Changing Perspectives on Global Sport, International Relations and World Politics

Any lingering doubt about the extant relationship between sport, foreign policy and international relations should be removed by news that London Olympics security measures will cost approximately £1 billion (around $1.5 billion). Some might argue that the Olympics are atypical, more media spectacle than sporting event. That, however, would overlook a long history of international relations/politics being attendant on the Games. Even the ancient Olympics had clear city state political dimensions, while the international relations aspect has been ever-present in the modern era. In resurrecting the modern Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin had an overtly politicised “European agenda “, seeing sport as an alternative international interaction mechanism that might release tensions extant in other planes.

The three outstanding recent Olympic examples of this sport-politics and policy nexus are Berlin 1936, Munich 1976, and Moscow 1980. Hitler and his architects had the clear objective of demonstrating German power and ideology through the Games, with the first modern media angle pioneered through Leni Riefenstahl’s idealising Olympia. Munich and Black September were, sadly, the inevitable next step, with the Games’ increasing visibility rendering them a potential stage for the display of wider, more serious concerns. From there, security at the Games became paramount, leading to the latest huge spending in London. In 1980, a range of world governments extended that sports leverage differently – by staying away, protesting the Soviet Union’s Afghanistan intervention. That probably marked the effective end of futile attempts to maintain separation between “sport” and “politics”.

The “keep sport separated from politics” refrain, emanating from Victorian England’s “amateur” ethos and taken up by de Coubertin, has bedeviled the study of sport in international relations (and much else) until very recently. The irony is that sport has always represented a rich vein of study for these issues in both the applied and theoretical dimensions. At present, for example, sport contributes significantly to issues such as globalization, the actions and activities of NGOs, international negotiation and reconciliation, nation state development, power relations, aid and development, transnational organisations and alignment, to name just some.

The attempt to split “sport” and “politics” created another false dichotomy. Because the two were assumed to be separate, any attempts to match them up automatically began from that assumption. The result was that any analysis began by trying to determine whether sport was a “causative”, affective factor in international affairs, or simply an “effect” of them. That is, the thought was to determine how sport might generate an international issue, or be used to illustrate or influence one.

“Causative” examples are rare to the point of being non-existent, of course. The most cited case is the so-called 1969 “football war “ between Honduras and El Salvador when a World Cup football qualifier sparked a four day conflict and approximately 3, 000 deaths. In truth, football was catalyst rather than cause, the latter rooted in cross-border migration and land ownership problems. The 1932-33 English cricket tour of Australia was an earlier example. English on-field tactics caused enough discontent to produce serious Canberra-Whitehall political relationship issues. Again, though, the incident was based in financial and sovereignty policy issues, the sport was simply catalytic.

The point is that these examples, and the increasing numbers of sports-related issues now arising, are embedded in the complex system of global politics, relations, negotiations and behavior patterns. Rather than see sport as an “effect”, that is, it is more productive to consider how sport became incorporated into international ebb and flow patterns. The immediate starting point in the post-World War II period is with state-building and international image projection.

The best examples involve the German Democratic Republic, the USSR, China and, more recently, India. Sport was central to the GDR’s international showcasing of national progress and achievement. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, before the Wall fell, the GDR was a leading Olympics medal winner. To that end, it built an elaborate system of local sports and training centres, and what became the world’s first systematic sports doping regime. That regime led directly to a global tracking and policing system, supported by world governments, in the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Like other multilateral agencies, WADA has its own sectional and regional dogfights, demonstrated by the struggle to install Australian ex-politician John Fahey as boss.

The Soviet Union was also a major player in sport as state building, international representation, and drugs. From 1952, when the USSR re-entered the Olympics, until the empire’s 1990s collapse, “big power politics” were manifest in the struggle for supremacy in the Olympics medal count. It became commonplace to measure the state of the Cold War through the Olympic prism. The double-sided potential here appeared at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics when Russia met Hungary in water polo just after Soviet troops rolled in to annexe their neighbour. The match was a bloody replay of the wider struggle: the depiction of sport as state power could be reversed.

China and India took this aspect of sport to another dimension. The 2000 Olympic Games being awarded to China was interpreted widely as recognition of its “new” global position. Chinese authorities emphasised that view, which is why the spectacular architecture and successful events management were so important. Inadvertently, the unswerving commitment raised several human rights issues internationally, principally as people were forcibly relocated to allow for Olympic construction. India was far less successful. It calculated that a successful 2010 Commonwealth Games would position “New India” to host an Olympics that would signify the country’s “arrival” as a great power. Unfortunately, graft scandals and venue construction dramas combined with poor events management to produce nightmare rather than dream. The spotlight picked out India’s broader corruption, governance and reliability issues rather than India “shining”.

