ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with sport in Central and Eastern Europe, where there has been a tension between politics, nationalities and sport that has been of a different dimension from Western and Western Central Europe. Within the borders of this area’s states (which changed frequently during the 20th century) different nationalities and ethnic groups lived together and alongside in a situation of concurrence, which has been characterized by the term Konfliktgemeinschaft (community of conflict).1 Under these circumstances physical education and sports were of special importance, as a means to show a nation’s will to struggle for emancipation and as a way for people to represent themselves as an ethnic-national collective.
