Helppoahan tämä, kun kisahötön aivottoman töllöttämisen sijaan voi vaikkapa lukea. Googlennettuna
Why do boycotts almost never work?Their story can help us understand this.
Andrea Braschayko 28 November 2022
Boycotting is a collective action as old as sporting competitions themselves. The first documented case dates back to 332 BC. The Athenian athlete Callipo won gold in the pentathlon by bribing his opponents and, once discovered, was forced by the government of Elea to pay a fine. Callipo refused and hired a lawyer to defend himself, while the Athenians threatened to withdraw from the Games for the insulting insinuations addressed to their fellow citizen. The International Olympic Committee did not exist at the time, and it was up to the Oracle of Delphi to give a response: the Athenians were forced to convince Callipo to pay the fine and return to Olympia.
Even in modern times boycotts have rarely been effective, except when conceived as part of a broader multifaceted strategy, mostly political and economic, towards a state. When deciding whether or not to boycott a sporting event, it is impossible to ignore a value judgment regarding the formal autonomy of sporting institutions. Is sport (also) politics or is it desirable and indeed necessary for it to remain in a neutral bubble? Between those who believe sport can be a vehicle of positive messages globally and those who contest the lack of coherence of a position that taken to the extreme could paralyze most international competitions, the debate has infinite potential and ramifications. This gives an idea of how complex it is to reach a coordinated decision among more than two hundred countries participating in the Olympic Games or trying to qualify for a World Cup. But let's go in order.
First: why is it called a "boycott"? The etymology of the term derives from the name of the English landowner Charles Boycott, who paid his Irish farmers less than the agreed wages and used inhumane methods against them. The latter coalesced, refusing to work the lands of Boycott. The English government tried to come to his rescue, but after the estates fell into disrepair following the boycott, they had no choice but to sack him. Therefore, already from its first experience, the boycott refers to a coordinated action that refers to universal principles and rights, and requires that they be socially shared. At the same time, in Boycott's story, a political dynamic is not secondary: the feeling of hatred of the Irish towards the English masters, perceived as colonizers and exploiters.
Jesse Owens wins gold in the 100m at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. That edition represents one of the most notorious failures of boycott campaigns in sport (Keystone/Getty Images).In sport, boycott campaigns almost always originated in Western countries. Sometimes more for strictly political reasons (we could define them strategic boycotts), others starting from the bottom due to systematic violations of human rights (ethical boycotts). Regardless of their origin, these campaigns have almost always had little resonance, if not open ostracism, in areas of the world that view the universalist claims of liberal democracies with suspicion.
In this sense, it is curious that one of the most successful and famous sporting boycotts, that of apartheid South Africa, concerned a regime initially supported by a part of the Western world. The racist regime that ruled the country for most of the twentieth century was first expelled from the 1964 Olympic Games, then definitively expelled from the IOC in 1970. Overall, the sporting isolation of South Africa lasted almost thirty years, but it should be specified that sport did not act alone, but in addition to political pressures from both outside and inside which finally gave the desired result, i.e. the end of the apartheid regime in 1991. In the opinion of the University professor of Bologna Nicola Sbetti, specialized in the history of sport, despite its socio-political and identity relevance «sport is all in all a marginal phenomenon» as a form of direct pressure on a country, risking being influential mostly when accompanied by political sanctions and wider economies. And in this sense the success of the boycott campaign of South Africa confirms it.
New Zealand activists disrupt a South African national rugby team match against the All Blacks in Hamilton, 1981. Although South Africa was barred from Olympic sports, the Springboks were never expelled from the International Rugby Board during the apartheid regime. Mandela's decision to host the 1995 World Cup (later won by South Africa) helped erase the stain of complicity with apartheid on the national rugby team.Boycotting through sport has been more successful in the long term, when the sanctions have involved individual countries guilty of violating fundamental values enshrined in the Olympic Charter – as in the case of South Africa, a model which, in some way, today we are trying to replicate against of Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. How can the perception of Russia have changed compared to the 2018 World Cup? It is obvious that its exclusion from sporting events is determined by the deterioration of the international context, but the perception of the dangerousness of a host country is often a subjective matter which pertains to the political will of the countries. The authoritarian, expansionist and repressive tendencies of minorities were evident in Russia already before 2022, as well as the attempt to use sport as a weapon of soft power, often with illicit methods such as the state doping machine that had set up Moscow in the years prior to the invasion. However, the only public opinion to speak of a boycott was that of Ukraine, as it was directly affected by the 2014 war. And even in Ukraine there was no clear-cut position on a possible boycott of the World Cup. The matter simply fell on deaf ears when Shevchenko's national team failed to qualify, losing in the last match against eventual finalists Croatia in Moscow.
In this sense it is useful to go back to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. When Hitler and Goebbels were preparing to host the Berlin Olympics, there were at least half a century before the term sportwashing spread. The Games had been assigned by the International Olympic Committee in 1931, two years before Hitler's rise to power, and by a strange paradox, precisely in order to break Germany's isolation from the international community following the First World War. At that time the boycott front was split. On the one hand, the European countries tried to avoid any move that might annoy Hitler, on the other, the US commission charged with carrying out an inspection of the conditions in which the Games would be held was composed mostly of "conservative members, when not sympathizers of the Nazism, which brought back a reassuring image of Germany» says Sbetti. In the United States, more than in Europe, however, a strong debate arose on the possibility of boycotting the event, especially within the Jewish community, due to the approval of the Nuremberg Laws. However, the boycott fringe found itself having to face the only apparently unexpected hostility of the African-American community, which saw in sport a tool to emancipate itself from the systematic racism of US society. In this regard, the legend according to which Hitler refused to recognize the triumph of Jesse Owens in those Olympics (winning four gold medals) is quite famous, when in reality it was the American athlete himself who denied it. “Hitler didn't snub me, Roosevelt did: he didn't even send me a telegram,” Owens said about the president of the United States.
