Olympic solidarity: global order and the diffusion of modern sport between 1961 to 1980

This thesis examines the emergence of Olympic sport aid policy in the early phase of its establishment in 1961 with the founding of the Commission For International Olympic Aid (CIOA) and the Olympic Solidarity (OS) in the early 1970s. The study aims to explore the global process of cultural flows of Olympism and modern sport, and the international relations involved in constructing, modifying or resisting the Olympic 'message'. A tentative conceptualisation of 'aid donors' (core and semi-periphery) and the 'aid recipients' (peripheral states) is outlined in relation to the global sport interaction between nation states. At the macro level, it is clear that the bi-political order of the Cold War, the decolonisation process, and the development aid projects provided to the newly independent countries in Africa and Asia influenced agents' approaches in forming the sport aid policy and the promotion of Olympic institutions. At the meso level, the IOC relations with UNESCO, IFs, regional games and National Olympic Committees and the emergence of hyper nationalism, commercialism and professionalism impinge on the creation of the global sport aid programme that emphasises the hegemony of the Olympic movement. The research subscribes to critical realism as its ontological and epistemological base and the principal method employed to investigate is a form of qualitative content analysis using a protocol drawn from ethnographic content analysis. Inductive and deductive techniques were utilised to analyse 355 official documents and agents' correspondence in English, French and German gathered from Olympic Museum archives and facilitated by the application of QSR NUD*IST software for qualitative data analysis. A socio-economic and political account of the postcolonial era is provided as viewed through 'prism' of modernisation, cultural imperialism, dependency and figuration theories. The thesis provides an approach to the evaluation of the global diffusion of sport and Olympism through the aid programmes revealing complex responses and engagement with global processes, contextualised by (in some ways) homogenous and (in others) heterogeneous nature of the global sport.