The Political Use of Sport

Abstract

Before we begin to look at the widespread political use of sport made by states, it is worth considering that little academic research has been conducted by the very people one would assume would analyse the politics of sport: political scientists and international relations scholars. There are, of course, a number of exceptions that we have discussed elsewhere,¹ but, astonishingly, there is barely a political science or international relations ‘literature’ as such within which one could place one’s own work. Much of the (good) work that does exist has been penned by sociologists, sports studies scholars and, especially, historians. Allen Guttmann surveys the work concerning politics and sport undertaken by historians and picks out a number of major themes from the vast, and diverse, extant literature. Of his six themes, the most interesting for the current discussion include those scholars who have studied sport under fascism, under communism and those who have focused their attention on the politics of the Olympics.² As we shall see in this volume, these themes overlap and the Olympics become a political site used by regimes to promote their particular brand of ideology and, in the East German case, an event that drives, steers and dominates sport policy-making and policy cycles. This makes the lack of analysis of sport by political scientists and international relations scholars even more surprising: sport as a political resource has been used and manipulated for thousands of years since the Ancient Greeks and Romans — either externally in interstate relations, or internally, inter alia, as part of an attempt to create a sense of statehood among citizens.