The European Commission has invested much symbolic capital in sport's potential contribution to European identity, recently stating ‘that sport has a role in forging identity and bringing people together’. Yet such claims must be strongly qualified. Whilst sport is conspicuously present in Europe as an everyday activity, it is elusively variegated in its social and cultural forms and impacts, and historically informed scholarship points to a more sophisticated approach to the understanding of the subject. At the same time, national histories – conceived largely within national frameworks – hold sway in the field of sports history. There is little truly comparative work and this lack allows the European Commission to put out its statements unchallenged. This article proposes a number of ways in which European sports history might be conceived comparatively. It outlines four different models of European sport (British, German, Soviet, Scandinavian), whilst highlighting the problems inherent in such modelling; argues for greater historical depth (e.g. the importance of Italy in the early modern period); warns against the dangers of presentism (e.g. highlighting the proximity of dance and gymnastics in earlier periods); challenges the hegemony of British sport; and champions the cause of a serious consideration of Eastern Europe.

This article argues that the question of national perspectives is a fundamental problem in the writing of European sports history. It does so by demonstrating that France has an equal pedigree, in terms of diffusion and exceptionalism, as Britain, and pleads for a less skewed approach to the history of the subject in general. The article shows, first, that France contributed significantly to the internationalization of sport in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with French networks facilitating the spread of sports across the globe. It considers the impact of French universalism on the institutional structures of world sport and assesses the importance of sport to governmental diplomacy. Second, it proposes that France occupies a special place in the history of European sport, halfway between that of the British on the one hand and other continental sporting cultures on the other. It discusses the role of central and regional administrations in the creation of a sports space that is distinctly marked by a lack of football hegemony. French sport, the article concludes, is characterized by a peculiar mix of anglomanie, invented traditions, internationalism, state interventionism and eclecticism.

This paper considers the reception and growth of sport in Spain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which the new activity developed from a novelty into part of the national culture. I focus on who exactly gravitated to sport and why, to explain this growth and ground that explanation in the larger national and regional history. Several factors and early groups spurred Spanish interest in sport including the movement to ‘regenerate’ the country around the turn of the century, the support from the medical community, and organizations such as the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the Federación Gimnástica Española. Sport was also attractive to the emerging urban, Spanish middle classes who embraced it as a form of conspicuous consumption and for whom sport served a similar social purpose as art in cities such as Barcelona. In the 1910s and 1920s, the masses also became receptive to sport and football in particular for various reasons. In particular, clubs created local identities that drew in members and allowed teams to serve as community leaders, like Athletic de Bilbao and F.C. Barcelona do today.

This article surveys the Catholic Church's exploitation of sport in Liberal (1861–1922), Fascist (1922–1943), and post-war Italy. It examines how and why the Church overcame its initial reticence to embrace sport and turn it into a fundamental pillar of an alternative culture that challenged the monopoly of national sporting federations. Following the rise of Fascism, sport became one of the principal means by which the Church resisted a complete takeover by the regime. Analysis of the devout Catholic cyclist Gino Bartali reveals how the Church maintained its identity and tradition of sporting independence despite the inevitable suppression of Catholic sporting organisations. Culminating in an examination of the ‘immortalisation’ of Bartali after his win in the 1948 Tour De France – a victory popularly credited with saving Italy from civil war – the article illuminates the processes by which sport became a central feature of Catholicism in national life. It highlights the Church's contribution to the development of Italian sport, assesses the wider impact of sport's role in forming alternative cultures, and argues that sport perfectly positioned the Church to respond to the demands of Reconstruction Italy and provided opportunities to secure a post-war Christian Democratic society.

The title of Allen Guttmann's landmark study of sports history, From Ritual to Record, captures the way cinematic treatments of the Olympic Games, Europe's most resonant sporting invention, developed in the early twentieth century. Projected film and the modern Olympic Games began in the same year, 1896, and the way the two phenomena have grown together demonstrates a progression from formality and ritual to an ever-increasing emphasis on individual, nation and achievement. This transition from ritual to record is demonstrated by two Olympic films from the European Games of Paris 1924 and Amsterdam 1928, Les Jeux Olympiques Paris 1924 and De Olympische Spelen. These cinematic records are not only documentary records of the events they portray, but are an important reminder that modern sports are witnessed by most not as stadium spectators but as viewers – in the case of the 1924 and 1928 films, as members of a cinema audience. The film record is essential to our understanding of the popularisation of modern sports, while through their contrary impulses to document and to idealise (particularly through the use of slow-motion photography), the two films demonstrate what is meaningful about Olympic sport.

From the Renaissance, dance and sport formed the basis of ‘polite’ and ethical behaviour. Both offered a frame within which social norms could be taught and enacted. Scholarship has often concentrated either on the history and aesthetics of dance or on those of gymnastics but neglected the proximity of both forms to each other. This paper focuses on one particular narrative: the intertwining of dance and gymnastics as utopian projects in the arousal of nationalism and creation of a new ‘German’ body. From Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who sketched the first national and patriotic movement system in Die deutsche Turnkunst 1816, to dance master Franz Anton Roller, gymnastics teacher Adolf Spiess, and dance gurus Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, it will demonstrate how the distinction between dance and gymnastics was constantly re-negotiated; and it argues that twentieth-century Modern Dance developed out of nineteenth-century Turnen and gymnastics. Dance intended to revolutionise German society physically and aesthetically and incorporated spatial concepts and movement sequences that gymnastics systems had already explored. Through their conceptions of motion in time and space, dance and gymnastics created a modern and revolutionary physical practice for the German nation.

Until recently, sports history has largely neglected Eastern Europe. Yet new research has shown that historians need to embrace a perspective from the periphery towards the centre, and reach beyond the paradigms of modernization, Sovietization, and the nation-state if Europe's sporting culture is to be fully understood. Focusing primarily on Poland, this article outlines three features peculiar to the region. First, it stresses the importance of trans-national spaces and networks as well as European sub-regions. Missing out on the initial phase of sport's internationalization due to lack of independence, the development of Polish sport was regionally distinct. Sports flourished in Habsburg-ruled Galicia (in Cracow and Lodz especially) under relatively liberal political authorities, but developed more slowly and under different influences elsewhere. Second, the prominence of rural Galicia, inhabited by traditional groups such as Ukrainian peasants or Chassidic Jews, shows that Polish sport did not evolve in line with modernization and industrialization. The relatively slow diffusion of sport in industrial centres such as Warsaw or Silesia contradicts the paradigm of modernization and the notion of East European backwardness. Third, sport history sheds light on phenomena such as multi-ethnicity, migration, integration or disintegration.