Does it even make sense to discuss these two concepts together? Sports exist to test our physical and mental boundaries, a chance to engage in some friendly teamwork and entertain or challenge others, and diplomacy is all about fancy suites and long conversation-heavy gatherings that do not necessarily reflect the thrill and musicality of a good baseball game. The UN Assembly meetings and the Super Bowl or World Cup do not necessarily have much in common at first glance - in fact, they are as opposite as things can get. You see my point, we do not often think of sports and international relations as things that go hand in hand, and we cannot so easily envision an ambassador and a famous basketball star sipping coffee at the same table. They are just one of those pairings that simply do not exist, like the opposite of yin and yang. This explains why we seldom discuss sporting events at international relations courses, and why the Super Bowl does not necessarily revise the UN Declaration of Human Rights at halftime.
However, are they really that different? To what extent are the goals and outcomes of sporting and diplomatic events related? As someone who had the honor to find herself in Buenos Aires for that historic World Cup final on December 18th, 2022, I can testify that watching this final in one of the central parks in Palermo and hearing the public accompany the national team in the singing of the national anthem with jumps and cries was one of the most zealous and evident portrayals of national unity and participation. Witnessing this, as someone deeply curious about the way nationalism emerges and manifests itself, and someone who during my study abroad in Buenos Aires continuously passed by posters and graffiti expressing critique about the way the public only comes together for World Cup and is not equally united in the country’s stance against the ongoing inflation and a myriad of economic and socio-political issues, I found myself thinking of the power of sporting events and their relationship to a country’s or a region’s politics and sense of self. This article is meant to provide an overview of moments in which sporting events and major diplomatic statements and action converged to create powerful messages and results.
Sports and Diplomacy Through World Regions
Asia
Beginning with the largest, most populous region, that also happens to be the first one to face the morning sun, it is important to reflect on how regional organizations here happened to recognize and center sporting events as cornerstone of multilateral and intercultural cooperation. ASEAN, a main Asian regional body composed of 10 Southeast Asian members and in charge of facilitating political, economic, and cultural interaction and regional integration. ASEAN is also interesting due to its particular emphasis on sports. As such regional bodies are a newer, modern trend, it is enlightening to see the emphasis ASEAN has placed on sports as part of its mission towards fulfilling its pillars of integration and supporting amicable relations. ASEAN specifically recognizes the ancient roots of the practice of sports and sporting events and tournaments across the region, with an understanding of the intersection of sports and race, gender, religion, age, ethnicity, and nationality and ways that these identities manifest and interact through sports, as well as the sports’ ability to instill and promote the values of “respect, inclusion, fairness, and duty” as a way to contribute to a sense and prosperity of the ASEAN Community. ASEAN has come to facilitate football (soccer) and chess regional associations as part of its role as a regional body, which is unique and not observed to the same extent in other regions.
Sports have also played a key role in breaking up tension between warring countries or countries in dispute. The case of a ping pong tournament organized in 1971 as a way to allow for lessening of tension and first official interactions in Cold War between China and the US serves as a great example, to the point that this initiative known sometimes as ping pong diplomacy, was also featured in popular culture masterpieces such as Forrest Gump. More recently, however, we were able to bear witness to a historic merger of North and South Korea at 2018 Winter Olympics following days of talks between the two countries. While the degree to which interactions and exchanges occurred was limited in time and scope, fans from both sides of the 38th parallel could join in the celebrations and cheering together, and athletes marched side by side at the opening ceremony, with some additional future collaboration being planned and later materializing to a degree, such as a unified Korean women’s hockey team for that season. While the Olympics also feature some well-known and continuous tensions such as disputes over Taiwan’s name and flag, and more recent controversy over national attire, national dishes, and their promotion, these cases still show the impact of sports on the regional and international psyche and their contribution to our meaning making and positionality of modern nation states.
On the other side of the continent, Turkey and Armenia, still at crossroads due to Ottoman colonial heritage and subsequent disputes over acknowledgement of genocide against the Armenian people, managed to get their presidents to sit together and see visa regulations relaxed thanks to the 2008 World Cup qualifying match. This event even contributed to kickstarting additional diplomatic channels and, albeit arguably for only a very limited window of time, the two countries saw a potential to make amends and deepen their diplomatic interactions.
Australia and Oceania
The Australian Government has an entire 2030 Sports Diplomacy Strategy, with its goals being to affirm and deepen the ideals of sports diplomacy “to bring people together, generate goodwill and cultivate partnerships for Australia across the world.” The Plan also recognizes and lists the exact economic contribution of sports to Australia annually and outlines the competencies of Australian industries in competition and participation as much as in hosting, opening additional facilities, and being engaged in sports-related innovation. This attitude centers investment in sports and allows Australia to explicitly rely on sports in its diplomatic efforts.
