Sports Diplomacy

Origins, Theory and Practice

Stuart Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351126946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers an accessible overview of the role sport plays in international relations and diplomacy.

Sports diplomacy has previously been defined as an old but under-studied aspect of the estranged relations between peoples, nations and states. These days, it is better understood as the conscious, strategic and ongoing use of sport, sportspeople and sporting events by state and non-state actors to advance policy, trade, development, education, image, reputation, brand, and people-to-people links. In order to better understand the many occasions where sport and diplomacy overlap, this book presents four new, inter-disciplinary and theoretical categories of sports diplomacy: traditional, 'new', sport-as-diplomacy, and sports anti-diplomacy. These categories are further validated by a large number of case studies, ranging from the Ancient Olympiad to the recent appearance of esoteric, government sports diplomacy strategies, and beyond, to the activities of non-state sporting actors such as F.C. Barcelona, Colin Kaepernick and the digital world of e-sports. As a result, the landscape of sports diplomacy becomes clearer, as do the pitfalls and limitations of using sport as a diplomatic tool.

This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy, foreign policy, sports studies, and International Relations in general.

Part I

Sport, diplomacy and traditional sports diplomacy

1 A revised anthropology of diplomacy

Before the hybrid term sports diplomacy can be conceptualised, its individual parts must be correctly, and thoroughly, understood. To facilitate, this chapter employs interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, culture and sociology in order to establish the ‘essence’ of diplomacy (Jönsson and Hall 2005). At times, the reader may find this exercise pedantic, however, the concept of diplomacy is often misunderstood. For Sharp (2003, 857), it is a ‘notoriously tricky term … conveying many and different things’, and, Sir Harold Nicolson (1957, 3), one of the great diplomatic practitioner-theorists, agrees, writing that it is a ‘precise, although wide’ term.

A general misunderstanding of diplomacy is problematic because it over-simplifies a very complex phenomenon, as well as embeds an erroneous, annoying and incorrect stereotype of what diplomacy is, or what a diplomat does. As this chapter argues and documents, diplomacy is anything but simple. It is ancient, versatile and a fascinating institution that continues to operate ‘at the forefront of any international event of significance’ (Murray 2013, 30). A revised ‘exercise in political embryology’ therefore confirms that diplomacy is a primal, civilising institution that has always been fundamental to stable relations within and between all human societies, across all periods of history (Cohen 2013, 16). Often the difference between war and peace, it is a fundamentally important human invention.

Finally, this book aims to increase collaboration between the fields of sport and diplomacy. Therefore, sports theorists and practitioners need to understand what diplomacy is. There can be no hope for sports diplomacy if its future protagonists only know what half the term means. A crash course in politics, diplomacy and international relations thus ensues for the – respectfully – uninitiated. It is also hoped that the sports scientist or practitioner begins to recognise similarities with diplomacy, particularly its core purpose of minimising friction between separate peoples, nations and states.

Framing and challenging the stereotype of diplomacy and diplomats

To understand diplomacy is to first consider its relationship with politics and the concept of the government. In a simple, political and sociological sense, all human beings belong to distinct and separate political entities called states. Pecora provides a lengthy if thorough definition of a state as an entity with

control over a definite geographical territory of some size (that is larger than a city); an independent, domestically generated, and relatively centralized administrative apparatus; a distinct political structure, legal code, economy, currency, division of labour, and educational system; and a culture defined by language, arts customs, religion and/or race, that may be enormously varied by region and ethnicity but that generally has a dominant, hegemonic strain adopted by urban elites.

