In various European countries, sports and athletic associations play a pronounced role in the mobilization of national movements. The pre-1800 history of sports and sports contests is considerable, and in many cases, ritualized competitions have had a public function in which the contestants were seen as representative of a community or constituency; obviously so in the original Olympic Games of ancient Greece, but also in medieval city and community festivals of which the Siena Palio is probably the most famous modern survival.

Sporting pursuits and festivals have in many instances, in the 19th and 20th century, been refurbished as national traditions. Alpinism; the Tour de France cycling event in France and the Highland games in Scotland, the Vasaloppet skiing event in Sweden and the Elfstedentocht skating event in Friesland / Netherlands; bullfighting in Spain and fox-hunting (riding to hounds) as well as archery in England; Pelota in the Basque Country and Pesapällo in Finland: all of these are examples of a trend more extensively dealt with elsewhere in the Encyclopedia. The focus here is on sports sociability.

The transition of organized sports and athletics into the modern state can be traced, as so many other things, to the French Revolution. Its cult of ancient republican virtues led in 1796-98 to a modern revival of the Olympic Games, the Olympiade de la République. Simultaneously, the importance of gymnastics and “physical education” was propounded by educationalists such as Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (1759-1839; author of Gymnastik für die Jugend, 1793) and Phokion Heinrich Clias (1782-1854; author of Anfangsgründe der Gymnastik oder Turnkunst, 1816, and founder of the Vaterländische Turngemeinde in Bern, 1816).  In the 19th century we can see physical education (gymnastics, athletics, but also team sports) become increasingly important at military academies and in the English public schools as reformed by Thomas Arnold (1795–1852). Arnold, reforming headmaster of Rugby School, has become mythically linked with the origin of the game of rugby, largely as a result of the juvenile classic Tom Brown’s school days (1857) by Thomas Hughes, a book extolling the virtues of sportsmanship as being formative of the character of an ideal Englishman: fair-minded, disciplined, self-reliant – the “muscular Christian Gentleman” of Arnold’s pedagogics. These ideals spread all over western Europe, particularly to other boarding schools for boys (e.g. Noorthey and Schreuders in the Netherlands and the Josephite College in Melle, Belgium), all breeding spots of national political, economical and religious leaders. Although their appropriation of sport and accompanying values produced national differences, the core of organized and disciplined sport as part of the project of modernity remained intact.

Arnold influenced the thought of Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), whose instigation of the modern Olympic Games in the mid-1890s had been prepared by a decade of activism in favour of physical education in French schools as part of a national regeneration agenda. Others propagating similar agendas had been the statesmen Paschal Grousset (1844–1909; founder of the Ligue nationale d’éducation physique, 1888) and Jules Simon (1814–1896; founder of the Comité pour la propagation des exercices physiques, also 1888). Notions of rebronzer the fatherland profoundly influenced the naval officer Georges Hébert (1875–1957) and his “méthode naturelle”, which formed the base for the Collège d’Athlètes in Reims and French military training in the First World War. In the Netherlands, gymnastic teachers and military officers introduced physical training as part of an offensive to regenerate the fatherland, inspired by the physical strength and endurance of their “kinsmen”, the South African Boers in the Boer Wars of the 1880s and 1890s.

Such international currents in favour of sports and athletics as part of physical education and, as such, of the nation’s physical regeneration, culminate in the Boy Scouts movement, originally founded in 1907 by General Robert Baden-Powell (a clergyman’s son). The scouts’ handbook, Scouting for boys (1908) reflects not only Baden-Powell’s experiences in the Boer Wars, but also the romance of soldiering and pioneering as expressed in the imperialist adventure romances of Rudyard Kipling (both Kim and the Jungle Book frequently providing Baden-Powell with points of reference) and the boys’ adventure novels by G.A Henty (1832–1902). Scouting quickly spread to many countries (Coubertin introduced it in France in 1911) and is still flourishing; in the course of the century, its formula with military-style uniforms, discipline, rewards and adventure was adopted by nationalist, communist, fascist and religious youth organizations. Within Britain, the preparatory role of the school playing fields for the Empire’s battlefields, and the metaphorical description of colonial expansion or warfare as an adult extension of “the Game” or “the Great Game”, had early on become a patriotic commonplace. In 1909, Baden-Powell’s sister Agnes founded the Girl Guides, for which – together with her brother – she published The handbook for Girl Guides or How girls can help to build up the Empire (1912).

