‘A Secret Instinct of Social Preservation’: legitimacy and the dynamic (re)constitution of Olympic conceptions of the ‘good’

Abstract

Despite the relative novelty of the contemporary sport-for-development movement, instrumentalising sport for purposes of human and collective development is nothing new. The International Olympic Committee's (ioc) belated efforts to play a leadership role in this movement is ironic, given its 117-year commitment to placing sport at the service of world-cultural ideals of progress, equality, development, modernisation and international understanding. The ioc's behaviour is best understood with reference to the institutional environments it has inhabited. Rather than adapting primarily because of ineffectiveness, the ioc has changed the meanings of its social interventions (often unwittingly) in order to secure legitimacy among its institutional peers and other exogenous actors in world politics (eg states, activist organisations, etc). Reinventing itself in accordance with evolving world-cultural preferences allows it to survive and have a measure of power. Three historical periods are reviewed to illustrate how the social purposes of the Olympic movement have adapted to account for changes in the ioc's institutional environment. Its recent embrace of the sport-for-development movement is merely its latest reinvention.

Notes

1 J Rogge, ‘The potential of sport in the search for peace and development’, speech to the ‘International Forum on Sport, Peace and Development’, Olympic Museum, Lausanne, 7 May 2009. In his speech, Rogge actually alluded to a much older heritage for such an idea, namely the intersubjective notion that the Games in ancient Greece ‘were about an ideal, for peace and human development’.

2 For extended consideration of the distinctions between rationalist and social (including Wertrational) causal explanations or world politics, see I Hurd, After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007; A Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; S Weber, ‘Origins of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’, International Organization, 48(1), 1994; and M Barnett & M Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

3 R Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage, 1992.

4 F Lechner & J Boli, World Culture, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, p 267.

5 See M Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996, ch 2.

6 See, for example, M Finnemore, ‘Norms, culture, and world politics: insights from sociology's institutionalism’, International Organization, 50(2), 1996, pp 325–347.

7 Lechner & Boli, World Culture.

8 For a fuller account of sociological institutionalism, the world polity approach, and the place of international nongovernmental organisations (including specifically the ioc) therein, see J Meyer & B Rowan, ‘Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony’, American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 1977, pp 340–363; WR Scott & M Meyer, Institutional Environments and Organizations: Structural Complexity and Individualism, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994; M Meyer & L Zucker, Permanently Failing Organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1989; J Boli & GM Thomas, ‘World culture in the world polity: a century of international non-governmental organization’, in F Lechner & J Boli (eds), The Globalization Reader, New York: Wiley–Blackwell, 2004; Boli & Thomas (eds), Constructing World Culture, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999; and JW Meyer, J Boli, GM. Thomas & F Ramirez, ‘World society and the nation-state’, American Journal of Sociology, 103(1), 1997.

9 For example, I have elsewhere demonstrated how the ioc's drive for the universal inclusion of nation-states mirrors that of other global international organisations such as the UN. B Peacock, ‘“Géographie sportive”: playing the Olympic sovereignty game’, MA thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, June 2009. Maurice Roche has similarly argued that ‘New nations in particular have needed both political and cultural ‘international arenas’ or public spheres in which to display themselves, be recognized and be legitimated … in different ways and with different implications, nations could be said to have needed recognition by the Olympic Movement … almost as much as they have needed recognition by and participation in the United Nations organization’. M Roche, ‘The Olympics and “global citizenship”’, Citizenship Studies, 6(2), 2002, p 2. Others who have demonstrated other aspects of isomorphism in the history of the Olympic movement include J Hoberman, ‘ Toward a theory of Olympic internationalism’, Journal of Sport History, 22(1), 1995; and A Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia, Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.

10 The majority of Coubertin's body was laid to rest in Lausanne while his heart, in accordance with his wishes, was interred at ancient Olympia in Greece.

11 P de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, ed Norbert Müller, Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000, p 747.

12 Weber, ‘Origins of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’, p 5.

13 For an interesting and potentially influential exposition on neo-institutionalism and the potential for a new strand of institutionalist research, namely ‘discursive institutionalism’, see VA Schmidt, ‘Discursive institutionalism: the explanatory power of ideas and discourse’, Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 2008, pp 303–326.