(Pecora 2001, 2)

A state, in other words, manages a fixed, geographical and sovereign territory which is overseen, managed and secured by a small urban elite or, in lay terms, a government. Governments are complex administrative, bureaucratic, cultural and legal arrangements that, quite simply, decide what resources the masses get, as well as where, when and how. There resources can be tangible or intangible because all humans have a ‘social contract’ (Rousseau 1913) with their state, an implicit agreement among the members of a society who have surrendered or sacrificed certain aspects of their individual sovereignty to the state in return for freedom, order, justice, welfare and security (idealistically, of course; not all states honour the contract). To realise these basic functions, governments evolved and developed many departments or ministries which specialise in defence, welfare, sport, economics and foreign affairs, for example.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is of particular relevance to this book because it is the custodian of foreign policy and diplomacy. A typical MFA is based in a nation’s capital, is staffed by professional civil servants, and acts as the government’s vanguard institution in all matters foreign. It formulates and executes foreign policy and manages a nation’s overseas embassies, consulates and commissions. These buildings are staffed by accredited diplomats who physically represent their state abroad, communicate their state’s core national interests or foreign policy positions to other states, and, via many bilateral and multilateral channels, negotiate with other diplomats. Diplomacy is therefore a means to a state’s foreign policy ends. As Berridge and colleagues (2001, 1) notes, diplomacy is ‘the term given to the official channels of communication employed by the members of a system of states’, whose ‘chief purpose’ is to ‘enable states to secure the objectives of their foreign policies without resort to force, propaganda, or law’. Besides representation, information gathering and dissemination, communication, and negotiation, one of the key functions of diplomacy is ‘the minimisation of friction in international affairs’ (Bull 1977, 165). Such friction is a by-product of a world of nations separated by borders, where one state can never be entirely sure of another state’s ultimate intentions. This is true in close, as well as, adversarial relationships.

Despite its vital role, diplomacy is often over-simplified, under-appreciated and, at times, disparaged. For ‘outsiders’, a stereotypical and, thus, incorrect view of the ‘dialogue between states’ prevails (Watson 1982). According to Seymour Finger (2002, 1), for example, a typical foreign service is made up of ‘rich young men’ who spend ‘most of their time on high living abroad’. Paul Sharp is more sardonic, claiming that ‘among general publics, a well-developed image exists of a privileged elite pursuing exciting and prestigious careers, without paying parking tickets and with varying degrees of effectiveness’ (1999, 40). Seminal books in the canon seem to reinforce this opinion of diplomacy. Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy tome, for example, is full of ‘pictures of grand old men at major international conferences that reshaped the contours of our world over the past few centuries’ (Varghese 2015). Diplomacy is often clichéd as an elitist canapé trail, populated by hapless, aristocratic, male elites, supping G&Ts in various, exotic locales. On the rare occasion diplomats do any work, it takes place in secret, rarefied, hermetic palaces far from the madding crowd, to borrow from the title of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel.

Such antiquated impressions of diplomacy persist, despite recent attempts by MFAs to lift some of their mystique. And, while some of it might be true (many diplomats do like a G&T, but it’s often well-deserved), as with most stereotypes these views are outdated and quite far from the truth. Stereotypes do a great disservice to a generally honourable, pacific institution. They also greatly annoy serving diplomats. Consider, for example, the opinion of Paul Wilson,¹ a serving Australian diplomat, who agreed that his profession

does carry a certain social cache. Frankly, however, if the diplomatic service reflected the stereotype – the champagne and caviar approach to international relations – then I’d be quite ill and out of a job. The thing about the canapé trail is that there is no urgency to it; the day-to-day business we take care of has a major amount of urgency to it.

(Wilson 2005)

Typecast views also vex diplomatic scholars because they also intrinsically know of the importance of diplomacy. After all, it is the ‘best means devised by civilisation for preventing international relations from being governed by force alone’ (Satow 1957, 1). Throughout the ages, it is diplomacy – not trade, statecraft, or armed force – that has been the difference between war and peace, chaos and order, suffering and progress. Cohen (1987, 1) quite rightly describes diplomacy as the ‘engine room’ of international affairs, an engine that drives trivial but important consular work as well as far more serious negotiations over safeguarding the world from nuclear annihilation. Diplomacy is therefore extremely important to the peaceful functioning of the international relations system. Moreover, diplomacy has always mattered to relations between dyadic, separate political communities. As the following section demonstrates, it is intrinsic to humans, the societies they form, and the relationships between those societies. By proving that diplomacy has always been a ‘master institution’, pointless, absurd and incorrect stereotypes that plague diplomacy can be banished (Butterfield and Wight 1966, 10).

