Major sporting events such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup have long been more than innocent diversions from the more serious aspects of life. For their host countries, the propaganda potential of several weeks in the glare of the world media has been obvious since Hitler's carefully stage-managed Berlin Olympics of 1936, which also marked the dawn of the age of television. Things can go badly wrong, of course, as with the Olympic Village massacre of Munich 1972, or the Western boycott of the Moscow Games in 1984, but for a succession of host cities and countries the big quadrennial events on the international sporting calendar have generally been profitable platforms for self-projection on the global stage, with Beijing 2008 and South Africa 2010 next in line.
Successful participation can equally be of major significance. The Olympic medals table was a major battleground of the Cold War, with no greater winner than the German Democratic Republic after the East Germans won the right to send their own team in 1968. The iconic importance of West Germany's unexpected triumph at the 1954 World Cup has recently been recalled by the film The Miracle of Bern. Even Jürgen Sparwasser, an East German hero after scoring the winner in the one and only clash between the two German states during the 1974 World Cup, will be the subject of a TV movie.
The Cold War is over now, of course. It is perhaps not coincidental that the transition from the bipolar world of two competing ideological, socioeconomic and political systems to the “one world” of neoliberal “globalisation” has seen the Olympic Games eclipsed by the World Cup. The “world game” with its naked commercialism, unashamed professionalism, and often brutal national competition would seem a much better metaphor of the new era than the eclectic mix of sports, the pseudo-Hellenic ideological baggage (“not winning but taking part is what matters”) and “shamateurism” of Baron de Coubertin's creation. The 2006 World Cup, which has just got underway as this is written, provides some telling examples.
First, the absences. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, regular and on occasion distinguished participants in postwar World Cups, no longer exist. The former Yugoslavia is represented by Croatia and Serbia-Montenegro, the latter itself having dissolved into its constituent parts only days before the start of the competition. Of the successor states of the Soviet Union, only Ukraine is present, but not Russia. The only Russian presence, albeit a towering one, in Germany 2006 is that of Roman Abramovich, the richest and best-known of several dubious characters to have reinvested the enormous sums siphoned off the process of post-Communist privatisation into Western football. His club, Chelsea, owns the star players of a whole number of World Cup contestants—from Germany to Ukraine, Ivory Coast to Holland, Ghana to Argentina, not to mention England. The great majority of the players turning out in the World Cup for the countries of the former Communist world today play for rich Western European clubs, as indeed is the case for almost all of the players pulling on the colours of the participants from other continents.
Indeed, the globalisation of the “world game” so spectacularly marketed by FIFA turns out to be a mere chimera, or more precisely an almost exact replica of the “globalised” world economy. The much celebrated “rise of African football”, for instance, is nothing but an optical illusion owed in part to the dual citizenship of the sons of many black migrants, and in part to the efficiency of the West European clubs at spotting teenage talent in the slums of Accra, Johannesburg, and Dakar. It has nothing to do with the state of the game in the poverty and war-stricken countries of the continent, where such luxuries as public sporting facilities are, if anything, rarer now than they were immediately after independence.
Even in Latin America, with its strong football traditions, the international stars of Brazil and Argentina are now only glimpsed by those with access to private satellite and cable television networks broadcasting European matches. Conversely, the recent appearance in the World Cup of countries without any real “soccer” tradition, such as the USA, Japan, and Australia, owes everything to the efforts of the same media and other multinationals to fill the remaining voids in the global market for the product of professional football.
The World Cup as a metaphor for neoliberal globalisation would not be complete without the part of the “rogue nation” for the “international community” to gang up on: Fortuitously, Iran have qualified for the tournament, thus providing politicians of all German parties, the German trade union federation, and various Zionist groups the opportunity to organise demonstrations at their matches against the mere possibility of President Ahmadinejad coming to watch his team. The uproar over the latter's stupid comments on the Holocaust is, of course, little more than part of the propaganda campaign to prepare for Israeli or US military action over the alleged Iranian nuclear threat. At Iran's first match in Nuremberg, Bavaria's Interior Minister called upon all Germans to “stand side by side with Israel” but not, presumably, to persuade the only nuclear power in the Middle East, and nonsignatory of the NNPT, to accept an international inspection regime. The far-right or, not to mince words, neo-Nazi NPD meanwhile cancelled planned pro-Ahmadinejad demonstrations on the grounds that it did not want to add to security problems in Germany during the World Cup.
Which brings us back to the question of big sporting occasions as platforms for the propagandistic self-projection: What does “Germany 2006” tell the world about the state of the host nation? Not a lot, is the answer, but therein lies a truth too. The last time the World Cup was held in the country, in 1974, it was in West Germany of course, closely following the Munich Olympics of 1972 and the bloody terrorist attack on the Israeli team. Notwithstanding their surprise defeat by the East German Cold War rival in the first round, the team of Beckenbauer (now the organiser of Germany 2006) & Co. won the championship, and were expected to win. It was a time at which the self-confidence of the Federal Republic had reached new heights not only on the football pitch: the era of Willy Brandt's and Helmut Schmidt's Modell Deutschland, of the economic giant finally preparing to grow in political stature too. The message in 2006 is more low-key, bland even, and not only because of the low expectations of the host nation's team. The tepid slogan “the world as a guest among friends”, the opening ceremony with its awkward mix of thigh-slapping Schuhplattler folklore and Berlin hip-hop multiculturalism, are suggestive less of a confident cosmopolitanism than of “globalised” marketing. Compare the two iconic stadium buildings in Munich: on the one hand, the 1970s Olympic stadium with its innovative, lightly floating transparent roof, on the other the “capitalist realism” of the Allianz Arena (sic), a rotund colossus boasting only the ability to change colours at the flick of a switch. This is Germany 2006: Angela Merkel not Willy Brandt, Grand Coalition not social democracy, unsure of its place in the “new world order” but fluent in the PR esperanto of the new globalism.
The next issue of Debatte will be devoted to an attempt to assess the state of Germany in the first decade of the twenty-first century more systematically, through a series of specially commissioned articles focusing on the domestic German scene. In this issue, topics range from Michael Fleming's analysis of the widespread abstentionism in recent Polish parliamentary and presidential elections—an analysis that raises many issues pertaining equally to other countries even where the actual abstention rates remain lower—to Franz Oswald's suggestion that the relationship between the US and Europe is one of “soft balancing” rather than outright rivalry. Winfried Wolf, former member of the Bundestag for the PDS and a leading campaigner against the privatisation of the German railways, exposes the hypocrisy of the European Union's rhetorical commitment to an environment-friendly transport policy. The issue is completed by Chris Ford's contribution to Ukrainian labour history and a commentary by Michael Barratt Brown on the death of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic while on trial before the International Tribunal in The Hague.