The Geopolitics of Global Aspiration: Sport Mega-events and Emerging Powers

Abstract

What is the significance of the fact that several recent or upcoming sport mega-events are hosted by emerging powers such as China (the 2008 Beijing Games), India (2010 Commonwealth Games), South Africa (2010 FIFA World Cup), Russia (2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi) or Brazil (2014 FIFA World Cup)? This paper analyses events hosted by three states of the emerging power (or so-called BRICSA) axis. These are the 2008 Olympics, the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the 2010 New Delhi Commonwealth Games. It suggests that the hosting of such events by today's emerging powers occurs through a common agenda: to showcase economic achievements, to signal diplomatic stature or to project, in the absence of other forms of international influence, soft power. Furthermore, emerging powers can reshape the way in which events are viewed, planned for and commercialized, and by which they impact upon stakeholders. In all, sport mega-events constitute a key part of the political imagineering of emerging powers, serving as a focal point both for the type of society and state these authorities try to create, as well as for the position in the international order these rulers attempt to craft. While this strategy has some success, it also tends to come at some material and symbolic costs for these states.

Notes

[1] See for instance Brownell, Beijing's Games.

[2]‘See you in Delhi’ 2010 Commonwealth Games promotional video, available at www.thecgf.com/games/intro.asp?yr_2010, accessed 17 Jun. 2009; also see Black, ‘The Symbolic Politics of Sport Mega-Events’.

[3]‘Not Quite Yet a House of Brics’, Financial Times, 17 June 2009. For analyses of emerging powers see Antkiewicz and Whalley, ‘BRICSAM and the Non-WTO’; Shaw et al., ‘Global and/or Regional Development’; and Pattnayak,‘India as an Emerging Power’.

[4] Nel et al., South Africa's Multilateral Diplomacy; Adebajo et al., South Africa in Africa.

[5] See Alden and Vieira, ‘The New Diplomacy of the South’ for a discussion of the IBSA trilateral forum.

[6] Speech by Indonesian president, Sukarno to GANEFO Preparatory Conference, 27–29 April 1963. Cited in Pauker, ‘Ganefo I’, 174 (italics in original).

[7] See for instance Horne and Manzenreiter, Sports Mega-Events and Roche, Mega-Events and Modernity for reviews.

[8] Avery Brundage in correspondence to Otto Mayer, IOC Secretary-General, 14 Sept. 1963, archives of the Olympic Studies Centre, Lausanne, Switzerland.

[9] Avery Brundage in correspondence to Mayer, 5 Jan. 1963, archives of the Olympic Studies Centre, Lausanne, Switzerland.

[10] Mbaye, The International Olympic Committee and South Africa, 107.

[11] See for instance Allison and Monnington, ‘Sport, Prestige and International Relations’; Houlihan, Sport and International Politics and Lowe et al., Sport and International Relations.

[12] For instance Black, ‘The Symbolic Politics of Sport Mega-Events’; Black and Van der Westhuizen, ‘The Allure of Global Games’; and Cornelissen, ‘Scripting the Nation’.

[13] World Bank, World Development Indicators 2009, 352.

[14] See for instance Taylor, China and Africa.

[15] This was intended to serve a number of diplomatic purposes for the country, central of which was to gesture support for the anti-Western political propaganda of Indonesia and the wider Afro-Asian bloc, but also to exhibit its own strength. The country is rumoured to have paid a substantial portion of the costs for hosting GANEFO, and it sent the largest delegation of athletes. Chinese athletes stood out for the level of their performances, winning the greatest number of medals (171 in total, 68 of those gold medals) (Pauker, ‘Ganefo I’). In this China significantly outshone the Soviet Union, a key ideological rival. The country's performance also lent it symbolic prominence in the developing world which in subsequent years the PRC sought to transform into new diplomatic alliances.

[16] Rogge, interview, ‘The View from the Top’, Sport Business International 142 (2009), 26.

[17] Reuters, ‘Beijing Games to be costliest, but no debt legacy’, 5 Aug. 2008, available at www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Olympics/idUSPEK25823820080805, accessed 11 Mar. 2009.

[18] See Cornelissen, ‘Scripting the Nation’.

[19] See Black, ‘The Symbolic Politics of Sport Mega-Events’.

[20] 2010 FIFA World Cup Local Organizing Committee, media presentation, 25 May 2007.

[21]‘Opening Address by Sport and Recreation Minister M. Stofile at the International Year of African Football and 2010 World Cup Workshop, Pretoria, 7 March 2007’, Government Communication and Information System, Pretoria.

[22] T. Manuel, ‘Budget Speech 2007 by Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel MP’. Government Communication and Information Services, Pretoria. Grant Thornton, ‘Updated Economic Impact of the 2010 FIFA World Cup’. Media Press Release, 21 April 2010.

[23] See Cornelissen, ‘“It's Africa's Turn!”’.

[24] Pattnyak, ‘India as an Emerging Power’.

[25] Black, ‘Dreaming Big’.

[26] See Smith and Fox, ‘From “Event-Led” to “Event-Themed” Regeneration’; and ‘People, Place, Passion’, Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games Candidate City File.

[27] Indian Olympic Association, Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games, 47.

[28] Ibid., 52.

[29]‘2010 Games in Delhi to be Greenest: Dikshit’, India Today, 13 Jan. 2009.

[30]‘Commonwealth Games has no IPL option to up sticks from Delhi’, The Guardian, 24 March 2009.

[31]‘Lula: An Olympics would mean more to Brazil than the US’, Inside the Games, 30 April 2009 available at www.insidethegames.com/show-news.php?id=5588, accessed 5 May 2009.