Globalization

I don't know how many people subscribe to both Foreign Policy and Sports Illustrated, but I do know lots of people who take athletics seriously. Human beings seem to be hard-wired into making "in-group/out-group" distinctions, so it's not surprising that the loyalty that sports fans show for their favorite teams looks a lot like the broader phenomenon of nationalism. And I'm not saying that just because I'm a proud member of Red Sox Nation.  

Success in sports can be the first step toward a successful political career (e.g., Bill Bradley, Sebastian Coe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Kemp, etc.) and athletes like Pele, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods have become genuine global icons. Of course, using sports to demonstrate national prowess or as a source of national pride is a common practice. The revival of the Olympic games in the 1890s was at least partly intended to promote international cooperation and understanding, but as a good realist would expect, the Games eventually became yet another arena where states could try to demonstrate the superiority of their own system and enhance their global influence.

Anyway, as summer winds down and the fall term looms, I found myself wondering about various episodes where sporting events actually had an effect on world politics, or told us something about how the world was changing. Here's my list of ten key moments, in no particular order.

1. The Berlin Olympics, 1936.

Adolf Hitler uses the Olympic Games to highlight the superiority of the Nazi regime, but his efforts are at least partly undermined when a black American, Jesse Owens, wins four gold medals.

2. La Guerra de futbol (aka “Soccer War”): El Salvador vs. Honduras, 1969. 

Here’s a case where sports may have helped cause a war: a hard-fought match between El Salvador and Honduras in a preliminary round for the 1970 FIFA World Cup exacerbated the existing tensions between the two states and helped spark a brief four-day war in which over 1000 people died. The war ended inconclusively and El Salvador eventually won the actual match, but was ousted in a subsequent round and did not make the finals.

3. "Ping Pong Diplomacy:" U.S. Table Tennis Team Visits China, 1971. 

During the world championships in Japan, the U.S. table tennis team received an unexpected invitation to visit China, and shortly thereafter became the first group of Americans to visit China since the communist takeover in 1949. The "ping heard 'round the world" was the first tangible sign of normalization between the United States and China (even though the Chinese teams reportedly had to throw a few matches to the Americans). The visit was obviously not the cause of the subsequent rapprochement, but it shows how sporting events can be an effective diplomatic tool.

4. U.S. Women Win Soccer World Cup, 1999.

I see this as significant for two main reasons. First, it underscores the growing importance and legitimacy of women’s sports, which has been an important element in modern feminism. Second, it shows the United States finally demonstrating real prowess in the world's most popular sport. Plus, the final game was against China, which makes it a nice harbinger of 21st century geopolitics.

5. Black September at the Munich Olympics, 1972:

Palestinian terrorists seized and eventually killed eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. The heinous act sets back Palestinian national aspirations and triggers a protracted Israeli reprisal campaign that assassinated a number of Palestinian leaders and at least one innocent victim.

6. South Africa Wins Rugby World Cup, 1995.

South African teams were barred from most international competitions during the apartheid era, a step that highlighted the regime’s pariah status and helped undermine popular support for the policy. The post-apartheid team’s victory in 1995 was a vivid symbol of South Africa’s new beginning, symbolized when President Nelson Mandela awarded the victor’s trophy to team captain Francois Pinear, a white Afrikaner.

7. Australia II Wins America’s Cup, 1983.

The Aussie victory broke what was probably the longest winning streak in the history of sports -- 132 years of dominance that began when the schooner America outpaced a British flotilla in a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851. (When she asked who had finished second, Queen Victoria was reportedly told "Your Majesty, there is no second.”). In retrospect, one could see the Australian victory as a symptom of globalization: cutting-edge yacht design wasn’t an American monopoly any longer. Since then, alas, the competition has been driven by another American export: gamesmanship and ceaseless litigation over the rules of the competition.  

8. The "Miracle on Ice": the U.S. Olympic Ice Hockey Team Defeats the Soviet National Team, 1980. 

Labeled the greatest sports moment of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated, the improbable defeat of a heavily-favored Soviet team by a group of U.S. college players arrived at a moment when many Americans mistakenly felt the Soviet Union was pulling ahead. In fact, the USSR was on its last legs, though its hockey establishment remained a powerhouse and eventually sent a lot of players to the NHL.

9. “Das Wunder von Berne:” Germany Wins World Cup, 1954.

An underdog German team defeated Hungary in the final in Berne, a win that set off a wave of euphoria in Germany and is seen by some historians as a key event that restored a sense of national pride after the shame of the Nazi era and helped signal Germany’s re-integration in the world community.

