Megaevents and Modernity

Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture

Maurice Roche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415157117
• eBook ISBN: 9781134729159
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This analysis explores the social history and politics of mega-events from the late 19th century to the present. Through case studies of events such as the 1851 Crystal Palace Expo, the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Maurice Roche investigates the impact Expos and Olympics have had on national identities, on the marking of public time and space, and on visions of national citizenship and international society in modern times. Historical chapters deal with the production of Expos by power elites, their impacts on mass culture, and the political uses and abuses of international sport and Olympic events. Chapters also deal with the impact of Olympics on cities, the growth of Olympics as media events and the current crisis of the Olympic movement in world politics and culture.

1 Mega-events and modernity

Perspectives and themes

‘Everyone loves a parade’, as the saying goes. At least, governments and the powerful often hope that we do. This book is about some of modern society’s great ‘parades’ and ‘shows’ which can be called ‘mega-events’. ‘Mega-events’ are large-scale cultural (including commercial and sporting) events which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal and international significance. They are typically organised by variable combinations of national governmental and international non-governmental organisations and thus can be said to be important elements in ‘official’ versions of public culture. This book aims to explores the history and social significance of two key types of the genre, namely World Fairs (hereafter Expos)¹ and Olympic Games. Its interest is in the ways in which these kinds of events have contributed to the meaning and development of ‘public culture’ ‘cultural citizenship’ and ‘cultural inclusion/exclusion’ in modern societies, both at a national and an international level.

To do justice to these sociological and political interests makes it imperative to take a broad and historical perspective. Thus the book covers a long historical sweep from the mid/late nineteenth-century origins of expo and Olympic events, through the inter-war period to the contemporary period. Along the way it looks at the role of these mega-events in relation to such issues as nationalism, civil society and empire-building in Britain and the USA, the development of authoritarian political cultures in Nazi Germany in the inter-war period, and urban politics and global media empires in the contemporary period. In addition to the expo and Olympic mega-events, it also takes a look at the popular cultures of cities, sport, tourism and the media, particularly the event-related aspects of these cultural spheres. Later in this chapter (section 4) an overview is provided of these themes and issues together with an outline of how they apply to the various studies and chapters which make up the book. This is followed by a final section in which the content of the chapters is summarised.

To prepare the way for the thematic overview we need to consider some basic questions about mega-events, namely what they are, and why and how they should be studied. The first two of these questions are considered in the first section of this chapter, and it is worth noting that general points raised here are picked up again in the theoretical reflections which make up the final chapter. The second section below addresses the third of our questions, namely how to study mega-events. It outlines some of the strengths and weaknesses of the main perspectives in existing research on mega-events together with some of the main features of the general approach taken in this book. To begin with, however, we need to get a broad picture of the nature of mega-events and of their potential significance in understanding our society and our times.

The nature and significance of mega-events

In this section we first consider some examples of the presence of mega-events in modern culture. Second, we consider some of the rationales for studying mega-events in terms of their personal, historical and sociological significance. Finally we consider some of their main characteristics.

The mega-event phenomenon

Some key examples of world-level mega-events in the contemporary period (1980– 2012) period are indicated in Table 1.1. We discuss some of these, and their role in helping to structure international public culture, in more detail in Part 2 of this book.

Table 1.1 Structuring international public culture: key mega-events 1980–2012

Before we begin to consider the characteristics of events such as these, it is important to point out that the Olympics and expos are only the most visible and spectacular examples of a dense social eco-system and social calendar of public cultural events in modern societies. This thriving ‘event ecology’ or ‘performance complex’ includes a vast range of more specialist forms of great international events which have developed in the late twentieth century. For instance, the contemporary heirs to the Expo-event type include specialist world-level international trade fairs for a vast range of technologies and industries (e.g. aircraft, cars, computers, books etc.). The contemporary heirs to the Olympic event type include specialist world-level international sports competitions (e.g. the World Cup competitions in soccer, athletics, rugby, etc. and Grand Prix events for horseracing and motor-racing, etc.). The World Cup in soccer is particularly important in this context as it has grown, through television and the global diffusion of sport culture, to the same scale as the Olympics in terms of attracting unprecedentedly vast global television audiences.² Specialist world-level international arts and cultural events (such as the Edinburgh Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, etc.) derive from both of the main mega-event types. In addition, there are also the ‘world regional’-level versions of these events. In the case of sports, these may be connected to either the multi-sport Olympics (such as the Asian Games, the PanAmerica Games, the African Games, etc.) or to the world-level specialist events (e.g. the European zone qualifying competition for the soccer World Cup).