14 See, among others, MacAloon; Guttmann, Sports; Quanz; CR Hill, Olympic Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996; DC Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004; N Müller, Coubertin and Olympism, International Pierre de Coubertin Committee, 1998; AE Senn, Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1999; and E Weber, ‘Pierre de Coubertin and the introduction of organized sports in France’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 1970, pp 3–26.

15 MacAloon, p 5.

16 Coubertin, Olympism, p 188.

17 MacAloon, pp 22–23.

18 Coubertin, Olympism; and MacAloon.

19 See MacAloon, esp ch 8.

20 Quanz.

21 Quoted in ibid, p 123.

22 Coubertin, Olympism, p 583.

23 Ibid, p 340.

24 N Müller, ‘The idea of peace as Coubertin's vision for the modern Olympic movement: development and pedagogic consequences’, Sports Journal (Daphne, AL, US Sports Academy), 9(1), 2006.

25 Coubertin, Olympism; and MacAloon.

26 MacAloon, p 189.

27 MacAloon. The reference here to only ‘men’ and not also women is intentional; Coubertin did not originally intend to include (or educate, as it were) women as competitors at the Games.

28 Ibid, p 102.

29 Coubertin, Olympism, p 209.

30 For more information on Coubertin, see Hoberman, ‘Toward a theory of Olympic internationalism’; Quanz; and C Koulouri, ‘Olympic Games, Olympism and internationalism: a historical perspective’, Hitotsubashi Invited Fellow Program Discussion Paper Series, February 2009, pp 1–18. Of course, in many ways, the same dichotomy continues to exist today and is doubtless fostered by institutions such as the United Nations system. Indeed world polity theorists understand states as one of the most fundamental poles of world culture and they see many contradictions and conflicts as a result of the tension between individual rights, state sovereignty, and internationalist/cosmopolitan/globalised values.

31 In many ways the tendency of President Rogge in recent times to assert that the ioc is ‘only’ a sports organisation (while implicitly hoping that the predicted benefits will follow) highlights the extent to which the ioc remains somewhat uncomfortable straying too far from this original value that it believes it adds to world society.

32 See, for example, Lechner & Boli.

33 Coubertin, Olympism, p 590.

34 Boli & Thomas.

35 Peacock, ‘“Géographic sportive”’.

36 See, for example, M Barnett, ‘The new United Nations politics of peace: from juridical sovereignty to empirical sovereignty’, Global Governance, 1, 1995, pp 79–97; and RH Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

37 Meyer & Rowan, ‘Institutionalized organizations’.

38 For examples of loose coupling in educational policy, see B Fuller & R Rubinson (eds), The Political Construction of Education: The State, School Expansion, and Economic Change, New York: Praeger, 1992. For examples of loose coupling in national scientific policies, see Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, ch 2.

39 N Elias, ‘An essay on sports and violence’, in E Dunning & N Elias (eds), Quest for Excitement, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986, p 151.

40 Guttmann, Sports.

41 H Digel, Sport in a Changing Society: Sociological Essays,, Schorndorf: Karl Hofmann, 1995, pp 123, 126. Despite the decline in popularity of (and the controversy surrounding) modernisation theory in recent decades, Digel, as late as the 1990s, remarked: ‘everybody has realized that the concept of modernization and the related theoretical arguments, which have been criticized for decades, are more attractive today than ever’ (p 123).

42 The following are some of the technical goals of this assistance: ‘to assist the nocss in the preparation of their athletes and teams for their participation in the Olympic Games; to develop the technical sports knowledge of athletes and coaches; to improve the technical level of athletes and coaches in cooperation with nocs and Ifs, including through scholarships; to train sports administrators; to create, where needed, simple, functional and economical sports facilities in cooperation with national or international bodies; to support the organisation of competitions at national, regional and continental level under the authority or patronage of the nocs and to assist the nocs in the organisation, preparation and participation of their delegations in regional and continental Games; to urge governments and international organisations to include sport in official development assistance’. International Olympic Committee, Olympic Charter, Lausanne, 2007.

