International Workers’ Sport as a Means of Bringing Peoples Together

Abstract

The process of organising the culture of physical exercise for working people can be divided into three major historical phases: (1) the birth of worker-supported sports as part of the bourgeois national sports movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century, (2) the development of an autonomous worker’s sports movement as part of the working class movement in the period between the world wars and (3) the joint activity of the workers’ sports movement with the bourgeois sports movement following World War II. Although salient differences exist in the organising process and ideology of workers’ sports from country to country, we can nevertheless consider the above-mentioned breakdown to be quite generally applicable. The basis of the breakdown into periods is the question that had dominated the history, present stage and future of workers’ sport: the relationship of workers’ sport to the bourgeois sports movement. In all periods the forms of organisation of workers’ sport have been determined in terms of the solution at any given time to to this key question. An examination of the history of international workers’ sports shows this quite convincingly.