[Reader-list] The Olympics as Nationalist Theater

[Isaac D W Souweine]

Dear Sarai Reader List:

Having just joined the list today, I thought I might as well make what
passes for a grand entrance. 

Below is an article that I have been working on, the title of which
(same as the title of this post) should be self-explanatory. 

As the newest iteration of Olympic theater prepares to descend upon us,
I hope that it provides a useful orientation from which to view the
spectacle. 

If this post stimulates a hunger for more Olympic history tidbits,
please let me know, as I've got a great collection. 

Yours,
Isaac Souweine

New Delhi - India
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The Olympics as Nationalist Theater
By Isaac Souweine

The Olympics are a “celebration of humanity”, a realm of pure athletic
competition insulated from the tarnished world of politics. The idea has
a cheerful sort of mass appeal. Lost within the idealistic glow,
however, is an understanding of the Olympics’ role in modern history.
Far from being accidentally “marred” by politics, the Olympic Games were
created and sustained by political forces – primarily nationalism in
both liberal and socialist forms – which have habitually used the
Olympic theater as a crucial arena for contesting the shape of the
international order.

The tradition of Olympic politics is a venerable one. In ancient Greece,
city-states fought for control over the Olympic temples and used
athletic victories in the Games to establish prestige. The first modern
Olympic revivals, contested four times between 1859 and 1885 under the
leadership of a Greek philanthropist named Evangelis Zappas, were
crucial moments in the consolidation of a newly minted Greek state.
Indeed, the history of modern organized sports – most of which took
their present form in the mid nineteenth century – is inseparable from
the politics of nineteenth century nationalism: gymnastics (now physical
education) was pioneered in Germany and Sweden as a way of strengthening
national armies, while the English aristocracy understood rugby and
cricket as proper training for colonial service. 

As for the founder of the modern Olympics, a French aristocrat named
Pierre de Coubertin, he thought that organized sport would be a boon to
French soldiers, whom to his mind lacked vigor on the battlefield. Not
content with developing French sporting culture, Coubertin envisioned a
festival of international competition between nations. Though well aware
that such a venue would serve mostly to strengthen national rivalries,
Coubertin effectively packaged his Olympic brainchild (largely filched
from Zappas sans attribution) in the internationalist rhetoric of the
day: “Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other
lands. That is the true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is
introduced into Europe the cause of Peace will have received a new and
strong ally.”1 Coubertin is also famous for his vigorous defense of
Olympic amateurism, a seemingly commendable ideal that, among other
things, cleared the way for a nationalist monopoly over Olympic bodies
and their symbolic power. 

CONSOLIDATION OF THE OLYMPICS AS NATIONALIST THEATER

In their first forty years - from Athens (1896) to Munich (1936) - the
Olympics solidified their identity as the pre-eminent international
theater of nationalism. While predictable in retrospect, this
development was not inevitable. In the inaugural Athens Games, athletes
wore their club uniforms as opposed to their national uniforms, and a
local capitalist footed the bill for the entire games, as the price tag
was beyond the reach of the fledgling Greek state. The next two
Olympics, in Paris (1900) and St. Louis (1904), were both overshadowed
by the era’s pre-eminent sphere for the performance of the nation – The
World’s Fair. 

After this shaky start, however, the Olympics soon found their
nationalist stride. In the first London Games (1908), athletes marched
into the stadium behind their respective flags; though not before the
English and Russians tried to prevent the Irish and Finns from
displaying their colors. The nationalist symbology of the Games would
not be complete, however, until the first Los Angles Games (1932)
introduced the now familiar victory ceremonies in which medal winners
stand on a victory podium while flags fly and anthems play. The
development of Olympic symbols demarcating a neutral sphere of peace,
fellowship and international fraternity was slightly more regular - the
Olympic Flag and Oath appearing at the Antwerp Games (1920); the Olympic
Flame at the Amsterdam Games (1928) and the Olympic Torch Relay at the
Berlin Games (1936). Presided over by Hitler and an ascendant Nazi party
in full regalia, the Berlin Games provided a twisted culmination to this
period of Olympic nationalist theater, a performance immortalized in
Leni Riefensthal’s phenomenal and disturbing film Olympia. 

THE OLYMPICS AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ORDER

With the return to the Olympics of Russian athletes absent since 1912,
the Helsinki Games (1952) represented a major shift in the character of
the Olympics as nationalist theater. For the next thirty odd years, the
Games would be waged as contests for international superiority between
communism and capitalism. While communist countries achieved a more
crushing monopoly over their athletes’ bodies, which became laboratories
for testing the power of the socialist state, both sides used this ever
more crucial venue for elaborate performances of national superiority
and visceral identification of national enemies. Rather than an aberrant
defiance of the Games’ essence then, the decision by Eastern Block
athletes to eschew the hospitality of the Helsinki Olympic village is
better understood as the first salvo in a contest that would culminate
in the back-to-back Olympic boycotts in Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles
(1984).

While the battle between capitalism and communism was the main act in
this period of Olympic theater, it was not the only one; the post-war
Olympics also provided a space to affirm and define a new broader
international community. In acknowledgement of the bigger, broader
post-war world, the IOC began awarding the Games to sites outside the
European-American nexus: Melbourne (1956), Tokyo (1964), Mexico City
(1968). Meanwhile, dozens of newly created post-colonial nations, many
of which had specious histories as unique cultural or political units,
used the Olympics to assert and confirm their identities on a world
stage. The nature of Olympic competition, in which a single athlete from
a small nation could symbolically defeat the entire world, merely added
to the symbolic effect, though medals for fledgling states remained scarce.