Over in New Zealand, a unique node to Native culture has been expressed precisely through the haka dances, a traditional Māori ceremonial dance, performance of which went viral during the 2014 Basketball World Cup game against the baffled US. While the internet and modern culture led to the popularity of the New Zealand basketball team, it is important to note that the practice actually dates back to the New Zealand Native football team of the 1880s and has continued on through rugby and basketball associations for over a century. While this is celebrated as a way to honor the ways of the Native people of New Zealand, the practice has also been seen as controversial when performed erroneously by non-Native members of New Zealand’s society. New Zealanders with Māori origins historically and presently greatly contribute to the country’s sports culture, but it is crucial to ensure these sporting tributes to them and their culture are not purely performative and that they are accompanied by a proper way to honor and contribute to the communities these cultural practices come from in order to ensure the dance’s intended purpose of unifying the country and celebrating Native culture.
Oceania famously joins New Zealand in its focus on rugby as a national sport, although there are increasingly many efforts to honor traditional sports and associated ceremonies unique to this part of the world. Still, the focus remains particularly strongly on sports such as rugby, football, cricket, and basketball. It is the Olympics that are at play once again here as the Tongan sports sensation Pita Taufatofua represented his country three times so far and has famously done so with his shirtless walks in various traditional outfits, both as the country’s first taekwondo player and also even in the Winter Olympics where he was a sole representative of his country, having qualified for the cross-country skiing category. A fellow regional representative rower Rillio Rio Rii of Vanuatu joined in the showcase of traditional outfits. While critique can be placed here as well due to global gaze and objectification of these athletes that ensued, these all represent important potentials, when done and observed properly, to celebrate world traditions but also amplify knowledge about these countries living in a particularly unique and increasingly vulnerable part of the world.
Africa
Africa, the birthplace of humanity and forever a hub of great sportsmanship, both through talent and sports virtue, continues to impress the world with its many top-notch athletes, who defiantly win against all odds following centuries of colonial oppression and continued global inequality in earnings, which is of course also dangerously and tragically reflected in sports. The Olympic Games have bestowed a number of medals going to African athletes, with South Africa, Nigeria, and more recently Botswana reaching for the stars. However, it is also important to note that, while records have been broken and consistent medals received in longer distance running, with brilliant anecdotes about winning under excruciating circumstances such as Kenyan Kip Keino winning a 1500-meter race, while hurt and even after running for 2 miles in order to arrive on time for the competition when his bus was caught in traffic in Mexico City. In spite of this, the lack of proper investment, infrastructure, and necessary preparation and equipment that requires continuous funding and lifestyle that African athletes cannot always afford back home often prevents these exceptional athletes from reaching their full potential - and this is best manifested in the fact that African short distance sprinters are less likely to break records, with short distance running being a discipline where consistent prior preparation and very specific infrastructure is required. These complexities show how sports results may be impacted by inequalities of the global setting, albeit sports and athletes still often find ways to overcome neo capitalist competition and allow raw talent and hard work to shine.
Sports, however, can also be used to not only push our limits and always reach for a higher, faster, and stronger achievement, but also break the social mold and help us move beyond stereotypes. Movies such as the Egyptian Maye Zayed’s documentary Lift Like a Girl can help break the stereotypes and showcase true potential that sports have to offer for everyone, including girls and women that are often cut off from investment and support of male counterparts in the sporting world.
When it comes to brilliant results by African athletes, one cannot overlook the incredible advancement of African football (soccer) showcased throughout team games as well as in the World Cup, with the most recent World Cup featuring Morocco at the forefront of action and reaching 4th place thus breaking African records, and countries like Cameron and Ghana boasting incredible strategy, power, and true love of the game, not to mention the strength of the fans themselves and their dance moves and sportsmanship. While this helps position Africa as a force to be reckoned with in world football (soccer), it is important to note that this attention that African players receive on such big events also invited the corporations’ gaze and has facilitated the buying and selling of African players, which erodes development of local clubs as players are invited elsewhere, though this practice still brings fame and recognition to Africans and can help diversify the world of football (soccer). However, looking further into the outcomes of commercialization of sports, it should be noted that this phenomena also provides platform for a lucrative business of clandestine trafficking of young African talent where young athletes, especially boys, are promised jobs as players in Europe only to be left at mediocre clubs or made to essentially engage in forced labor as poverty and lack of protections at home are being exploited to trick young talents with false promises of success. Thus, the sporting world remains intricately connected with the globalized world and finds itself in constant interaction with the global development policies and current disparity.