10. Pentathlete Boris Onischenko Disqualified at Montreal Olympics, 1976.

I was on the fencing team in college, so I can’t resist adding this to my list.  Onischenko was a member of the Soviet modern pentathlon team who was disqualified after referees discovered that his sword had been modified to enable him to register “hits” on the electronic scoring machine by pressing a switch concealed in his grip.  Together with the East German steroid scandal, such episodes helped undermine the image of the Soviet empire.  Plenty of other athletes have cheated, of course -- think of sprinters Ben Johnson and Marion Jones, bicyclist Floyd Landis, and subway-riding “marathoner” Rosie Ruiz -- but their transgressions had less impact absent the Cold War atmosphere.

There are other examples one might add: Budge versus von Cramm at Wimbledon, the controversial Soviet "defeat" of the U.S. men's basketball team at Munich, or the notorious Soviet-Hungary water polo match at the 1956 Olympics (played in the shadow of the Hungarian Revolution, the game was so violent the water reportedly turned pink). So please feel free to contribute your own suggestions.

IOC Olympic Museum /Allsport 

I watched the Men's final at the French Open tennis tournament yesterday, and I was struck by the dominance of: 1) Roger Federer, who won his 14th Grand Slam tournament handily, and 2) the English language. The announcer at *Roland Garros* Stadium reported the scores en francais and French TV apparently got the first courtside interview with Federer after the match (while NBC took a commercial break), but Federer and Swedish runner-up Robin Soderling gave their acceptance speeches  in English (with a French translation for the crowd). One imagines the spirit of Charles de Gaulle whirring rapidly in his tomb, not to mention the "Immortals" in L'Academie francaise.

It’s possible that Robin Soderling (the Swedish runner-up) spoke to the crowd in English because he doesn't speak French. But Federer reportedly speaks fluent French, German, and Swiss-German, as well as English, so why wasn’t he addressing the local crowd in their native tongue?

My guess is that this was dictated by the global TV market, and by the growing position of English as the lingua franca of contemporary globalization. The tournament was being watched all over the world, and English is the language that would be understood by the greatest number of potential viewers world-wide.  

Americans sometimes view the dominant position of English as another component of America's "soft power," but that view is simplistic chauvinism.  With English becoming a "universal" language, no single country will own it or be able to regulate its content. Instead, it will continue to evolve as most languages do, incorporating new words, spellings, and grammatical practices from an wide variety of sources. If they haven't started already, American xenophobes are going to start complaining soon about the corruption of "standard English" by all these foreign influences.  For an interesting collection of views on this topic, check out the "Freakonomics" discussion here.

Of course, this whole discussion may be moot, given the damage that email, text-messaging, and Twitter feeds are already doing to civilized discourse.  Or does that comment make me sound like a technophobe?

*P.S.: Bonus points for anyone who knows who Roland Garros was without looking up the link. Answer: Garros was a French aeronautical pioneer, who developed an armored propeller that allowed the use of a forward-firing machine gun for aerial combat during World War I. His system predated the more effective synchronization device later perfected by the Dutch/German Anthony Fokker. Garros was captured by the Germans in 1915, later escaped, and eventually shot down and killed in 1918. The stadium for which he is named occupies the site of a tennis academy that he attended.

JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP/Getty Images

In my last post, I argued that the U.S. policy of "don't ask don't tell" is contrary to a realist view of world politics, because it excludes qualified people from military service and thus makes it harder for the United States to field the most effective forces in a competitive international environment. I think there are other objections to the policy as well, but I was primarily concerned in that post with the strategic implications. The policy obviously doesn't prevent the United States from producing highly capable fighting forces, but restricting the talent pool in this way means our forces will cost more than they have to and/or be less effective than they could be.

This got me thinking: might a similar logic be at work at a more global level? Specifically, does the competitive nature of international politics give some states an advantage because their political systems and social values make it relatively easy to attract and assimilate talented citizens from other countries, thereby enabling them to draw more-or-less selectively on the entire global talent pool? If so, then these states will be able to improve their relative position over time, and to the extent that globalization now facilitates people moving from place to place, that tendency should be increasing. By contrast, states that make assimilation difficult or that discriminate on other areas will tend to be less attractive destinations for highly educated and/or entrepreneurial individuals, and these states will for the most part have to work with the citizenry they've got or pay a very high premium to attract talent from abroad.

