Politics and the olympics : some new dimensions

Politics and the Olympics: Some New Dimensions John J. MacALOON University of Chicago Working Paper n.128 Barcelona 1997 INTRODUCTION The advertised title of this talk could not have sounded very promising to political scientists here in Barcelona. With six years of political discourse leading up to Barcelona ’92, and over three years of investigation, analysis, and polemic after these Games, there can be little left to say here on the local and regional dimensions of the theme of «politics and the Olympics». Any Barcelona audience already knows a lot about: the politics of selecting host cities for the Games; the Olympic incitement of struggles, negotiations, and eventual collaborations among municipal, autonomous provincial, federal state, and regional political entities; the unique Olympic mobilization of political capital for urban redevelopment and infrastructure transformation; and the impetus the Olympic context provides for cultural politics, as against what we might call the politics of the everyday1. Moreover, the publication by my colleagues at the Centre d’Estudis Olímpics at the Universitat Autònoma of their detailed empirical studies of the television communication of Catalan, Spanish, and European political realities in distant nations takes care of a key «global» dimension of «local» Olympic experience2. The best one could offer, then, would seem to be some comparative analyses with other Games. For example, we could discuss the contradictory position into which the question of «Europe» placed the Social Democratic political tradition in Norway. We could contrast the Catalan Generalitat’s and the Barcelonan Ajuntament’s use of «Europe» as an instrument against the Spanish center with the Norwegian socialist center’s attempt to use the 1994 Lillehammer Games to convince Norwegian voters that they could have their European cake and eat it too. Faced with conservative political forces focused on a new cosmopolitan business class, the Norwegian Social Democrats sought, with very mixed results, to use Lillehammer as evidence that Norway could maintain a decades-old policy and ideology of rural community autonomy and cultural value, while simultaneously subjecting itself to EU membership and regulation3. Or we could compare Barcelona and Lillehammer with the very different political thematics of Atlanta, where the main intention is to dramatize and globalize a message of minority human rights and multicultural cooperation in the post-Cold War liberal state, in the context of failure to generate much in the way of local urban renewal. Instead, however, I will focus my remarks on the central organs of the Olympic Movement, notably the International Olympic Committee (IOC) executive, in their interactions with macro-political forces and trends in recent years. I hasten to reassure you that I won’t return to the boring old curriculum of topics: fascist, socialist, and capitalist Olympics; government «interference» in sport; Cold War battles between «East» and «West»; terrorism; boycotts, and so on. I will discuss an important new book about the IOC and Seoul ’88, which opens to public scrutiny a new dimension of Olympic geopolitical engagements. Yet I will also suggest that this text inadvertently signals an end to this WWIIthrough-Cold War Olympic political curriculum. After briefly characterizing the new shape of world affairs, I will conclude by describing current efforts by the IOC to rematerialize an «Olympic Movement» and to make itself more relevant in the new geopolitical environment. This to-ing and fro-ing, I will suggest, makes the Olympics a still more illuminating window into the fundamental, yet still very inchoate political dynamics in the global environment of today. FIELD WORK UNDER OLYMPIC COVER Political scientists, at least in the European and American institutions and traditions I am most familiar with, have rarely suspected that there might be dimensions of engagement between major geopolitical actors and the Olympics besides the conventional ones I have just listed. Professional pride in dealing with the «real» forms of modern power4, together with the cultural common sense of social milieus which place sport categorically into the realm of the ludic, or leisure, or idealistic, or strictly commercial domains of life have conspired to blunt the political-scientific imagination5. Scholars of international diplomacy and national security might well conduct the following thought experiment. If you are a head-of-state, senior foreign affairs official, diplomat or security actor, what would describe the ideal context for you to pursue your most delicate and controversial aims and responsibilities? The answer is an environment offering maximal possibilities of same-level interaction with enemies, rivals, and allies, with a minimum of prior constraints, public awareness, and press scrutiny. Without realizing it, you have just described conditions at an Olympic Games. The significance of the Olympic Games and related international sports events as scenes for high-level political and diplomatic encounters is composed of two elements. Here is the first. Mass publics and the press today consider it «only natural» that high-level political elites attend Olympic Games. Because athletic delegations are composed on a national basis, politicians and government officials attend «to show support for the nation». Even when they have not put it about that they are sports fans, such persons are widely assumed to wish to be where all the other