Diplomatic Games

Sport, Statecraft, and International Relations since 1945

Heather L. Dichter,Andrew L. Johns

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813145662
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diplomazia e trattati

International sporting events, including the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup, have experienced profound growth in popularity and significance since the mid-twentieth century. Sports often facilitate diplomacy, revealing common interests across borders and uniting groups of people who are otherwise divided by history, ethnicity, or politics. In many countries, popular athletes have become diplomatic envoys. Sport is an arena in which international conflict and compromise find expression, yet the impact of sports on foreign relations has not been widely studied by scholars.

In Diplomatic Games, a team of international scholars examines how the nexus of sport and foreign relations has driven political and cultural change since 1945, demonstrating how governments have used athletic competition to maintain and strengthen alliances, promote policies, and increase national prestige. The contributors investigate topics such as China's use of sports to oppose Western imperialism, the ways in which sports helped bring an end to apartheid in South Africa, and the impact of the United States' 1980 Olympic boycott on U.S.-Soviet relations. Bringing together innovative scholarship from around the globe, this groundbreaking collection makes a compelling case for the use of sport as a lens through which to view international relations.

Part 1

Alliance Politics

1

“A Game of Political Ice Hockey”

NATO Restrictions on East German Sport Travel in the Aftermath of the Berlin Wall

Heather L. Dichter

The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 was designed to keep the United States involved in European affairs, both to prevent a return to the American isolationism that developed after World War I and to serve as a bulwark against the increasing Soviet influence in Europe as the Iron Curtain of the Cold War cut right through Germany. In the spring of 1954, when the Soviet Union granted sovereignty to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the three Western wartime allies—Great Britain, France, and the United States—reaffirmed their support of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as the only legitimate German state because it had the only freely elected government on German territory. The transatlantic alliance supported this position regarding West Germany’s eastern neighbor, passing a resolution that NATO members “are not prepared to recognise the so-called German Democratic Republic as a sovereign state or to treat the German authorities there as a government.” With the Federal Republic’s accession to NATO the following year (1955), the rest of the alliance members agreed to maintain the isolation of East Germany and to exclude it from the international community.¹

As a result the GDR sought alternative avenues with which to gain recognition. Realizing the difficulty of securing formal (de jure) recognition by states and international organizations, the East German state, with the support of its Soviet bloc allies, sought to force de facto recognition through acceptance of representations of the GDR, such as its coat of arms, flag, and trade missions. The East German regime particularly hoped that through international sport, with its frequent use of flags and anthems, it could gain de facto recognition on a large scale. The Soviet Union and the other communist bloc members frequently advocated for East German membership inside international sport federations as well as participation by separate East German teams at international sport competitions throughout the 1950s and 1960s. International sport federations, which select the host cities and venues for their sporting events, decided individually whether or not to accept East Germany as a member.

Because of the transitory nature of international sport, with world championships changing locations every year and the Olympic Games changing locations every four, NATO continually confronted the issue of East Germany’s attempts to participate in international sporting events in their countries once the Federal Republic became a member in 1955. Because of NATO’s support of the Federal Republic’s stance regarding the GDR, the German-German relationship, as the events of the early 1960s demonstrate, cannot solely be viewed through a bilateral lens. Within NATO, West Germany frequently had to defend its policies toward its eastern neighbor to persuade its allies to uphold a similar position. Even though international sport asserted autonomy in conducting its own affairs, NATO member countries coordinated their efforts within the transatlantic organization to block the increasingly more frequent attempts by East Germany to send a national team (separate from West Germany) to international sporting events.²

The continued concern by NATO and the diplomatic corps regarding international sport reveals that the transatlantic alliance, although created for military purposes, quickly expanded its purview to other areas. By examining NATO’s impact on the German-German sport relationship, this chapter addresses an area of NATO activity that has received almost no attention: the transatlantic alliance’s concern with the media coverage and popular opinion regarding NATO’s actions. Scholars have examined in detail the origins of NATO as a way of ensuring American involvement in European affairs after 1945 or, more recently, the expansion of the organization after the end of the Cold War. Because NATO was initially conceived as a military alliance, its military strategy and nuclear policies have also been extensively studied. Within a few years of the creation of NATO, the organization recognized that many aspects of politics and society impacted their military alliance. By the end of 1950, NATO had created its own Information Service and, three years later, had established a permanent Committee on Information and Cultural Relations, both of which sought to promote NATO through public diplomacy efforts within alliance members. As the Cold War was ending, historian Norman Graebner wrote that “NATO has come to embody more than military values, that it stands for political, civilizational, even spiritual values common to the parts of Europe it represents and to North America as well.” Even with this realization of the expansion of what fell under the purview of NATO’s functions, scholars have rarely moved past the military aspects of NATO strategy in their studies.³

As this chapter demonstrates, NATO and its member states were greatly concerned with what their domestic populations thought about NATO policies. When political controversy struck international sporting events held in NATO countries, the military alliance considered these issues vital to maintaining security and unity and therefore sought to influence international sport. Although NATO supported West Germany’s policy of not recognizing the GDR, East German attempts to participate with its own team, flag, and anthem at athletic events in NATO countries forced member states to balance their national interests with coordinated NATO policies. States on both sides of the Iron Curtain also recognized that the popularity of international sport provided an excellent venue to persuade the public of their position within the Cold War. These issues became acute after the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 forced NATO to counter East German propaganda with their own domestic media efforts aimed at swaying public opinion.

