Cumhuriyet Modernleşmesinde Devletin Spor Üzerinden Bedene Bakışı ve Spor Politikaları

Abstract

The Republic of Turkey has always focused on the young generation while making cultural revolutions in a series of revolutions aiming modernization which has carried out in the early years of its establishment. For a young citizens, keeping their bodies strong has turned into a civic responsibility rather than a personal choice. A citizen with a healthy body in peacetime was regarded as the basic core of a healthy society, a vigorous and physically strong generation meant a civil army ready for military in a possible war situation. In this context, the state aimed to use sports as a tool to organize young individuals and shape their bodies through physical training, and in order to do this, Turkish politicans were searching for a model to establish this in sports governence. By finding the perfect example they were looking for in Germany, Turkish government invited Carl Diem, the founder of the German model, to Turkey, and the report he wrote as a result of their work became a text that guided the statist policy of sports in Turkey. This study focuses on the relationship between sports and the state in a historical perspective, and aims to explain why states want to govern sports and which policies they targeted by using sports within a perspective of politics of sport. The main goal of the study is to re-evaluate the policies implemented in the first years of the Republic of Turkey following its establishment within the framework of the policy of sports and to reach a conclusion by comparing it with its contemporaries in political history.