dignitaries and celebrities are. As for military and state security figures, if their presence at an Olympics is even noticed, it is attributed to supervising the protection of athletes and other national delegation members, given the ever-present dangers of terrorism6. Finally, a kind of artificial taboo against the normal types of press and public curiosity reigns during an Olympic Games. I’ve many times heard state officials successfully deflect political questions about their activities in the Olympic city with a casual, «We’re just here to visit the Games, let’s save local political business for another time». The second component you would have no way of knowing if you had not yourself been a credentialed guest at the Olympic Games, that is to say if you had done ethnographic field work under «Olympic cover»7. The deepest circle of «Olympic Family Zones» at the stadiums, administrative installations, and headquarters hotels is absolutely closed to all but «A» credentialed persons (IOC members and their families) and «G» credentialed persons, precisely heads-ofstate and their staffs, top-level diplomats and government officials, IGO chiefs, military and security figures, international tycoons, some decorative international celebrities, and a number of persons whose identities are never clear to anyone. No journalists can ever get near these secured areas, and few even know of their existence. Even the approaches to these innocent-sounding «hospitality zones» are hidden and carefully and rigidly monitored. In sum, nowhere else do such favorable conditions exist for otherwise difficult meetings -on an invisible, informal, and agenda-less basisamong such a total range of global political elites, including from nations at war or having no diplomatic relations with one another. I am sure that when diplomatic and national security historians and analysts put aside their cultural and scientific biases and explore this context, they will make some very interesting discoveries. We already know quite a bit about state-level political activity by other sorts of actors operating under «Olympic cover», for example, intelligence and counterintelligence personnel. It has been a more or less open secret in Olympic circles that the so-called Olympic attachés, nationals resident in the host country appointed to assist their home country delegations, have generally been secret service agents. Ostensibly there to help visiting delegations navigate the local society, their real mission has traditionally been to monitor and control all foreign contacts of athletes, coaches, and officials, preventing defections or other embarrassing incidents, and of course to attempt to «turn» each other. Revelations in the former communist countries have made public what also was common knowledge to insiders: that secret police agencies regularly recruited athletes and other sports personnel as informants, disinformation and penetration agents. Olympic Solidarity, the IOC agency responsible for sports aid to Third World countries, for years accepted volunteer services from superpower sports personnel whose real identities and intentions had much more to do with state political agendas that with sports development. The most famous published exposé by a former American CIA agent included a whole chapter asserting an sustained Olympic CIA presence since Helsinki and detailing his own counterintelligence operations under Olympic cover in Mexico. I have developed further information that the CIA and DIA used international sport throughout the 1960s and 1970s as a very successful cover for covert counter-insurgency training in Latin America and the Middle East8. Just as scores of American reviews of the infamous Agee book ignored its Olympic sections, so too former counterinsurgency sports operatives still chuckle today as to the domestic perfection in the USA of this cover. «For Americans, it’s mere sport, so who would imagine, much less inquire?» Soviet authorities, of course, knew full well, and because of the Soviet state’s own clearer intelligence preoccupation with sport, Soviet and Central European athletic circles and wider publics often assumed that Americans on Olympic missions were «CIA» agents. By contrast, American sports persons and wider publics assumed the «communists» were state security, but scarcely imagined that the holy «We» might be so too9. Another variation on our theme is the double political and sports identities IOC members sometimes have. The best known of these here in Barcelona is probably Juan Antonio Samaranch’s position as Spanish ambassador to the USSR at the same time as he was negotiating unsuccessfully for the IOC to prevent the Olympic boycotts. A more successful case might be Muhammed Mzali, who at the time he was prime minister of Tunisia also was head of the IOC commission for the International Olympic Academy in Greece and a yearly lecturer there on the theme of Islam and Olympism. One year, because of the cover of his annual Olympic visit to Greece, Mzali was able to stop in Athens for the negotiations which led to the successful evacuation through Greece to Tunisia of the PLO fighters surrounded by the Israelis in Beirut. Today, at least one IOC member who began his career as a penetration agent for a national security force continues to be financed and influential for shadier masters in today’s post-Cold War era. FIVE RINGS AROUND KOREA The 1994 publication of the book Five Rings Over Korea: The Secret Negotiations Behind the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul10 has, I believe, permanently