43 B Peacock, ‘Olympic potential: a proposed shift from trickle-down Olymponomics to grassroots football within the German Olympic Committee's development program’, Honor Thesis, Brigham Young University, August 2007.

44 International Olympic Committee, ‘Minutes of the Executive Board Meetings’, Amsterdam, 8–16 May 1970.

45 German football coach Rudi Gutendorf gives an entertaining first-hand account of the personal advice West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer gave to him before the former embarked on a football development project; if Gutendorf didn't do a good job, Adenauer reminded him, then the developing countries would turn to the East Germans and the communist bloc to get a better coach. R Gutendorf, Machen Se et Jut, Herr Jutendorf, Verlag die Werkstatt, 2004. For a more general treatment of the ideological nature of sport development interventions, see Peacock, ‘Olympic potential’.

46 Philip Agee's insider exposé makes direct reference to a number of such activities during his tenure with the cia. Agee, Inside the Company: cia Diary, Des Plaines, IL: Bantam Books, 1975.

47 The gap between rhetoric and practice is, as noted in the discussion of loose coupling above, actually a commonly observed phenomenon among world polity theorists. The pressures to conform to isomorphic forces rather than to be solely concerned with effective outcomes often generate this divide.

48 International Olympic Committee, ‘Minutes of the Executive Board Meetings’, emphasis added.

49 United Nations Security Council, Resolution 757, 30 May 1992, art. 8(b). The resolution specifically required that member states ‘take the necessary steps to prevent the participation in sporting events on their territory of persons or groups representing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’.

50 For information about the ioc's strained relationship before the 1980s with, for example, see Senn, Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games, pp. 174–75.

51 Evidence that faith in multilateralism was on the increase in this period is to be found in John J Mearsheimer's refutation of it. JJ Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the future: instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15(1), 1990, pp 5–56. For a discussion of this faith in relation to UN affairs in sub-Saharan Africa, see C O'Sullivan, ‘The United Nations, decolonization, and self-determination in Cold War sub-Saharan Africa, 1960–1994’, Journal of Third World Studies, 22(2), 2005, pp 103–120. Optimism in multilateralism was particularly noticeable in the areas of security and related notions of international law. JT O'Neill & N Rees, United Nations Peacekeeping in the post-Cold War Era, New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005, pp 1, 38; and J O'Brien, International Law, New York: Routledge, 2001, p 60.

52 For recent information on ioc partnerships with UN agencies, see http://www.olympic.org/en/content/The-IOC/Commissions/International-relations-/?Tab=2. Among the more prominent organisational partnerships are those with the International Labour Organisation, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Joint United Nations Programme on hiv/aids, the United Nations Children's Fund, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the United Nations Development Programme.

53 LB Andonova, Globalization, Agency, and Institutional Innovation: The Rise of Public–Private Partnerships in Global Governance, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagements Working Paper No 2006–004, March 2006, Colby College, p 2.

54 M Minow, ‘Public and private partnerships: accounting for the new religion’, Harvard Law Review, 116(5), 2003, pp 1229–1270.

55 TA Börzel & T Risse, ‘Public–private partnerships: effective and legitimate tools of transnational governance?’, in E Grande & L Pauly (eds), Complex Sovereignty: Reconstituting Political Authority in the Twenty-First Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

56 For an extensive accounting of the intimate relationship between unep and the ioc (including the press release regarding the Champion of the Earth award), see unep and the International Olympic Committee, at http://www.unep.org/sport_env/Olympic_games/index.asp and http://www.unep.org/sport_env/olympics_unep.asp.

57 One recent press release, found at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Olympism-in-Action/Development-through-sport/Sport-officially-recognised-to-boost-MDGs-/, accessed 23 September 2010, highlights, for example, how sport was explicitly praised in a recent review of progress towards the mdgs. Such commentary is very common within both the ioc and the UN system, and the role of sport in the mdgs has been frequently mentioned by the recent UN Secretaries General (including Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Kofi Annan and, presently, Ban Ki-moon) and the two Special Advisers of Sport for Peace and Development that Annan and Ban have appointed (Adolf Ogi and Wilfred Lemke, respectively).