Another "school" case is that of the so-called "shameful" World Cups, i.e. those of Argentina in 1978. Their story could begin with the personal story of a former Wermacht captain in the African and Italian campaigns, Hermann Neuberger, who during the 1970s finds himself FIFA vice president. In charge of providing a report on the situation in Argentina before the World Cup, he declares that "there are no better conditions for the tournament to take place". As for Berlin, the 1978 world championship was also assigned to Argentina a few years before Jorge Videla's military coup. In truth, the Argentine generals were initially even annoyed by the burden of attracting the prying eyes of the international press to themselves. This would have risked shedding light on the enormous system of internal repression, hitherto unknown to most Argentines themselves, and the subject of rumors in Western leftist movements. Taking the opportunity, however, the military regime chose to take advantage of the opportunity to restore abroad the image of a peaceful, pacified country after all.
Meanwhile, a grassroots uprising in Europe was taking hold against the World Cup of the fascist dictatorship. It happened above all in France, where there was a strong diaspora of Argentines, but also in Holland, where the players of the national team received information brochures on the crimes committed in Argentina from the humanitarian association SKAN, and in Sweden, after the disappearance of Dagmar Hagelin, a 17-year-old Swedish girl who disappeared in Buenos Aires after being arrested by the police.
Two posters of the Comité pour l'Organisation par le Boycott de l'Argentine de la Coupe du Monde (COBA), an association made up of Argentine exiles in France, which also obtained the support of Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the Parti Socialiste by François Mitterand.Perhaps for the first time, even some players will take a political position: the most striking confirmed case will remain that of Jorge Carrascosa, captain of the Albiceleste who decides to retire a few weeks before the World Cup, avoiding making the real reasons for his choice public. According to newspaper reports, some of the tournament's potential stars have also declined to play in Argentina. Among them is Paul Breitner, a Maoist, who however at the same time also has a perennial conflict with the West Germany coach. Johann Cruyff's last-minute absence will also be politically exploited. The Dutch number 14 will only later clarify that he withdrew out of fear for his personal safety and for his family, which had been kidnapped shortly before the start of that World Cup.
The Argentine World Cup will take place in a complacent atmosphere. The leaders of FIFA will parade together with Videla, who can count on the support of the United States. Even the Eastern bloc national teams, however, will have little trouble playing. Argentina coached by the communist Menotti will win, who will remain silent, and whoever asks too many questions, like Gianni Minà, will simply be expelled from the country. Only five years later the tragedy will be summed up: the Videla dictatorship made an estimated number of about 30,000 people disappear, almost half of the fans who attended the Albiceleste victory against the Netherlands at the Monumental.
Apart from these cases, in which, as we have seen, silence won in the end, boycotts have been partially successful only in the presence of political choices in contexts of extreme polarization. This occurred during the Cold War and almost always concerned the Olympics rather than the World Cup. In 1980, the United States and 64 other countries did not participate in the Moscow Games in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and even though communism collapsed just over a decade later, the proclaimed goal – to withdraw the Russian army from Kabul – will be far from being reached. Although it was the most mammoth sporting boycott in history, it failed to achieve total consensus even among the allies. Under the Olympic flag, for example, Australia, Great Britain, France and Italy participated, the latter first in the medal table among the countries of the Western bloc.
In turn, the USSR and thirteen other Warsaw Pact bloc countries refused to participate in the subsequent Los Angeles Games in response to “anti-Soviet hysteria and chauvinistic sentiments.” Even in these cases marked by the exceptionality of history, the short-term result is indisputable: the competitions of international events continue in relative normality and the political situation of the host country remains unchanged, even if the level of competition between the athletes is undeniably conditioned .
This does not mean that boycott campaigns cannot achieve local goals. For example, the African teams deserted the qualifiers for the 1966 World Cup, complaining of the only place available among the sixteen participants, to be contested, moreover, with the Asian (South Korea also joined the boycott) and Oceanic national teams. Already in the following edition in Mexico, an exclusive place was reserved for the CAF and, when it was decided to expand the number of participants to 24 at the 1982 World Cup, the places for Asia, Africa and Oceania became four. The European national teams, which in 1966 in England featured ten teams, only obtained three additional places in the following decades, during the process that brought the number of participants to thirty-two in the France '98 edition. If one of Africa and Asia risked remaining unrepresented in the final stages until the 1970s, the two continents can now count on a total of nine places.
The globalization of football was one of the side effects of the duopoly between 1974 and 2015 between João Havelange and Sepp Blatter as president of FIFA. A phenomenon that many have considered a kind of veil of Maya behind which corruption and unclear relationships with authoritarian regimes were hidden, but which actually made football the global sport it is today. However, the assignment of the last two editions to Russia and Qatar in one fell swoop helped to uncover Pandora's box within FIFA, and to ignite the debate within an international public opinion.
If the Olympics have often been the scene of geopolitical clashes and retaliation between states, the boycott campaigns of the football World Cup have more often started from the bottom, almost replacing a government of world football perceived as corrupt and unreliable. They were born spontaneously from the precious work of journalists and activists, aiming to highlight critical factors of major international events among a public more sensitive than in the past to issues such as minority rights, human rights violations and environmental sustainability. However, the boycott campaigns had resonance among a predominantly Western audience, while they were often viewed with skepticism in the rest of the world. The protests almost always lost strength as the official start of the competition approached: once the party began, few had the strength not to participate. The World Cup in Qatar and the expulsion of Russia from the sporting world could mark a change of course, even if it is still too early to tell.
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