Sportswashing. This term was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2018 after it appeared in NGO campaigns and media reports. The terminology has now become firmly established and is also used for the Olympic Games in Beijing and the World Cup in Qatar. The term is relatively new, but the practice itself is not.
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“From Hitler’s Olympic Games to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, which took place during the military junta, to the Olympic Games in Beijing – every time these states have made efforts to host these major sporting events, and it can be argued that it is always about acted in some form of sportswash, “says Felix Jakens of Amnesty International. As organizers or investors, the autocrats are prominent members of the sports family and benefit from the positive image. That is well known.
An unexplored term
Nevertheless, there are only a few scientists who have dealt with the various dimensions of sportswashing, says economics professor Simon Chadwick: “If you enter ‘sportswashing’ in Google Scholar, where academic publications and studies are listed, practically nothing appears. So it’s a term that is quite new and relatively unexplored. “
The Briton Chadwick gives an example that affects his home country and has so far not really been associated with the history of sportswashing: “At the beginning of the 20th century, 107,000 South Africans were in British concentration camps in South Africa. 28,000 of these 107,000 perished in concentration camps And at the same time the UK government is sending soccer teams, rugby teams, cricket teams to South Africa to keep the locals happy and show them they are there for them. I think if we talk about sportswashing we have to Open up the term and not just view it as a purely Saudi Arabian or Chinese phenomenon, for example. “
Sportswashing in democracies too?
The tendency in reporting by NGOs and the media is to locate sportswashing only among actors who commit serious human rights violations and who act outside the rule of law. This seldom applies to countries in the so-called global west. But the line between classic PR and sportswashing is vague.
Are anti-discrimination campaigns by UEFA trying to gloss over the situation in some member countries? Is the promotion of the still small Formula E trying to disguise the bad environmental balance of motorsport? Does the NFL American Football League’s cooperation activities with the US military attempt to make the misconduct of the armed forces forget? You can answer no to such questions.
But: The sports leagues and major events are also used specifically by Western governments to advertise. For example, the British government has been working with the Premier League since the summer for an advertising campaign in 145 countries that aims to present Great Britain as a dynamic and future-oriented country. Those responsible pointed out that, according to surveys, the Premier League is most likely to make people feel positive about the UK.
Such a campaign comes in handy to defuse sensitive issues to a certain extent, even without a sophisticated strategy – for example, when an analysis of the “Action on Armed Violence” in September showed that the British government supported the illegal killing of almost 300 Afghan families from relatives – sometimes with only a few hundred pounds.
The line between image campaigns and sportswashing is vague
But where do we draw the line between sportswashing and image campaigns? Peter Heidt, who sits for the FDP in the Bundestag, has the following opinion: “The moment I leave the rule of law; the moment I try to relativize the arbitrary oppression of groups in my country – that is the limit for me. As long as I just want to show a positive image of my country, that’s fine with me. And you have to set the limit. “
Ultimately, the debate about the exact definition of sportswashing is perhaps also a purely academic one. Because in public it is especially important for human rights organizations to vigorously pillory the worst perpetrators. Wenzel Michalski, Germany Director of Human Rights Watch, does not want to soften the term: “If we throw strong terms around in the same way everywhere, as, for example, Corona opponents denigrate the Yellow Star in an anti-Semitic way Then we devalue the terms, but also what lies behind them. There are differences between autocracies and democracies. That does not mean that you can let the democracies or constitutional states get away with anything. On the contrary, you have to continue a discussion there, too. But as I said, the difference has to be manifested. “