NATO unity was particularly challenged by widespread media coverage of sport on both sides of the Iron Curtain, which made dealing with East Germany a public matter and not a purely internal political issue within the transatlantic alliance. Hosting major international sporting events, including world championships, draws extensive media coverage and helps cities and countries increase their prestige. However, the efforts to maintain NATO’s policy of not recognizing the GDR, including the refusal to permit East German athletes to enter their countries to compete in sporting events, often damaged a country’s international prestige and caused a public outcry when the level of athletic competition was then diminished as a result of these political decisions. Spectators want to see the best athletes from across the globe, and when top competitors are barred from participating or other teams withdraw in solidarity, the public is less inclined to purchase tickets. International sport federations, attempting to prevent politics from interfering with the successful organization of their world championships, became intimately involved in world affairs. National representatives to these sport nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from NATO states conferred with their country’s foreign ministry, and at times the presidents of these international federations appealed (unsuccessfully) to heads of state to facilitate the smooth organization of their world championships.

These international sporting events therefore became key sites for NATO public diplomacy efforts. The transatlantic alliance hoped that placing blame for the political interference in sport on East Germany and the Soviet bloc would help maintain alliance policies as well as promote their position among their own populations. NATO’s actions in response to the construction of the Berlin Wall forced international sport to address the German question. At the same time, the continued discussion of international sport within NATO reveals not only the broad understanding of what issues impacted the military alliance but also the complicated process of balancing national interests with policies agreed among all alliance members.

The Federal Republic attempted to thwart these East German claims through its policy of nonrecognition of East Germany, which came to be known as the Hallstein Doctrine. This policy, named for West Germany’s foreign minister, Walter Hallstein, sought to prevent countries from initiating diplomatic relations with East Germany. The Bonn government believed that recognition of the GDR would signal the permanent status of a divided Germany.⁴ The failure by most states and international organizations to recognize the GDR, while at the same time establishing formal relations with the Federal Republic, provided further validity to Bonn’s claims regarding the lack of legitimacy of East Germany. Once NATO accepted the Federal Republic as a member in 1955 and agreed to support the Hallstein Doctrine as its own policy, the entire transatlantic alliance was very soon confronted with the problems of the German-German relationship, including within the realm of international sport. The Italian delegation to NATO reported in May 1955 that it had denied travel visas the previous month to an East German rugby team that wanted to participate in an international tournament, because the GDR was not recognized as a sovereign state. The chairman of NATO’s Committee on Information and Cultural Relations, where the Italians reported this visa refusal, noted that the Italian action was in line with NATO policy and no further discussion ensued.⁵ By the end of the decade, however, the GDR and the Soviet Union took actions in an attempt to pressure the West to acknowledge the second German state, which ultimately forced the political and sport worlds to confront these issues simultaneously.

In November 1958, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent an ultimatum to the three Western powers, threatening to unilaterally sign a peace treaty with the GDR because no peace treaty with Germany had been signed in 1945. Khrushchev’s ultimatum was an effort to compel the Western powers to negotiate a four-power treaty and, ideally, end West Berlin’s status as a democratic outpost deep inside East Germany. West Berlin was particularly problematic for the communist state because by 1958 it was the point of exodus for more than 90 percent of all East Germans fleeing to the Federal Republic. To the Western powers, a Soviet–East German unilateral treaty would transfer to the GDR the responsibility of checking papers for Western military members traveling to and from West Berlin, thus forcing representatives of the Western states to interact in an official capacity with representatives of a state which the Western powers did not recognize. Although Khrushchev’s ultimatum largely came to naught, efforts to force the West to recognize the GDR in some capacity did not end there.⁶

In its effort to assert its sovereignty and gain de facto recognition from the international community, the East German government also turned to the promotion of state symbols. As part of the tenth anniversary celebrations of the GDR in October 1959, the East German state introduced a new flag with the emblem of the worker and peasant state in the middle of the black-red-gold flag. This addition to the flag differentiated the East German flag from the plain black-red-gold flag of West Germany, which had also been the flag of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). The Federal Republic considered the new East German flag a symbol of the division, as compared to the basic tricolor, which alluded to national unity in freedom. The West German government considered the display of the East German flag a disturbance of the constitutional peace and a breach of law and order. The Bonn government therefore banned the flying of the GDR flag anywhere in the FRG, including at sporting events.⁷

This new East German flag quickly became a problem for sport organizers in NATO countries as well as for NATO itself. National flags are an important part of international sporting events, particularly continental and world championships. Often the flags of all competing countries are hung inside an arena or flown around the top of a stadium. In addition, the flags of the top three competitors are raised while the national anthem of the winner is played during the victory ceremony. Organizers of a world championship were required to invite all members of that international sport federation—which included East Germany for those few federations that had decided by the late 1950s to recognize the GDR.

The importance that the GDR gave to its new flag and anthem became a point of contention at the 1961 Ice Hockey World Championships in Geneva, Switzerland, and prompted NATO to reevaluate its position regarding East German participation in sporting events. Although East and West Germany did not play each other in the round-robin stage, they ultimately met on the last day of the tournament to determine their places in the final standings. The West German team, however, refused to take the ice against East Germany if it had to go through the traditional postgame ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction. Competing in the Global Arena: Sport and Foreign Relations since 1945
• Part 1. Alliance Politics
• Part 2. The Decolonizing World
• Part 3. East-West Rivalries
• Part 4. Sport as Public Diplomacy
• Conclusion. Fields of Dreams and Diplomacy
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Studies in Conflict, Diplomacy, and Peace
• Books in the Series