The new international community also used the Olympics to dictate rules
for membership, most famously in the exclusion of South Africa
(1960-1992) and Rhodesia (1972), both for apartheid politics. More
common than official sanction by the IOC, which after all remained an
institution ‘above politics’, was the use of the Olympic boycott as a
way of contesting the shape of the international community. A shockingly
long list, the roll-call of Olympic refusniks in the post-war period
includes: Arab nations protesting Israeli militarism (1956); African
nations protesting New Zealand’s S. Africa rugby tour (1976); China for
various reasons (1932-1984), and of course the massive boycotts in
Moscow and Los Angeles. Such consistent use of the Olympics as a site to
contest the nature of the international order stands in sharp contrast
to the 1936 Games, where the world community left it to Jesse Owens’
memorable four-gold performance to register a silent protest against the
Nazi regime.  

As a necessary correlate, the development of a fully realized Olympic
national theater created a space for challenges to national hegemony.
The Mexico City Games (1968) were most memorable in this regard, with
American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos saluting their flag with
black-gloved fists and Vera Caslavaska, gold medal winning Czech
gymnast, lowering her head during the playing of her anthem only months
after signing a manifesto against Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia.
In staunch defense of its apolitical stage for nationalist politics, the
IOC quickly expelled the American sprinters, chasing them with the
ironic claim that “The basic principle of the Olympic Games is that
politics plays no part whatsoever in them.”2 A more chilling and
contemporarily relevant example of the Olympics as anti-national
spectacle occurred at the Munich Games (1972), when PLO operatives
kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes and officials, all of whom died during
a bungled rescue attempt.   
	
THE OLYMPICS AS NATIONALIST MEDIA SPECTACLE

While today’s Olympics still function as the great theater of
nationalism, the meaning of the performance has shifted to revolve
around global consumer capitalism’s appropriation of ‘national brands’.
Though athletes are still clothed, draped and serenaded with their
nation’s symbols, the significance of these performances now has as much
to do with their marketing potential as their geo-political
ramifications. Meanwhile, host nations use the Olympics to perform their
unique national cultures for the world while simultaneously asserting
their ability to participate in the international economic system. As
for the inherent eroticism of Olympic bodies –  once monopolized by the
ideological needs of nation states, now the same toned and shapely forms
are fodder for an intensely sexualized capitalist system that lays equal
claim to professional Olympic athletes and their close cousins,
amateurs-with-endorsement. 

First covered fully by television in Rome (1960), the Olympics’
transition to nationalist media spectacle began in earnest in 1984, when
Peter Uberoth, of National Football League fame, secured the first
Olympic corporate sponsors for the second Los Angeles Games. Four years
later, the Seoul Olympics (1988) saw the first official appearance of
professional athletes, as well as the first well-marketed Olympic mascot
– a cute tiger perfect for mugs and t-shirts. By the time the Olympics
arrived in Barcelona (1992), the transition was complete. Commencing
with a fabulous opening ceremonies that brazenly presented Spain as the
center of European culture, Barcelona offered a compelling theater for a
new internationalist capitalism that saw nation states as just one cog
in a larger system of globalizing profit. No longer sullied by apartheid
or the Cold War, Barcelona was a boycott-free, ostensibly politics-free
arena for the production of capitalist sporting spectacle. 

Twelve years later, the Athens Games will seek to raise the bar further.
For the hosts, the Games will offer a chance to perform their uniquely
Olympic national culture in an extended add for www.visitgreece.com,
while hopefully debunking rumors of a small nation’s inability to stage
such a massive event. Satellite television will beam the images of
Athens 2004 to billions worldwide, with table tennis slated to be the
most watched final, during which TV executives will be caught in candid
shots drooling at the mere mention of Beijing 2008. During slow moments,
readers of FHM magazine (and surely internet users around the globe)
will be able to devour photos of America’s female Olympians. While the
Olympics in Athens will remain a theater in which nations use the their
athletes bodies to consolidate their national bodies, the best
competitors will now be brands in their own right, even as the
interpretation of citizenship for top athletes’ grows ever more
flexible. As for once troublesome boycotts, they will be replaced by a
worldwide obsession with the newest sub-national threat to the
international status quo – terrorism.

FROM ANALYSIS TO ASSESSMENT

In many ways, the Olympics present the best that the international order
had to offer. An aesthetically beautiful sublimation of nationalist
competition, the Olympics can engender a commendably inclusive form of
communalism, as in the planned appearance in Athens of two Afghani
female athletes. At their best, the Olympics even foster a sense of fair
play and universalism that exceed the exclusivism of nation states. As
for the Olympic alliance with global capitalism, athletics is a far more
wholesome product than most of what is available on the world market,
both in terms of the actual product of spectator sports and the
attendant increase in athletic participation at all levels. 

None of which is to say that we should mislead ourselves about the
inherent limitations of Olympic theater. The Olympics’ seemingly
innocuous performances of nationalist aggression indubitably pave the
way for less benign reprisals outside of the stadium. Moreover, in
allying ever more closely with global capitalism, the Olympics foster a
particular sort of economic globalization that has little capacity for
the creation of a just economic order. To put it another way, if the
Olympics occasionally perform a better, more wholesome international
order, they have little ability to think outside the boundaries in which
that order is conceived. Nor does the Olympics’ disavowal of politics
mitigate the problem; if anything, this formal neutrality merely
increases the power of their implicit affirmation of the political
status quo. 

To accept the notion that the Olympics are or should be somehow outside
of politics is to engage in idealistic self-deception. Nationalism, in
both liberal and socialist forms, has literally and symbolically created
our Olympic athletes and the stage upon which they perform. While this
fact does not erase the phenomenal sporting feats achieved by Olympic
athletes, it nevertheless bears remembering as another version of the
Olympic theater unfolds.