Europe
Making our way westward, Europe comes with some important examples from recent history, showing just how powerful and influential sporting events can be. The event that is a more widely known case but that cannot be left out of any analysis of this type is the uncomfortable decision to allow the 1936 Summer Olympics to be organized by Hitler’s Third Reich. Having won the bid in 1931 to organize the Games in 1936, Berlin proudly assumed the role of an internationally-savvy host. Hitler and his Cabinet worked hard to outmaneuver records of the previous Olympic Games hosted in Los Angeles, ensuring larger track fields, bigger stadiums, and more gymnasiums, all the while sprinkling, and usually not at all subtly, the now painfully known elements of Nazi propaganda. Visitors were welcomed by the Nazi eagle and insignia, and, after the US and its allies came out of heated debates agreeing to not boycott the Games but rather send their representation and compete, the 1936 Games came to showcase almost 4000 athletes and 49 teams competing in 129 events.
While this event dangerously contributed to glorification of Hitler’s regime and deepened the influence of contemporary Nazi propaganda, painting the image of the Third Reich as a tolerant and peaceful nation, some events that were impossible for Hitler to predict went down in history as some of the biggest challenges to the Nazi ideology. Most notably, the biggest star of the games was Jesse Owens, an African American who captured four gold medals and was constantly on the podium. In fact, African Americans tended to dominate the popular track and field events and were welcomed with cheers by the German audience, demonstrating the ability of sports to uniquely bring people together and break the societal molds. The censorship prevented offensive remarks for the duration of the game, but it became obvious that Nazi publishers and thinkers were struggling to process the event, and this certainly threatened to shake up the dubious ideology of the Third Reich. Obviously, this sadly could not prevent the bloodshed that was to ensue with the onset of WWII, as Jewish athletes and citizens had already been prosecuted and excluded by this time. A great irony also comes from the fact that Jesse Owens and his compatriots had to return to a deeply segregated society that rejected them and never properly compensated for their successes despite calling itself a free country and supposedly being a perfect foil to Nazi Germany. While the sporting world cannot function as a peace treaty in its own right, the events of these Olympic Games allow us to see the ability of sports to showcase socio-political irony and once again help us to think critically and beyond stereotypes, although it cannot be ignored that the influence of sports has been used in this case to promote the opposite - a dictatorial regime with grotesque, horrifying policies looking to justify itself through sports.
Since we inevitably reach the topics of the two World Wars when talking about Europe, it is also important to note that, although sports are sometimes seen as a “war minus the shooting”, it is sports that often assisted in normalization of relations and at least brief truces, as well as means to support the troops’ sanity during the toughest of times. It is on European soil stained by blood and tragedy during the horrendous conflicts of the 20th century that some of the most curious truces have been established, with sports events used as an excuse for ceasefire and brief moments of joy and camaraderie. In fact, while the threat of an air attack made it impossible to do so in WWII, the Football Association (FA) allowed football (soccer) matches to continue as normal in WWI, boosting the morale of everyone involved, and this served as continuous recreation throughout the war. In WWII, the armed forces still retained the rights from FA to organize matches, and women working in munition factories formed their own teams, which shows the reach and inclusionary potential of sports in spite of societal challenges. While sports can be used to motivate competitive spirit not dissimilar to that which leads to conflict and war, sports also allow us to conceive a world in which we all come together to play and treat each other fairly and respectfully, showing the potential of sports towards in fact ending the conflict when appropriately organized and facilitated.
The Americas
Last but not least are the Americas. People say that football (soccer) is the world’s favorite pastime, and as someone who has had the utmost pleasure of witnessing a World Cup while in Latin America, I would be lying if I said that this statement can be truer anywhere else. The sport has fascinated the region ever since its first arrival with European fans in the Southern Cone. It has spread from the port of Buenos Aires, a city which today holds America’s record for the greatest concentration of football (soccer) stadiums per capita, and today it encompasses a large part of regional identity of Latin America, to the point where countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, to name just a few regional representatives, use this sport essentially as part of the nation-building processes.