A revised anthropology of diplomacy

Where, then, did diplomacy actually begin? This is a tricky question to answer because Diplomatic Studies has yet to embrace the ancient past, that is, the 190,000 years before the advent of so-called civilisation. Theorists have yet to fully embrace writing about diplomacy in a State of Nature,² with many tacitly accepting the view that diplomacy began fifteenth century Renaissance Italy, ancient Greece, or, further still, as a feature of the rudimentary political systems that emerged in during the Cradle of Civilization, c.8000–10000 BCE. To be fair, some scholars allude to the ancient past in diplomacy but often in a rather fleeting, clumsy manner. The great Sir Harold Nicolson (1957, 2), for example, simply stated that the ‘origins of diplomacy like buried in the darkness preceding what we call the “dawn of history” ’. Roetter (1963, 22) is equally vague, writing that diplomacy ‘just began when, in some dark, primordial forest of prehistoric days, two groups of savages, fighting over hunting boundaries, stolen cattle or abducted womenfolk, tired of slaughtering one another’.

In this ‘dark’ and ‘savage’ world, relations between tribes of humans seem rather brutal, Hobbesian and quite depressing. If, indeed, there was any diplomacy, it appears to have been born out of a mutual necessity to avoid killing one another. ‘There came a stage’, however, Nicolson writes,

when the anthropoid apes inhabiting one group of caves realised it might be profitable to reach some understanding with neighbouring groups regarding the limits of their respective hunting territories, rather than murdering emissaries upon arrival.

(Nicolson 1957, 2)

Again, this is not a good look for humans, or diplomacy. Images of roving bands of savage, cannibal-humans, fighting and roaming aimlessly around the drying plains of the Great Rift Valley comes to mind. Inter-tribal relations seem to be characterised by suspicion, violence and separation, and prehistoric life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ with our ancestors locked in a perpetual ‘war of all men against all men’ (Hobbes 1968, 168–188). As such, our forbearers are presented as violent anthropoids – estranged, barbaric, stone-age brutes that were saved by the light of civilisation.

The trouble with this view of early diplomacy is that it is too dark, whimsical, and, well, incorrect. If, for example, the scholar borrows insights from the field of anthropology the picture changes dramatically. Anthropological research suggests that our ancestors were far more diplomatic than scholars have been led to believe. Consider, for example, the excavations occurring at the Blombos Cave in South Africa (Henshilwood et al. 2001). This site, which was occupied between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago, continues to produce evidence of advanced levels of economic and social organisation, as well as symbolically meditated behaviour – diplomacy, in other words (Walter 2015, 32). Highly refined stone tools, engraved ochre and bone, and marine shell beads – the world’s oldest art – suggest that booms in population also led to booms in art, culture, creativity and unity. Put simply, when strangers came together in prehistoric times they didn’t always fight or eat one another. The Blombos excavations prove that early humans readily communicated with one another, a basic diplomatic system with rules and sanctions prevailed, and some sort of diplomatic status, and/or immunity, existed from the outset (in order that the messenger didn’t end up in the pot). This is something Hamilton and Langhorne agree with, noting that if it had ‘been decided that may be better to hear the messenger than to eat the messenger, then there have to be rules about who is a legitimate messenger, and there have to be sanctions which will ensure his uneatability’ (Hamilton and Langhorne 2011, 148).

There is lots of other intriguing evidence of prehistoric diplomacy. Indigenous Australians were also masters of soft power and cultural diplomacy long before so-called civilisation. For example, 30,000 years ago, a visitor to the Yaburarra people of the Burrup Peninsula in north-west Australia would have been greeted by a giant, outdoor temple and art gallery with over 250,000 exhibits (Donaldson 2009, 4). The art was not aesthetic but utilitarian and welcoming: paintings informing strangers, outsiders and new-arrivals of hunting techniques, celestial star-charts, or crude maps of where to find food or water. This evi...