changed conditions for political analysts of the Olympic Movement. The author, Richard Pound, is the senior IOC member in Canada, a long-time presence in the IOC’s executive board, and a member of Mr. Samaranch’s inner circle. The author has made the most of his privileged access to internal IOC documents, minutes, correspondence, contemporaneous conversations, and post-hoc interviews to describe and analyze key diplomatic interventions which helped overcome the geopolitical struggles unleashed by the 1981 award of the Olympic Games to Seoul, contributing to the eventually triumphant Olympic celebration in the South Korean capital in 1988. Mr. Pound has also presented an argument about the new geopolitical capacities of the IOC itself, and his detailed insider account will stand hereafter as a required touchstone for any serious academic, media, or policy analyst of «international sport and politics»11. In an opening chapter, Mr. Pound summarily reviews IOC responses to the «external» political challenges of past Olympic Games, from Berlin 1936 to the boycotted Olympics of 1976, 1980, and 1984. While rightly contemptuous of a standard media caricature of the IOC as a «moribund, antediluvian collection of aging, rich, and titled men completely unconnected with reality»12, Mr. Pound serves up some telling anecdotes to show that the «separation of sport and politics» rhetoric of past IOC leaders was generally a fig-leaf for their own political inadequacies. Throughout this period, Mr. Pound writes, «‘political’ problems were beyond the ability of a part-time organization having no particular international status; the IOC was not equipped, either organizationally or by disposition, to deal with such issues. Any action by the IOC tended to be in response to a crisis or to someone else’s initiative»13. According to the author, the IOC’s reliance on statelevel politicians to solve conflicts bearing upon the Games led inevitably to frustration and tragedy. By contrast, and in the aftermath of the Los Angeles boycott, the IOC at last formally recognized that NOCs are not always politically free to discharge their Olympic duty of participation and accepted the corollary that the IOC, NOCs, and other Olympic bodies have positive duties to actively engage government entities and state politicians in Olympic affairs. The geopolitical dangers and dilemmas resulting from the award of the Games to Seoul demanded a new activism. Led by Mr. Samaranch, who is the uncompromised and uncompromising hero sub specie diplomaticus of Mr. Pound’s book, the IOC embarked on an unprecedented political voyage of high risk/high gain, not only with respect to the Seoul Olympics but to the world prestige and legitimacy of the entire Olympic Movement. The catalyst and avenue was the appearance of proposals and eventually negotiations between North Korea and South Korea over some form of «co-hosting» the 1988 Olympics. The IOC made the decision, extraordinary given its history and the stakes of this game, to itself sponsor and attempt to control these negotiations. Over six chapters and 200 pages, Mr. Pound reconstructs in minute detail the complex and multilateral antagonisms, posturings, misunderstandings, interventions, negotiations, and executive actions which produced the four NorthSouth meetings held in Lausanne under IOC sponsorship and supervision, the continuation of initiatives and counter-initiatives right up until the opening of the Games, and the extraordinary end-result of a Seoul Games with only seven boycotting countries. Perhaps the author’s professional experience as a lawyer is responsible for his appreciation that the diplomat’s art lies in the minute scrutiny and careful staging of continuously shifting adversarial situations. In any case, scholars should be grateful that Mr. Pound has resisted any temptation to scrimp on his narrative. No existing text provides more fundamental education both for Olympic analysts unfamiliar with the conduct of international diplomacy and for international relations specialists ignorant of the significance and role of the Olympic Games in their domain. Indeed, appearing amidst the continued multilateral negotiations over North Korean nuclear policy, Five Rings has a topicality beyond its immediate subject matter. Mr. Samaranch’s wisdom, as Mr. Pound interprets it, lay in clear recognition of synergies on the strategic level which in turn permitted flexibility on the tactical level. As long as North and South Koreas were kept together at the table, the North’s state socialist and anti-American allies were limited in their capacity to undermine the Seoul Games. Since a breakthrough which would bring DPRK participation might always occur, and the IOC was so boldly signaling a willingness to accommodate North Korea, space was opened for states like the PRC to develop an independent policy. At the same time, forces favorable to participation within the USSR and the East European countries were better able to hold off hard-liners within their own state-party-Olympic apparatuses. DPRK initiatives against Seoul were likewise moderated. The IOC’s «historic offer» of considering the staging of some events in the North, that is, of violating a core tenet of its own Charter that Games are awarded to single cities only, made it difficult for critics politically schooled to see the organization as an transnational instrument of Western capitalist imperialism and anti-communism. The consternation, real or imagined, that IOC flexibility toward North Korea was believed to be causing the ROK