CHAPTER 1 Ethnicity and membership in Dutch amateur football 1.1 Organized sports and ethnicity Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. (…) Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination. Sports is the game of lovers. (Mandela, 2000) Organized sport as an ethnic integrator South Africa’s unlikely 1995 Rugby World Cup win brought a strongly racially divided nation closer together. This success story is perhaps one of the most appealing examples of the highly popular belief that sports activities are particularly effective at bringing distant ethnic groups closer together. Since then, the United Nations, together with sports organizations, NGOs, and governments have initiated a wide array of programs across the world which seek to harness the supposed ethnic integrative potential of sports. Under the ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ banner, these interventions have been predominately directed at low- or middle-income countries such as Zimbabwe, Iraq or BosniaHerzegovina. High income countries such as the Netherlands have strongly focused on the integrative potential of sports as well (Cremers & Elling, 2020; Krouwel et al., 2006). An important reason for this is that due to ongoing immigration, the populations of many countries have become substantially more ethnically heterogeneous over the last few decades. This has led to increasing pressures on governments to ‘manage’ the ethnic differences between citizens and to find ways to maintain or strengthen social cohesion in an ever-diversifying society (Spaaij, 2013). Echoing Allport’s (1954) intergroup contact theory, a primary strategy of
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