Once I was reading to make a boring final essay for college, I found a sentence inside a book of decolonization I was reading at the time, that caught my attention, it described a strange phenomenon that at first cost me to understand its truth. The phenomenon was that in a colonized region there are different groups of different natives or ethnic groups and between those groups there were conflicts and great rivalries, but the curious thing of the phenomenon is that these ethnic groups or groups of natives, get together and unite to be able to fight against their colonizers having an enemy in common, after they achieved their independence these conflicts reappeared.
What has all these to do with sport and nations? Well, a lot really. Let's start with the concept of nation, a nation is a type of political organization that imposes itself in a delimited territory. The nation creates a reality where its inhabitants share a series of common elements such as anthems, history, culture, language and territory. Creating a sense of union and collective identification based on the same objectives (prosperity of the nation). Sport is one of these common elements that produces a social union within a nation.
Sport, unites people searching for a same goal, the sport victory. The sport is a competitive activity that often generates a teamwork to be able to conquer all the objectives, and go through all the obstacles as a team to reach the victory. There are sports teams and sports individually (contact sports, gymnastics, weight lifting) in these two types of sports there is a teamwork, a social union where you have to keep good social relations but your efforts can be deficient in the competitions or tournaments. These teams play a great role when they represent their nation in an international competition since many of the ordinary inhabitants of the nation can feel identified with the team and if this team obtains a large number of victories the effect it has on the population is greater.
Sport as a social unifier
Sport has functioned as a system of social union, exposing some cases, we can look to the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time, Germany was separated in two territories, East Germany and West Germany, with two different systems of government and different ideologies, when establishing the unified Germany, the country incorporate players from the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) into the new football team giving a unifying example and a model to the German nation, both in character national as well as international.
Another example is the unification of Japan during the Meiji restoration. In Japan there were certain differences between peasants and ordinary citizens with the samurai (since the samurai had certain privileges previously) which generated some misgivings at the time of the army recruit but this negative factor could be repelled because the ancient samurai dictated classes of martial arts to new recruits, introducing them into their fields that could only be practiced by themselves, opening their range of knowledge allowed the practice of martial arts to the ordinary population and thus spawned a national practice since the samurai ceased to have the monopoly of martial arts.
During the end of the apartheid (system of racial segregation) and the first term of President Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the country went through a huge social crisis due to the tension between blacks and whites but something particular happened in the year 1995, South Africa was the headquarters of the rugby world championship that year. Rugby was a white sport and the majority of the black population was repudiated to that sport but Nelson Mandela saw an opportunity to unify a country. He asked the captain of the rugby team Francois Pienaar to give a series of sports clinics in the poorest areas of Africa (where the black population abounded), Francois Pienaar and his team to dictate the sports clinics of rugby transcended the competitive spirit and team to young South Africans, falling in love with sports and not discrimination. South Africa is rugby world champion, blacks and whites go out to celebrate the victory. Last year the first black captain of the South African rugby team was called Sinya Kolisi. South Africa still suffers social tensions but has made great progress thanks to sport. Two sides with great differences come together to achieve a single objective similar to the prayer of the book of decolonization, only that here the goal is for peace to last.
Image Source: https://www.vavel.com/es/futbol-internacional/2013/01/18/210435.html