state oriented towards the localised concentration of elite athletes.

The second part of this book is entitled Sport transition from the socialist state to the open market. These chapters provide the socio-political coordinates of countries at an intermediate stage of transition, economically poorer than those cited previously, with strong remnants of the former communist regime, but with evidence of a pro-Western and pro-European focus. These case studies include chapters on Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Ukraine and Georgia. A distinctive overarching feature of these states is that it is difficult to fully equate them with a neoliberal capitalist system, largely due to state corruption. These post-communist states left sport in the hands of civil society, but a lack of available resources helped prevent efficient social organisation. This is one of the reasons why their international competition went into decline, boosting the emigrational diaspora of their most promising athletes as a further negative consequence.

Under those characteristics, László Péter writes on the dramatic transition experienced in Romania in Chapter 6, where the decrease in state involvement not only caused the country to fall in rankings of international sport, but also reduced the number of sports practitioners, causing many social sectors to express nostalgia for the previous regime, at least the sporting prowess it illustrated. The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the breakup of Yugoslavia is analysed by Richard Mills in Chapter 7. He argues that sport in the country also suffered from privatisation related to corruption, and outlines how administrations on all sides of the frontlines forged their own distinct sporting cultures after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Albania is analysed by Philippa Velija in Chapter 8, in an examination of the political instability which prevented a transition channelled towards Western European patterns. She also detects a downturn in sport practice, a question that is also related to a lack of public support. Maryna Krugliak and Oleksandr Krugliak assess the case of the Ukraine in Chapter 9, referring to the opaque character of its sporting organisations. The authors reveal how this country’s instability also encouraged many athletes to emigrate, and governments invested selectively in sports that had developed during the Soviet period. Joel Rookwood examines the situation in Georgia in Chapter 10, another country that experienced a prolonged and tense aftermath of war. He illustrates the ethnic confrontations in the Caucasian region, where separatist nationalisms utilised sport as a channel of expression, creating teams under forbidden flags and organising parallel tournaments to build legitimacy and demand recognition of statehood.

The third and final part is entitled Post-Soviet presidentialism and sport mega events. All the countries discussed here, including the post-Soviet examples, maintain alliances with the Russian Federation. In addition, their governments are often denounced by international bodies for not applying certain standards in the protection of human rights. Their societies may be perceived as relatively weak due to the subordination of the citizens to a state that, in symbolic imaginary, is identified with a widely publicised figure of their respective paternalistic leader. In this typology, sport was subjected to state management, mainly dedicated to producing an athletic elite, whilst also focused on hosting costly sport mega events, developing architecture and infrastructure that represented the all-embracing power of the state in public spaces in the process. This is framed as an attempt to strengthen and reproduce national identity, reflecting the charisma of the respective leader, whilst raising the country’s standing in international contexts. Given the scale and prominence of the country, two chapters are dedicated to Russia, with other contributions on Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. The latter country, despite being located in Asia, is included in this otherwise European text as it represents a unique example of this presidentialist typology. It was also deemed important to have the ‘Stans’ region included as an im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Interpreting sport and transition in post-socialist and post-Soviet Europe: States, nations and markets
• PART 1: Neoliberal sport in the post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe
• PART 2: Sport transition from the socialist state to the open market
• PART 3: Post-Soviet presidentialism and sport mega events
• Index