58 United Nations General Assembly, 65th Session, ‘Keeping the Promise: United to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals’ (A/65/L.1), 17 September 2010, art. 67.

59 United Nations General Assembly, 65th Session, ‘Sport as Means to Promote Education, Health, Development and Peace’ (A/65/L.4), 18 October 2010.

60 D Booth & C Tatz, ‘Swimming with the big boys? The politics of Sydney's 2000 Olympic bid’, Sporting Traditions, 11(1), 1994, p 5.

61 K Toohey & A Veal, The Olympic Games: A Social Science Perspective, Trowbridge, UK: Cromwell Press, 2007, p 28.

62 ‘We won't lobby for Nobel Peace Prize: ioc chief’, Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa), 11 February 2010.

63 ‘Sport to push UN Millennium Development Goals’, 1 June 2010, at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Olympism-in-Action/Development-through-sport/Sport-to-push-UN-Millennium-Developme nt-Goals-/.

64 Start, for example, at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Olympism-in-Action/.

65 A Cornwall & K Brock, ‘What do buzzwords do for development policy: a critical look at “participation”, “empowerment” and “poverty reduction”’, Third World Quarterly, 26(7), 2005, pp 1043–1060. The cynical notion of ‘buzzwords’ is itself a manifestation of institutionalist theory; by emphasising rhetoric and formal practices instead of effectiveness and outcome, organisations can maintain a rationalised legitimacy within their various environments without accomplishing stated goals and in the face of negative unintended consequences.

66 ‘Taking Olympic education forward in Oceania’, 5 August 2009, at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/The-IOC/Commissions/Culture-and-Olympic-Education/?articleNewsGroup=−1&articleId= 72477.

67 ‘Wanted: women's participation!’, 10 March 2008, at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/The-IOC/Commissions/Women-and-Sport/?articleNewsGroup=− 1&articleId=55316.

68 ‘Gender equality in and through sport discussed at UN meetings’, 29 June 2010, at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/The-IOC/Commissions/Women-and-Sport/?articleNewsGroup=-1&articleId=93070.

69 See http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Olympism-in-Action/Development-through-sport/.

70 R Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First, Harlow, UK: Longman, 1983.

71 See http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Olympism-in-Action/At-grassroot-level/.

72 The Olympic Movement in Society: ioc Final Report 2005–2008, p 54, emphasis added, at http://www.olympic.org/Documents/IOC_Interim_and_Final_Reports/2005-2008_IOC_Final_Report.pdf. This final report for the 2005–08 period provides a fairly comprehensive overview of the ioc's development interventions.

73 Boli & Thomas.

74 Payne; and R Barney, S Martyn & S Wenn, Selling the Five Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2004.

75 For a helpful and contemporary overview of the bribery scandal and the reform efforts that were undertaken or suggested, see B Mallon, ‘The Olympic bribery scandal’, Journal of Olympic History, 8(2), 2000. For the mostly in-house investigation of and recommendations to the ioc, see International Olympic Committee, Report by the ioc 2000 Commission to the 110th ioc Session, Lausanne, 11–12 December 1999. It is interesting to note that this Commission, which was responsible for ‘cleaning up’ the ioc, was composed in part of individuals plucked from the institutional environment that the ioc aspired to inhabit (namely globally prominent political and business leaders such as Henry Kissinger, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Dick Ebersol (National Broadcasting Company, USA), and Giovanni Agnelli (Fiat)); their inclusion was intended to give the reform effort significant legitimacy regardless of the effectiveness of the reforms.

76 United States House of Representatives, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee, Olympic Site Selection Process, Hearing 15 December 1999; and oecd Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, art. 1(4).

77 Thus the ioc now releases quadrennial reports that are audited and comply with the International Financial Reporting Standards (ifrs; see www.ifrs.org for more information on the Standards and the governing body that regulates them). These are global accounting standards developed by the International Accounting Standards Board. The ifrs are rapidly becoming the uniform accounting practices throughout the world including, by 2011, in the USA. The ioc's final reports and the audits of them make extensive and comprehensive reference to the standards and their prescriptions for presentation, categorisation, uniformity, clarity and other details required by the ifrs. In this way, therefore, isomorphic forces have again brought about changes within ioc operations. The ifrs, however, are intended for profit-making firms, thus making the ioc's paradoxical status as a non-profit all the more difficult to understand and to hold to account. See, for example, The Olympic Movement in Society: ioc Final Report 2005–2008.