The true importance of sports associations for nationalism in Europe derives, however, from a different source: Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852) and his Turnvereine or gymnastics clubs. Jahn was one of those anti-revolutionary, anti-Napoleonic activists who felt Germany under French dominance was falling away from its true national and moral fibre (cf. his Deutsches Volksthum, 1810). Inspired by a meeting with GutsMuths, Jahn founded an association for physical training in order to promote a national regeneration, thereby becoming the founder of modern gymnastics. His Turnverein, widely noted for its public exercises on the open-air Hasenheide in Berlin, combined moral and political activism. Under the motto Frisch, fromm, fröhlich, frei (coined by Hans Ferdinand Maßmann and foreshadowing the pedagogical ideals of Thomas Arnold), it aimed to regenerate the manly virtues of the German nation, traced back to Arminius the Cheruscan and now deemed effete and etiolated as a result of French-imported corruption and in need of a return to truly national norms and values. Also, more concretely, it was a thinly-veiled paramilitary training school for young men who felt they might be called upon to defend their fatherland in arms.

The Turnvereine were, then, a preparatory initiative for the free corps volunteers and citizens’ militias that would later take a part in the anti-Napoleonic campaigns, and which were only reluctantly recognized and armed by a Prussian government which preferred to rely on standing armies led by aristocratic officers. Indeed the Turnvereine, rallying points for militant German traditionalists (Altdeutsche or Volkstümler) were eyed with suspicion by the reactionary forces of the day: their anti-French, nationally German commitment was also aimed at popular empowerment and smacked of what was denounced as demagoguery.

After the 1813 Battle of Leipzig (in which many gymnastics adherents had seen action as members of the Lützow Free Corps) and the demise of the Napoleonic system, the ideals of the Turnverein spilled over into the budding students’ associations, the Burschenschaften – an exemplary go-between being H.F. Maßmann. Both associations joined forces at the fateful Wartburg Feast of 1817, in the wake of which the Gymnastics movement became implicated in political scandal and was suspended in Prussia in 1819. Its ideals were partly implemented in schools and military academies, partly kept alive as part of student associations, and partly in bourgeois gymnastics clubs and associations that were re-established after the interdict was relaxed and repealed around 1840. In the German emigration wave after 1848, the Turner movement was exported to other countries in Europe and particularly to the US, where it became the core of the German immigrant culture.

A similar nationalist-mobilizing function for sports associations can be pointed out in various cases, two salient ones being the Czech Sokol (“Falcon”) and Ireland’s “Gaelic Athletic Association”. Sokol was founded in Prague in 1862 by Miroslav Tyrš (1834–1884; he had Slavified his name from his baptismal Friedrich Emanuel Tirsch), along Jahn-style lines. It complemented its athletics and gymnastics programme with other educational activities such as lectures and group outings (the latter reminiscent of what the excursionistas would later do in Catalonia). The programme was aimed at physical, moral and intellectual training for the nation, involving only men at first, in due course opening up to women as well. In the prevailing Pan-Slavic atmosphere of the time, the Czech Sokol (which had Slavically-styled uniforms designed for it by the painter Josef Mánes) quickly spread to neighbouring regions – Moravia and Slovenia (1863) Poland (1867), Ukraine (1894) and even Serbia and Sorbian Lusatia. (The Sokol movement was discountenanced in Slavic lands under Budapest rule.) Huge gymnastics festivals were held from the 1890s onwards, and placed the Sokol movement firmly on the map as an important nationalist and Pan-Slavic rallying force. Its organization and presence also inspired fervent Roman Catholic youth movements in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, which partly copied the physical and educational programme, although in a Catholicized version. A similar manifestation of competitive imitation was the foundation of Jewish sports and gymnastics clubs from the mid-1890s on, partly in response to anti-Semitism in existing Turnvereine, partly in an attempt to develop what Max Nordau in 1898 called Muskeljudentum, “muscular Jewry”. From this emerged the Zionist Maccabi sports organization (1921), which in 1929 spawned a Boy-Scouts-style Maccabi Youth Movement and organized, from the 1930s on, international Maccabi Games (in the style of the Olympic Games).

In Ireland, the Gaelic Athletic Association was founded in 1884 by enthusiasts who wanted to preserve and re-popularize native Irish sports such as hurling. The inspiration here was probably less from Jahn’s Turnvereine than from the Scottish Highland games, which had in various localities been gaining popularity since the 1830s. It flourished not only in the cities and towns, but, crucially, also in the countryside, where at village/parish level enough young men (and, later, women) could be mobilized for a local team. The GAA thus became one of the first large-scale associations with a native-revivalist agenda; it was soon flanked by the Gaelic League, whose aim was to revive the Irish language. In the following decades, the GAA became an important mobilizing force in Irish nationalism. It soon banned personnel serving in the British Crown forces from membership, and banned its members from engaging in non-native (“Protestant”) sports such as rugby, cricket or association football.