Below the international level the national level has traditionally been the main site for the development and staging of public events. While the kind of international mega-events we focus on in this book occur on a multi-annual cycle, such as the Olympic and World Cup four-yearly cycle, they can be argued to structure time in international public culture in a similar way to the more usual annual calendar of national-level public events. The nature and significance of the cultural and political symbolism attached to the annual cycles of public events, such as commemorative parades and sport events, within and between nations can be illustrated in various ways. For instance, Table 1.2 juxtaposes the contrasting public event calendars constructed to maintain the edifice of Soviet and Nazi power in the interwar period in the USSR and Germany, along with the contrasting quasinational event calendars, within contemporary Britain, of the English middle and upper classes, Ulster loyalists and Irish Republicans in Ulster.

Below the national level, the notion of ‘event ecology’ reaches down to and incorporates urban and community-level events. Of course, there is always, in any case, a local-level urban dimension to international-level mega-events as we discuss later (Chapter 5). In addition, the level at which public events are experienced and have their effects, whether global, national or local, is to a significant degree affected by the kind of media coverage they can attract and the degree to which they can become national or international ‘media events’ as we also discuss later (Chapter 6). Table 1.3 suggests a preliminary overview of some the main types, levels and dimensions of public events in terms of which ‘mega-events’ can be situated and with which we are concerned in the course of this book.

So far we have attempted to indicate something of the characteristics and richness of public cultural events eco-systems and ‘performance complexes’. While these systems are sociologically important in characterising and understanding modern societies at national and local level as well as at the international level it should be noted that, understandably, and not least for reasons of space, in this book we do not attempt to provide a comprehensive sociology of their full range and complexity. We do indeed touch on such events as national mass rituals, urban festivals and media events in the course of our exploration of mega-events. However this is particularly to the extent that they help to throw light on the evolution and development of the Olympics and expos, which are the paradigmatic mega-event types with which we are mainly concerned here.

Table 1.2 National public event calendars: contrasting contemporary and inter-war examples

Sources: For Britain see Debrett’s Social Calendar information presented in Rojek 1993, p. 43; for Northern Ireland see Jarman 1997; for USSR see Lane 1981; and for Nazi Germany see Grunberger 1974. ^*WD stands for ‘Workers’ Day’.

Table 1.3 Public events: types and dimensions¹

The significance of mega-events in modernity

Mega-events have attracted relatively little research attention. This may be because as a cultural phenomenon they appear to fall within and between a number of distinct and unrelated disciplines and areas. These include, in the case of Expos and Olympic games, the social histories of science, art and technology on the one hand and of sport on the other, and in the case of both of them, practical management-oriented studies as opposed to more searching social scientific literatures. Also, precisely because of their ‘one-off’ event characteristics, and thus because of the unique story which needed to be told about each of them, the generalizing social sciences have perhaps tended to assume that they belonged to the subject-matter of history and that there was little of a general kind to say about them. Thus it can be difficult to bring them into focus as an admittedly complex but long-lasting popular cultural genre and an influential cultural movement. However, the effort is worth making for a number of reasons. Mega-events like Olympic Games (particularly in the post-war period) and expos (particularly in the late nineteenth century and inter-war years) have been and continue to be important phenomena at many levels and in many respects. There are at least four sets of reasons which underwrite a social scientific interest in the genre, namely personal, national historical, cultural historical and general sociological reasons. In the rest of this section the first three of these reasons are considered. The fourth reason is considered in the following section on the approach to understanding mega-events taken in this book. All of these issues are reconsidered in the final chapter.

