The Power of Sport as Public Diplomacy
By Siobhan Heekin-Canedy
What is sports diplomacy, and why does it matter?
The recent NBA-China controversy over a general manager’s pro-Hong Kong tweet has made the answer to the latter question painfully clear. As the NBA found out, sport and international relations cannot ignore one another. For better or worse, the world of sport has collided with the “real world.” Often, this occurs through sports diplomacy.
The concept of sports diplomacy is simple. Sport is a universal phenomenon, transcending linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries. As such, it can facilitate communication across cultures. At its best, sports diplomacy harnesses this aspect of sport for a variety of diplomatic ends: women’s empowerment, intercultural understanding, non-violence education, and more.
Although sports diplomacy has gained traction in recent years, it remains a little-known area of public diplomacy. This is a shame. The universality and versatility of sport make sports diplomacy a potentially important tool as free nations strive to build a peaceful and just global community. At the same time, ignoring sport can be dangerous. It can easily become a vehicle for extremist ideologies and government propaganda, as we saw recently when an apology mysteriously appeared on the NBA’s Chinese social media account with language typical of Chinese state media. Professionals involved in international policy—from politicians to researchers to diplomats—should pay attention to sports diplomacy, both in order to advance security, peace, and human rights and to guard against its misuse.
Today, the most salient example of sports diplomacy is the Olympic Games. Inspired by its ancient namesake, the modern Olympic movement seeks to promote peace, human dignity, and intercultural understanding. To some extent, it has been successful. The games have inspired generations of athletes and spectators with the Olympic values, and at times these values have bled into international relations.
For instance, the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics provided a golden opportunity to defuse tensions between North and South Korea. Athletes from each state actually marched together in the Opening Ceremony, and a unified Korean team competed in women’s hockey. Although these gestures were largely symbolic, they were nonetheless an important step forward in a fraught relationship.
Nor is it a coincidence that this took place in the context of the Olympics. Sport, with all its triumph, disappointment, pain, and exhilaration, briefly allowed Koreans to appreciate the shared experiences that make human beings more similar than different. It’s hard to imagine the two Koreas uniting in this way for anything other than a sporting event.
While the Olympics provide an important venue for sports diplomacy, it’s not the only one; it can thrive wherever people of various nations come together to play, train, or compete. In recent years, several sports diplomacy programs have sprung up in the United States. For instance, the U.S. Department of State’s Sports Diplomacy division uses sports-based exchanges and sports envoys—top U.S. athletes who conduct workshops abroad—to promote democracy, women’s rights, and other diplomatic aims. The division has also successfully partnered with non-governmental initiatives, such as the University of Tennessee’s Center for Sport, Peace, and Society.
Unfortunately, sports diplomacy also has a dark side. Sport can convey messages of hate and violence as easily as those of fellowship and peace. The most infamous example of this is the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which Nazi Germany used as a global platform for its ideology. Palestinian extremists also used the 1972 Munich Olympics to promote their cause by torturing and killing 11 Israeli team members.
Sport has proven a useful means of bolstering totalitarian or dictatorial regimes in states such as North Korea and the Soviet Union. Successful athletes and sporting events lend both domestic and international legitimacy to these regimes, and athletic competitions often become proxy battlefields. China’s recent attempt to silence the NBA on Hong Kong is yet another instance of this phenomenon.
Sports diplomacy has potential to sway minds and hearts, for good or ill. International policy professionals need to start treating it as a serious area of public diplomacy, not an afterthought or a curiosity.
Professionals working in public and private sectors should have a basic understanding of the ways sports diplomacy is already used and consider ways to integrate it into their own work.
Governments should support existing sports diplomacy initiatives and should consider starting their own. In an era when hard power is king and diplomacy too often falls by the wayside, sports diplomacy can help states refocus energy on soft power initiatives. Think tanks, development organizations, and other private initiatives can support the government’s efforts and adapt sports diplomacy to their own areas of expertise.
Perhaps most importantly, athletes, coaches, and league officials need to be aware of the way their sports can be manipulated for diplomatic gain. The NBA has learned the hard way that it its decisions have consequences reaching far beyond basketball. As globalization progresses, sport will find it increasingly difficult to remain neutral as competing powers try to co-opt it for their own use.
Keeping sport politically neutral is in many ways a noble endeavor. Athletic excellence, not politics, is at the heart of true sportsmanship. Today, however, complete neutrality is almost impossible. To withdraw in the face of opposition can be the equivalent of endorsement. In an attempt to extricate itself from a geopolitical mess, the NBA ended up supporting an oppressive and totalitarian regime. Athletes and diplomats, managers and politicians alike can all learn a lesson from this incident: ignore sports diplomacy at your peril. Sport inevitably carries powerful messages about international relations. The real question is: what message do you want to send?
Siobhan Heekin-Canedy is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School with a focus on Russia and Eastern Europe. From 2008-2014, she represented Ukraine as an elite-level ice dancer, ultimately competing in the 2014 Winter Olympics. She has also served as an intern in the Sports Diplomacy division of the U.S. Department of State.
PyeongChang_Women_IceHockey_05 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Courtesy of Republic of Korea