One can see this dynamic by comparing Japan and the United States. Japan is an ethnically homogeneous society, with small minority populations who remain objects of discrimination. It is possible for foreigners to become naturalized citizens after five years of continuous residence, but this practice is not widespread. Japan also has a rapidly aging and declining population, which will have significant long-term effects on its power and influence. Yet given Japan's current policies discourage talented foreigners from immigrating and assimilating, thereby making it harder for Japan to attract the best and brightest from around the world and reverse its demographic slide.

The United States, by contrast, is the very model of a melting-pot society. People automatically qualify for citizenship if either parent is a citizen or if they are born on American soil, and naturalization is quite common (about one million people became naturalized citizens last year). Although support for immigration has waxed and waned throughout U.S. history and remains a contested issue today (mostly due to issues pertaining to illegal immigration), the United States has had remarkable success attracting and assimilating some of the best and brightest from all over the world. All I have to do is look at my colleagues, whose ranks include an impressive number of scholars born outside the United States. Each of them was hired as a result of a global talent search, and we'd have a less distinguished faculty if we had looked only at U.S. citizens. Some of my colleagues eventually returned to their countries of origin (such as Andres Velasco, currently Minister of Finance in Chile), but others are likely to spend most if not all of their careers here in the United States.

The success of the American melting pot, as many scholars have commented, is due partly to good fortune (North America was rich in natural resources, arable land, etc.) but also to the particular nature of American civic nationalism (or what Anatol Lieven calls the American Creed): faith in liberty, constitutionalism, democracy, the rule of law, individualism, and political and cultural (but not economic) egalitarianism. Although the United States has hardly been free of racial or ethnic conflicts during its history, these features have made it possible for every new group to integrate itself as full citizens. The United States is an attractive destination not just because it is a wealthy society, but also because many different groups and individuals can become integral parts of that society instead of facing permanent second-class status.

If I'm right, then the pressures of international competition give an advantage to any society that can "cream" some of the smartest and/or hardest working people from all over the world. How? By making that society an attractive place to live and work, mostly by creating an atmosphere of equality and toleration. By contrast, societies that limit their de facto talent pool by defining citizenship narrowly, by treating minorities badly, by discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or other characteristics are placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

Over time, therefore, we should expect a growing gap between "cosmopolitan" societies that develop institutions and cultures in which diversity and tolerance are prized and where potential conflicts between them are managed well, and more restrictive societies that are either attractive only to a fixed population of particular ethnic identity, or who are face recurring internal conflicts between various contending groups. My bet would be that, other things being equal, the former do better over time.

And note that this argument isn't just about ethnic assimilation. In effect, what I'm suggesting is that from a realist perspective, there is a strong case for "small-l" liberal toleration. All else equal, societies that establish strong norms and institutions that protect individual rights and freedoms (including those governing sexual preference, I might add) will become attractive destinations for a wider array of potential citizens than societies that try to maintain a high degree of uniformity. And when you can choose from a bigger talent pool, over time you're going to do better.

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

I'm about to leave town for a conference on civil-military relations sponsored by the Eisenhower Project, so I won't be posting much until next week. But several thoughts occurred to me as I watched the world's nations rally to address the swine flu problem.

Potential pandemics appear to be one of those issue-areas where global cooperation works pretty well. By most accounts the response to SARS back in 2003 did a fairly good job of containing what might have been a much more serious problem. By contrast, the global response to climate change has been much more halting, and collaboration in other areas (the Doha Round, arms reductions, etc.) has been even more disappointing in recent years.

I think there are three features of the pandemic problem that encourage effective international collaboration. First, the dangers are immediate and somewhat indiscriminate, in the sense that lots of countries are likely to be affected and within a relatively short time-horizon. Mishandling a pandemic would not only impose major short term costs, it could also affect the political fortunes of incumbent politicians around the world. So nobody sits around twiddling their thumbs. Global warming, by contrast, is a long-range danger, which makes it easier for today's politicians to waste a lot of time haggling and push the problem off on future generations. 

Second, pandemics are not an issue where "relative gains" loom large. States don't see this as an opportunity to improve their strategic position by getting others to bear all the costs or by trying to free-ride (or god forbid, by trying to encourage the disease to spread to one's rivals). Infectious diseases are too mobile and the world is too interconnected for that approach. If Country A responds vigorously but Country B does not, B is likely to have a more serious problem. But the worse things are for B, the bigger the problem that A might face (think Mexico and the US in this regard). This situation encourages joint efforts, and makes it more likely that each state will do all that it can to contain the danger and mitigate the effects.

