Sport, nationalism and culture in Scotland.

Abstract

By the year 1999 Scotland will have a new Parliament, the first in Scotland since 1707. This Parliament will not make Scotland a homogenous entity. Within months of the country-wide endorsement in September 1997 of a devolved Parliament divisions were already apparent, as Scotland’s two major cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, were involved in a public debate over which city should be the temporary home of the Parliament (The Scotsman, 17 March 1998; Daily Record, 20 March 1998;The Scotsman, 21 March 1998; The Scotsman, 22 March 1998; The Scotsman, 24 March 1997). In short, from the moment of its creation, Scotland has always been an uneasy partnership of very different communities. Sport, therefore, should not be used as a fallacious guide to undifferentiated Scottishness but rather as a subtle reflection of social, cultural and political diversity. The argument at the heart of this paper is that sport reflects some of the many indices or different images of nationhood and peoples represented at any given time.