International Relations DataBase

by Andria Merabishvili

Introduction

Several days ago, two of my friends were having a tough debate about Italian football. The one who is an England fan claimed that it was Benito Mussolini who won two World Cups in 1934 and 1938 not footballers themselves. It seemed that the second debater who was a fan of Italian football did not quite reject the proposed idea but argued that even without the help of Mussolini, Italy had a wonderful team, thus deserved to win the World Cups. It is not surprising that there are lots of these kinds of discussions between football fans whether a certain team deserved to become world champions or not. In all these cases, there are lots of talks that the fate of champion was decided largely in the political echelons.

‘Nothing is more successful than success!’

My work will concentrate on these kinds of facts that lead us think that sport in general matters a lot to politicians. I will argue that authoritarian regimes use sport as a supportive tool to win public support, improve their international image, legitimize their regime and maintain existing power. It is natural that every government, president or prime minister wishes their sports teams to win major international tournaments. However, I believe that authoritarian rulers are more keen on victories. It is not just the opinion that people often associate the victory with the existent government and often rulers try to attribute sports success to their political performance. This is equally characteristic to any type of government. The different feature within the authoritarians is legitimacy problem. In many cases, authoritarians are not elected or voted and thus, they have less legitimacy level than democratic regimes that are elected by the majority of population. In authoritarianism, majority of people are dissatisfied with the government and cannot change it. Leaders in these countries try to use different tools to maintain their rule. State violence is this kind of action. However, “no regime rules through coercion alone” (Crystal, p. 274). They wish to win the popular support and rule the society that would be loyal to them. For that reason there are different types of mechanisms that regime uses, such as censorship and propaganda. Those help regimes to be presented as attractive ones. This attractiveness can win loyalty and support, which can be generated in legitimacy of the regime. When football teams achieve tremendous success like winning the World Cup, leaders can use it for building an attractive image of regime. “Nothing is more successful than success” (Kruger, p. 85). Therefore it leads to greater legitimacy of the same regime. This logic is absent in a democratic states where electing of government by majority already serves for its legitimacy.

Furthermore, international victories serve for promoting the regime not only within the state, but outside of it. Usually, authoritarian states do not have a positive image in the international society unlike the democratic ones. Hence, non-political activities can be used to repair the unsatisfactory status quo. For instance, in fascist Italy athletes were defined as “blue ambassadors” (Teja, p. 156). “If Italy conquers England in football, Mussolini plays up the victory as another example of the superiority of a fascist state over a democracy” (Tunis, p. 607).

Because of high importance of success in sports generally and in international tournaments particularly, authoritarian states do not hesitate to use any kind of illegal or legal tools to reach the victory. Pluralism and transparency that are characteristics of democratic countries make it difficult for the state to unlawfully influence the sport. Contrary to that, authoritarian regimes are already used to such crimes as bribery and corruption that often serve as modus operandi for them. Consequently authoritarians are more likely to use every legal or illegal means to help their sports team become a champion. To support the proposed theses, I will introduce empirical and statistical data. Read the rest of this entry »