Third, public health is a highly professionalized and comparatively de-politicized field, and the relevant international and national institutions (e.g., the World Health Organization) have a lot of prior experience. Many of the responses to these events are based on uncontroversial science and straightforward best practices, which means there is less debate about what measures to take and less time spent trying to devise solutions. One might contrast this with the current economic mess, where different national authorities have rather different ideas about the best way to respond and international coordination has been pretty paltry.

All this is not to say that the global response will be perfect, or that the potential pandemic will be contained as effectively as SARS ultimately was. But it does remind us that global cooperation is possible, and that some global institutions do provide valuable protection. Libertarian neo-isolationists and neoconservative institution-bashers should take note.

Last week a friend of mine sent me a link to a website for a film festival featuring over thirty movies about wine. That got me thinking: if Foreign Policy had a film festival, what movies should we show? There are some obvious candidates (see below), but rather fewer than you might think. After all, many aspects of foreign policy don't lend themselves to cinematic treatment, which is why I don't expect to see a gripping drama about the Doha Round or a lighthearted farce about the Six Party Talks on North Korea (though Kim Jong Il clearly has untapped comic potential).

There are lots of terrific war movies, of course, but most of them tell you relatively little about why the war happened or what the conflict was actually about. And spy movies have long been a popular genre, ranging from Hitchcock’s Thirty-Nine Steps to the gadgetry and glitz of most Bond flicks to the film noir seediness of The Third Man to the paranoid high-tech travelogue that is the Jason Bourne franchise.

But let's raise the bar high, and exclude pure war movies, spy capers, documentaries, and overt propaganda films like Triumph of the Will or Frank Capra's Why We Fight, and focus on movies that tells us something about international relations more broadly. Here's my personal top ten list, with apologies for my ethnocentrism (I don’t see enough foreign-language films).

10. Meeting Venus

Ostensibly a film about opera and an unlikely romance between a diva and an obscure conductor -- set in a fictitious "all-European" orchestra -- this droll sleeper actually tells you a lot about environmentalism, European labor unions, the historical legacy of the Trotsky-Stalin split, and the tangled politics of the European Union. Plus it’s got Glenn Close.

9. Independence Day

Basically a sci-fi flick the depends on you suspending disbelief throughout (e.g., how did Bill Pullman stay cockpit ready for an F-15 while serving as President, and where did Wlll Smith learn to fly a flying saucer?) It's Hollywood, so of course the United States gets to save the world. But it makes my list because it is balance-of-power theory in action: an external threat (giant alien spaceships), gets the world to join forces against the common foe.

8. Syriana

Yes, there are a lot of spies roaming around this movie, but its much broader than that; an exciting if somewhat incoherent portrait of the interplay of oil companies, great power politics, local militias, and the tension between modernity and tradition in the Middle East.  Not to be taken too seriously, but not without insights either.

7. Judgment at Nuremberg

Not just a gripping movie, but also a film about a watershed historical event. One could argue that this is where the modern human rights movement begins.

6. Wag the Dog

Instead of invading Grenada or firing cruise missiles at Sudan, here the White House hires a Hollywood producer to invent a wholly fictitious war. Sounds absurd, but those WMD in Iraq turned out to be fictitious too. There's a whole IR literature on "scapegoat wars" (i.e., wars fought to distract the public from other issues), and this film just takes that impulse a step further. It's a cautionary tale in this era of digital special effects, a compliant news media, and the citizens who are all too inclined to believe whatever they are told. Could this be Roger Ailes's favorite movie?

5. Fail Safe

Almost-but-not-quite a war movie, and one of the best Cold War-era "will we blow up the world or not?" thrillers, with a surprising, sobering ending.

4. Gandhi, and A Passage to India (tie)

Everything you ever wanted to know about colonialism and the unavoidable clash of cultures that it produces.

3. The Great Dictator

Chaplin's lethal lampooning of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, released in 1940 and addressing anti-Semitism at a moment when plenty of other institutions were still ignoring it. Reminds us that making fun of despots is often an effective weapon.
 
2. Dr. Strangelove

Granted, it is a war movie (though the war depicted here won’t last long), but so much more. Kubrick punctured the absurdity of the conventional military thinking in a nuclear age as well as any scholar could, and managed to satirize the whole Cold War mentality to hilarious effect.  

