CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Faje, Florin Mihai |
|---|---|
| Title | Playing to Win, Learning to Lose: Sport, Nation and State in Interwar Romania |
| Summary | The dissertation explores the role of sport in the making of the modern Romanian nation-state. It argues that sport has been instrumental for national unification, integration, and homogenization and for the consolidation of the Romanian state. In their turn, I show that these pressures operated to produce a distinctively Romanian sporting tradition premised on the Romanians perceived Latin “élan”. Romania’s extensive territorial expansion in the aftermath of the First World War inaugurated a historical conjuncture dominated by the need to affirm the new polity both domestically and internationally. At the same time, regional unevenness, ethnic diversity, conflicting views of modernization and development and a turbulent international environment heavily affected the structure, operation and results of the interwar Romanian state. The ascendance of modern sports and of programs of physical education during the early decades of the twentieth century made them into obvious and relatively ready available institutions to pursue these goals. Hence, I show that sports and physical education were soon taken up and encouraged by members of the Romanian elite in their effort to affirm Romanianness. This process was nowhere more visible and critical than in the region of Transylvania, where urban spaces were overwhelmingly non-Romanian and Hungarian, Jewish or German sporting clubs and associations were already in place since imperial times. Consequently, to explore the critical and often neglected role of sport in the making of the Romanian nation-state the current work is built around a case study of Universitatea Cluj, the par excellence Romanian club in Transylvania. Founded in 1919, the students’ sports association at the University of Cluj was a quintessential vehicle in establishing and safeguarding the nation locally, regionally and nationally. Universitatea’s history confounds with the history of Romanian administration in Transylvania. I devote major attention to the football section of the club, by far the most popular sport in Romania ever since the early interwar. The analysis of the club’s emergence, of its history and of the memories it triggered among its members afford crucial insights into the ways in which football worked to both support and undermine nation making and state consolidation. As an institution of sportsmen/intellectuals, a rarely observed sociological category, the analysis of its historical trajectory adds new facets to the making of modern sport. Moreover, Universitatea’s historically low levels of sporting achievement allow for a history of football rarely underwritten by performance and glory, as is often the case. This is a history of identification, loyalty and belonging that could do without sporting triumph in affirming and widely popularizing the national values that it stood for. In conjunction with the national developments that I explore, the case of “Universitatea” makes for a particularly interesting history of sport, nation and state, one where a rhetorics of cultivating bodies, minds and souls produced a sporting culture at odds with modern and contemporary developments in sport. To show that, wherever possible, I trace the history of the ideas that have animated Universitatea and the Romanian movements of sports and physical education beyond their formative years during the interwar into Romanian socialism and post-socialism. Overall, the dissertation refines and adds substance to oft-repeated claims that sports are essential in the making of modern nation-states and endorses understandings of modern nationalism that stress its Janus-faced character. |
| Supervisor | Rabinowitz, Dan |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/faje_florin.pdf |
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