It is important to note that here too we see some less-than-ideal conditions that sports are exposed to. Football (soccer) in particular is often associated with the hooligan culture, also known as the barra bravas in many countries of the region. These groups are not always the same as traditional street gangs and their cliques, and they oftentimes in fact find themselves in conflict with other violent groups/gangs. However, in many parts of Latin America and Europe, they are also known to consistently engage in violence both inside the stadiums and on the streets, often themselves participate in the selling and distribution of drugs and other illicit deals as a way to attract and organize youth and attain more earning for their activities, and have more recently been observed performing the function of paid protestors and rioters that catalyze corrupt political aims, once again revealing the power and socio-political reach of sports. The groups started with the supposed intent to support the club, and the fervor for the club is still there through impressive percussion and energy they always bring to the stadiums, but in some cases, and this happens all too often, these groups’ behavior goes out of hand and this becomes detrimental to other fans’ presence at the stadium, leading to some clubs and entire countries, as is the case with Argentina, to ban stadiums from hosting both competing teams’ fans just to avoid clashes of the barra bravas at the expense of sportsmanship-loving fans’ ability to follow their club to each game.
However, the relationship that clubs retain with their supporters and neighborhoods is impressive. I saw that some of the clubs I had the honor of interacting with in Central America and the Southern Cone function essentially as non-profits where all, or a significant portion, of additional profits are used to finance the building of sporting infrastructure for the youth of the neighborhood, and they also provide educational opportunities in their own facilities or through educational programs or school supplies they help finance. This is just one example of how football (soccer) remains the sport of the people and is able to retain its neighborhood spirit and local appeal as much as it has also presently become a lucrative business investment and a part of the system of multinational corporations. It is also, as previously mentioned, crucially used for the process of nation-building and a form of symbol for national identity, hope, persistence, and unity. Uruguay is a great example as it is the glorious host of the very first World Cup, an event that also coincided with the celebration of the centennial anniversary of the country’s first constitution and led to construction of Uruguay’s national stadium. It was a great struggle and honor to receive the title of host for the inaugural competition, and Uruguay is now working with partners from across the region to bring the World Cup back to its initial hosts for the World Cup 2030 bicentennial celebration of Uruguayan first constitution and centennial anniversary of the World Cup itself. Later renditions of the World Cup in the Americas have both been praised for infrastructure projects they brought in and a focus on increased security and social cohesion, but also critiqued as a distraction from national issues ranging from debt to dictatorial governance, again revealing the complexity of the world of sports and its influence on political matters, willingly or not, stretching all the way to present-day World Cup history.
It is again revealed that corrupt and power-hungry gangsters, officials, and even political leaders manage to successfully manipulate the world of sports, with football (soccer) in particular even having been used as a supposed prelude and an instrument to support wartime efforts in the infamous example of the 1969 conflict between Honduras and El Salvador, with the war even being referred to as “The Soccer War” as much as root causes of exactly zero examples of international warfare in the world are actually due to any sporting event. Better understanding the impact that sports and the rhetoric and feelings surrounding sports is necessary for policy makers to delegate the world of sports appropriate thought and protections, keeping in mind that sports are also a means of supporting one’s patriotic pride as well as a way to nurture the spirit of sportsmanship, fair play, and proper treatment of rivals, and facilitate infrastructure projects and community development efforts. Sports thus become a key issue of governance and the people’s trust in sports must be carefully cultivated and protected through proper policymaking.
Conclusion
Sports are inevitably connected to issues ranging from nation-building, global trade, and development to issues of governance, peacebuilding, and transnational crime, and, with their power having been recognized by those in leadership positions, sports have been used to meet both noble and corrupt goals in each world region. For the world of sports to not be corrupted and exploited but rather retain its significance as an honest, productive, and unifying pastime and fulfilling activity for people of all walks of life, it is necessary to ensure proper policymaking is applied. Sport disciplines and athletes, across gender, age, nationality, and bodily ability divisions, should be properly celebrated and rewarded. Issues such as inequity and impact of global inequality on the world of sports and trade in athletes should be examined. Comments made by FIFA higher-ups claiming that “less democracy is sometimes better for organizing a World Cup” should not be taken lightly so that fans around the world, myself included, and hopeful hosts do not have to suffer through the controversies that continue to surround the World Cup. Finally, sports should be seen as a way to celebrate humanity’s competitive spirit and need for teamwork and group association, but in a purely constructive manner that cherishes the spirit of cooperation and respect for rivals. One way to begin addressing these issues is to revive the UN Office on Sport for Development and Peace (UNOSDP) with a greater emphasis on monitoring mechanisms, possibly through sustained cooperation with the International Olympic Committee which currently completely overtook UNOSDP’s mandate as a cost-saving measure. This is all just the beginning and apparently a lot to ask, but if those in positions of leadership in the international political scene do not recognize and always keep the impact of sports in the back of their minds and at the forefront of some of the policymaking, we can amplify the positive impact of sports, which in one way or another reach and impact every human being on this planet. This article serves to be the catalyst of change.