Sport’s greatest centrality in international relations and politics came with the boycott movements mobilized against South Africa’s apartheid system. From the 1960s onwards, world sports organisations were drawn into unwanted debate as activist groups and NGOs found in sport major leverage for their cause. Specific sports like cricket and rugby union, the archetypal imperial/post-imperial games, came under pressure in countries like Australia and New Zealand to forego contests with South Africa because of its racial exclusivity in team selection. Importantly, otherwise “small powers” like the constituent members of the West Indies cricket organization (“West Indies” exist as an entity only in cricket and in a university system), because of their playing power, found themselves enabled to exert pressure on stronger states. This movement spread into international arenas such as the Olympics so that South Africa, itself placing great store in mainline sports demonstrating its global importance, became isolated. That was instrumental in helping open up South Africa in the 1990s and beyond.

Nelson Mandela confirmed the importance of this in his support for the “new” approach to multiracial sport, especially through his public advocacy for South Africa’s new “rainbow” rugby team that hosted and won the 1995 Rugby World Cup, allocated by the International Rugby Board as a means of re-integrating this major playing power into the world system. (The moment was captured in the Clint Eastwood-directed film Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela). This process was replicated later in cricket, and through South Africa’s hosting the 2010 football World Cup.

That highlights the role of major international sporting organisations that, over recent years, have considered themselves as important beyond sport itself. An excellent example is the International Olympic Committee’s interaction with the United Nations through the environmental movement. In 1992, the IOC attended the Rio Earth Summit, and from there worked towards achieving observer status in the General Assembly. Many athletes have become UN Goodwill Ambassadors, such as Sachin Tendulkar (cricket), Didier Drogba (football), and Nicol David (squash). Many critics see this as beyond the capabilities of those sporting organisations and their leaders, but the development indicates just how integral sport has become to the international political system. While the IOC now pushes a “green” agenda for its Games venues, it is arguable just how much real impact that has, with London a highly contentious case. Similarly, the IOC-UN approach to sport, peace and reconciliation through sport has created a lot of offshoots, initiating projects such as a youth football program in the tougher suburbs of Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, but the results and impact are debatable.

Paradoxically, the IOC is also criticized for not taking a political stand elsewhere. The most recent debate has concerned whether or not Saudi Arabia should be barred from London because of its treatment of female athletes. Just prior to the Games the Saudi leadership announced it would permit women to compete so long as they dressed moderately, were accompanied by a male guardian, and did not mix with other men. By exerting some pressure, the IOC headed into a contentious area of relations with Islam, but was seen to respond to pressure from within and without concerning gender development in a financially important member state.

The IOC was also involved in another long standing international issue pre-London, defending its acceptance of major sponsorship from Dow Chemical Co. Dow is now the Union Carbide parent company, so the IOC incurred severe criticism from India, still pursuing the dreadful 1984 Bhopal industrial accident that left up to 20, 000 dead. The IOC persisted with the sponsorship, but it is interesting to speculate what might have happened had India had greater leverage.

The role of sport as an international political agency is now widespread. In Europe, the 1995 Bosman case declared that it illegal under European law to restrict EU citizens from playing where they wanted inside the EU. That opened up labour migration generally. The 2003 Kolpak case extended the principle, declaring that citizens of countries having agreements with the EU had the same playing rights as EU citizens themselves. In 2007, the EU adopted its White Paper on Sport, with the specific purpose of “sharing our values” with the world. Then, Indo-Pakistani relations are constantly measured by whether or not they are playing cricket against each other, the periodic thaws usually initiated by a game or a series. Pakistan now plays its “home” games abroad, mainly in the United Arab Emirates, ever since 2009 when the visiting Sri Lankan team bus was attacked in Lahore by men armed with grenades and rocket launchers. In the lead up to the Euro12 football championships, the British Government announced it would send no Ministers to attend matches in the Ukraine because of on-going concerns about that country’s human rights record (an echo of the anti-apartheid movement). In the same tournament, the Greece –Germany match was widely interpreted as representing the evolving complexity between the two amidst the Eurozone currency and financial crisis.

Sport, then, is inevitably a major factor in all aspects of contemporary international politics and relations. On the one hand, governments now have to think more creatively and incisively about what consequences might emerge from sports developments. On the other, major sports leaders have to know about a great deal more than just the games they oversee.

As well as his columns for Global Policy, Professor Brian Stoddart also writes on his blog at www.professorbrianstoddart.com