78 Z Bannerman & N May, ‘The truth behind the ioc's reforms’, Conférence de l'École des Sciences de l'Activité Physique: Résumés, Université Laurentienne, 25–26 March 2010, at http://www.laurentian.ca/NR/rdonlyres/2857CAAB-91E8-44D9-82AF-397AE8216F41/0/FrenchAbstractBooklet.pdf#page=7.

79 For the role of international organisations as ‘teachers’ of international norms, see Finnemore, National Interests in International Society; and M Finnemore, ‘International organizations as teachers of norms: the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and science policy’, International Organization, 47, 1993, pp 565–597.

80 See Roger Levermore and Lyndsay Hayhurst in this issue.

81 For example, a press release regarding a partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees refers to this csr ‘strategy’: ‘A successful partnership: ioc and unhcr’, 13 June 2007, at http://www.olympic.org/en/content/The-IOC/The-IOC-Institution1/?currentArticlesPageIPP=50&currentArticlesPage=10&articleNewsGroup=-1&articleId=54839.

82 For the range of activities that the ioc now considers csr, see K Mascagni, ‘ ioc corporate social responsibility—program activities that benefit for women and girls’, pp 1–14, at http://www.anoca.info/docs/ International_Olympic_Committee.pdf.

83 International Olympic Committee, Factsheet: Human Development through Sport, August 2009, p 3, at http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Reference_documents_Factsheets/Human_development_through_ sport.pdf.

84 For examples of the ioc acting as a financer of sport-for-development projects, consider the ioc's role in the ‘Foundation for Youth, Sports, and Peace’, founded by the so-called ‘Brazzaville Declaration’ (http://www.forumolympiquecongo.com/index_en.php) or the suggestion in a sport-for-development ‘Resources Manual’ that Zambian sport-for-development projects seek funding from the ioc. A Solli, Let's Start our own Sports Club: Resources Manual, Livingstone City Council, 2003,p 10, at http://assets.sportanddev.org/downloads/ how_to_develop_a_sports_club.pdf. The International Platform on Sport and Development likewise advises researchers of sport-for-development projects to consider the ioc's Postgraduate Research Grant Programme. U Selvaraju, ‘New opportunities in sport and development’, 31 May 2010, at http://www.sportanddev.org/newsnviews/news/?1720/New-Opportunities-in-Sport-and-Development.

85 A useful, recent and brief overview of the scope, purposes and institutional influences that act upon the ioc's development and peace agenda is its Factsheet: Human Development through Sport, noted above.

86 Coubertin, Olympism, p 508.

87 Lechner & Boli, p 239.

88 I, like Weber, do not intend to completely ‘substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history’ (Weber 1958). Instead, the purpose here is to highlight the necessity of a cultural (world polity) approach in understanding how and why the meanings of ioc social actions have changed over time. Also, for each of my proposed understandings of ioc adaptation, there may (very probably) be multiple (valid) interpretations or ‘causes’ of change; my effort has been to isolate what I believe to be the most causally significant factors. As noted earlier, the intense and obfuscating interplay between material and cultural variables makes it difficult to separate them and to identify the direction of causation. That the social meanings of Olympic values have changed over time is certainly the result of cultural phenomena; whether these phenomena were themselves overwhelmingly the result of material factors is another question, although I obviously do not believe this to be the case given the evidence presented.

89 For a treatment and defence of the power and autonomy of the ioc in world politics, see B Peacock, ‘“A virtual world government unto itself”: uncovering the rational–legal authority of the ioc in world politics’, Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, XIX, 2010. For a sociological understanding of the sources of international rationalised bureaucratic power, see Barnett & Finnemore, Rules for the World.

90 Rogge, ‘The potential of sport in the search for peace and development’. Of course, the fact that the forum occurred four years after the International Year of Sport and Physical Education (2005) seems excessively long for a genuinely enthusiastic party.