The personal level

It is a common observation that people in all societies periodise their lives in terms of ‘life events’ and their community’s ‘rites de passages’ (Van Gennep 1960). It is also a common observation in modern large-scale complex societies that people reflect on and periodise their biographies in relation to the readily identifiable and memorable great public events which affected them during the course of their lives. This is evidently the case with people’s responses to major wars and revolutions. But it is also the case with cultural events of various kinds, not least in, for instance, the ‘fashion revolutions’ in music or dress which have become mass phenomenona in succesive generations in the post-war period. But in addition to reflecting on and periodising their biographies in terms of the fashions specific to particular decades, people do the same sort of identity-work using mega-events as temporal and cultural markers. This is true in relation both to expos and expotype events, and also to Olympic and major sport events in general.³

The national historical level

At this level the development of international mega-events parallels the growth and spread of ‘modernity’ and nation-state consciousness. The staging of international mega-events was and remains important in the ‘story of a country’, a people, a nation. They represented and continue to represent key occasions in which nations could construct and present images of themselves for recognition in relation to other nations and ‘in the eyes of the world’. They represented and continue to represent key occasions in which national ‘tradition’ and ‘community’, including a national past, present and future (national ‘progress’, potential and ‘destiny’), could be invented and imagined not just by and for leaders and citizens of the host nation, but also by and for the publics of other nations.⁴ Their national historical importance can be gauged by the fact that, as we will see later, mega-events have occurred in all periods of modern nations’ histories, from the good times to the bad times (e.g. 1870s Depression, 1930s Depression, post-World War reconstruction periods) and usually have been heavily subsidised by national governments.

The history of culture in modernity

Mega-events—particularly, initially, expos—were important and influential forces in the history of modern international culture in general. Part 1 of the book reviews their role and impact in some detail. However, for the moment we can summarise their importance and influence by briefly noting here their interdisciplinarity, their popularity, their institutional effects, and their attitudinal effects. In terms of interdisciplinarity the late nineteenth-century expo genre involved a series of unique exhibitions of some of the greatest contemporary achievements in most of the main ‘high cultural’ forms of Western civilisation, including science, technology, art and architecture, simultaneously and together as parts of a single event on a single site. Furthermore, these high cultural displays were extremely popular and attracted domestic and international visitors on a previously unprecedented scale. This event-based process of popularisation of high culture had institutional effects in the boost it provided to the creation of permanent cultural exhibitions in the form of publicly accessible museums and art galleries, department stores and theme parks, and also more generally in the form of post-primary public education. Finally, expos had important attitudinal effects in terms of the cultivation of mass interest in consumer culture and tourism culture, and the Olympics in due course had the same effect in terms of the cultivation of mass interest in sport culture.

On the sociology of mega-events

A multi-perspectival approach

We now need to introduce the general approach to the analysis of mega-events taken in this book in outline terms. This approach is reflected on in more detail in Chapter 8. The discussion in this section proceeds in three main steps. Firstly the general social significance of mega-events is indicated. Second, and addressing the multi-dimensional nature of mega-events, the main characteristics which need to be taken into account in any serious analysis of them are mapped out. Finally, a multi-perspectival approach to the sociology of mega-events, which proposes the need for a combination of ‘dramatological’ and ‘contextual’ perspectives in any analysis, is outlined. In the following section alternative approaches to the sociology of mega-events are reviewed and the way they relate to the approach taken here is considered.

The general sociological significance of mega-events

This book argues that mega-events are important both substantively and more formally in understanding structure, change and agency in modern society. Substantively, mega-events have been and remain important elements in the orientation of national societies to international or global society and in the theory and practice of public culture and civil society at this level. They have been important points of reference for processes of change and modernisation within and between nation-states, and for globalisation processes more generally. Mega-events, event movements and their networks remain of considerable importance in terms of the exchange, transfer and diffusion of information, values and technologie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Tables and Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Mega-Events and Modernity: Perspectives and Themes
• Part 1: Mega-Events and the Growth of International Culture
• Part 2: Mega-Events and the Growth of Global Culture
• Notes
• Bibliography