and the Pacific alliance further loosened the binariness of classical Cold War logic. This strategic policy left the IOC and the Seoul Olympics in maximal position to take advantage of the purely contingent outbreak of Gorbachevism which happened to ensue. What I have elsewhere called the «participation mystique» of the Olympic Movement, a commitment to maximal international participation in the Games as its ultimate and absolute value, kept the IOC leadership oriented in line with this strategic geopolitical synergy. Tactically, it followed that Mr. Samaranch and his colleagues and advisers had a clear path of action. The concrete issues in the ebb and flow of negotiations centered on how many and which events were considered for the North, the name of the Games and the organizing committees, the location of the opening and closing ceremonies and the torch relay, the division of television and sponsorship income, and the opening of the North-South border at least to the Olympic Family. The art Mr. Samaranch displayed month after month was knowing when to appear to bend in the face of shifting and escalating demands by North Korea and her friends, and when to appear to harden the IOC’s positions when the ROK, her allies, and the international sports federations and multinational corporations contracted to the Games grew overly nervous. The main challenge was thus deftly met of keeping IOC control of the agenda and not letting the negotiations be highjacked by either principal or any third party. Perhaps the chief compass which allowed Mr. Samaranch and his advisers to move so adroitly over such complex terrain was the IOC leadership’s belief from the outset that the negotiations would never lead to an agreement. Mr. Pound is perfectly direct on this point. «The IOC had to appear to be conducting the negotiations in good faith and it did, in fact, conduct them in good faith. The fact that the IOC did not believe that the negotiations could ever result in a mutually satisfactory compromise to share the Games in an equitable fashion between the North and the South was irrelevant in the conduct of the negotiations. Had they been successful, there is no doubt that the IOC would have agreed to the split venue. The IOC also did its best to create conditions that might bring about an agreement, despite its realistic political assessment that it simply would not be possible to get the North Koreans to comply with the myriad responsibilities of a host country of the Olympic Games»14. There is much to appreciate as well as to question in Mr. Pound’s account15, but I will only comment here on a more encompassing ring of the geopolitical onion of Seoul ’88 that students of international politics will find suggestively evoked but strangely unanalyzed in this book. Neither Mr. Pound nor, by his account, Mr. Samaranch seemed able to imagine that the IOC negotiations might themselves have been used as a diplomatic convenience and public «cover» for the truly secret negotiations among the real North and South Korean, superpower, regional, and free-lance geopolitical actors, concerned not just with Olympics but with deals for the eventual North-South unification, the future balance of power in the region, and what in retrospect we recognize as the end of the Cold War in East Asia. The book itself attributes the original suggestion of sharing events between Seoul and Pyongyang to then Italian foreign minister Guilio Andreotti in independent conversation with the ROK government. The South and North Korean governments quickly mobilized, not just with respect to the IOC but with their allies around the world. Even before the IOC membership was officially notified of these proposals, actors ranging from Fidel Castro to the senior Soviet, Chinese, and American leaderships were significantly engaged. Mr. Pound only mentions that «rumors» of secret North-South negotiations were reaching the IOC well before the decision to sponsor talks in Lausanne was taken. Figures like premiers Nakasone of Japan and Zhou Ziyang of China, George Schultz, Frank Carlucci, and James Lilley of the United States, and Mikhail Gorbachev, Edouard Shevardnadze, and Viacheslav Gavrilin of the Soviet Union make only cameo appearances in Five Rings. Finally, in Pound’s descriptions of the IOC talks, the members of the Korean delegations are listed, with official sports titles, but there is little evidence of any IOC effort to discover who these persons really were in the North and South Korean political environments16. Though privately informed of other widespread «rumors» at the time, for example, of the secret presence of scores of Soviet government advisers and even of important North Korean political figures in South Korea between 1986 and the opening of the Games, neither the IOC executive nor Mr. Pound in later preparing his book bothered to inquire carefully. Mr. Pound makes the point of how extraordinary it was for South Korean political authorities to trust the IOC with negotiating what was (and remains) the most important question of Korean national existence. Unfortunately, the author and presumably the IOC did not pause very long to wonder whether that trust really was so absolute. In par, this was surely because Roh Tae-woo’s adroit leadership had succeeded in winning IOC confidence, and Mr. Samaranch and the rest of the IOC «politburo» -Alexandru Siperco of Romania, Aswini Kumar of Pakistan, the Senegalese Kéba M’Baye, and the Chinese He Zhenliangsatisfied themselves with the IOC’s new significance and interaction at the headsof-state level.