1. Casablanca

No, it’s not really a war movie (there are no battle scenes, and the emphasis is on politics, resistance, and of course romance). But it’s on my list, because, well, it's Casablanca. And where would modern discourse be without phrases like "Round up the usual suspects," "Here's looking at you, kid," "I was misinformed," "I'm shocked, shocked!…" and "this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”?

HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Interpreter (not that good a movie, but how many films take place at the UN?); Rollover (an old B movie about a global financial meltdown triggered by crooked corporations, venal foreign investors, and corrupt financiers. Right, as if something like that could ever happen); Local Hero (hot shot rep from a multinational oil corporation is no match for the charms of a quirky Scottish fishing village); Duck Soup (the Marx Brothers show you what could happen if Glenn Beck ran foreign policy); Missing (about the CIA's involvement in Chile); Grand Illusion (a classic antiwar movie, but didn't make my list because it is set in the middle of World War I); Hotel Rwanda (humanity in midst of the world's most recent genocide); Charlie Wilson's War (partly about the Afghan War, but mostly about how things get done -- or not -- in Washington. My CIA friends tell me a lot of it is a crock, but Philip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant and Tom Hanks ain't bad); and last but not least, Reds (the Bolshevik Revolution was a major world event, and it's an excellent movie, too).  

And YOUR nominees are?

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I'm off to Singapore tonight, to spend a week at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. I'll be giving a couple of lectures and participating on a panel on "The First 100 Days of the Obama Administration," as well catching up on developments at RSIS and trends in SE Asia. Given that Singapore is one of the most wired places on earth, I'll try to post as much as my schedule and jet lag allows. I've also asked a few people to chime in as "guest bloggers" while I'm away, so you may see some other voices posting here over the next week. Stay tuned. 

Warning: this is not a realist post. It's not even all that serious. But it's Friday, and some of you may appreciate a brief diversion from the more depressing events of the week.

Here's my question: has there ever been a great European rock-and-roll band?

You would think that there would be by now, given the cross-fertilization of musical cultures that has taken place over the past few decades. We've been allied with Europe for a long time, and true rock bands have been touring the place for decades. The Armed Forces radio network used to broadcast lots of rock music too, so it was available to anyone with a radio. If we believe Tom Stoppard, rock music was a powerful cultural force on the continent (including Eastern Europe), just as it was in the United States.

Yet I can't think of a single European band or artist that would be regarded as a major force in the history of rock-and-roll. Obviously I am drawing a sharp distinction here between the United Kingdom and continental Europe. The UK has produced any number of world-class rock bands and artists: the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, U-2, Sex Pistols, Van Morrison, Cream, Elvis Costello, Eurythmics, David Bowie, etc., so my generalization obviously doesn't apply there. And this list appears to confirm that point.

But what about France, Germany, Spain, Holland, Denmark, Sweden? These cultures have produced a number of important jazz musicians (Django Reinhardt, Niels-Henning Orsted-Pedersen) and world-class popular music artists (Edith Piaf) plus a few one-hit wonders (e.g. Golden Earring's "Radar Love") but continental Europe has never produced a rock and roll band of any global significance. And I hope nobody counters by mentioning Abba -- whatever you might think of their music, it ain't rock.

I'm no musicologist, and I know there are other people out there who know more about the music scene than I do (paging Eric Alterman!). And I admit I haven't been keeping up with the scene as much in recent years. (My teenaged son was into some weird Japanese metal bands last year, but none of them seem to have broken out to a larger global following).

So I could be dead wrong about this, and I invite readers to chime in. Am I way off-base here? If there have been some major rock artists from continental Europe, who are they? (Note: I am not saying that there are no good rock bands in Europe; I'm just saying that they don't seem to be emerging as major artists in a global sense).

And if I'm right about the gap, what's the explanation? Is it network theory (i.e., lack of connections to key tastemakers, like the folks at Rolling Stone)? A function of trade patterns? The lingering influence of too much classical music training? American chauvinism?

My own theory, based on absolutely no research whatsoever, is that you can't have rock music without a blues and R & B foundation. Blues and R & B and early American rock and roll spread to England in the 1950s and helped ignite the British rock scene. Result: the British invasion of the 1960s. But blues and R and B were never a large influence on the continent, and it has therefore remained focused on (or to be unkind, mired in) an irretrievably "pop" sensibility.

On a more serious note: does this phenomenon tell us something about the limits of globalization? We can send digital music anywhere now, but that doesn't mean it sprouts and grows everywhere it lands, and national and regional cultures continue to retain a lot of individuality, even in the face of the Internet and the iPod.