Olympic Boycott: Beijing and Berlin

Nicolaus Mills on the Olympic Boycott

Almost everywhere the Olympic torch goes on its 21-country, 85,000-mile relay from Athens to Beijing, it runs into demonstrators protesting China’s occupation of Tibet and its role in the genocide in Darfur. In London, thirty-five demonstrators were arrested by the police after numerous clashes, and in Paris, the Olympic flame was extinguished five times before those carrying it canceled their relay run.

A similar set of events took place in San Francisco, the Olympic torch’s one stop in America. The day before the torch arrived activists unfurled “Free Tibet” banners on the Golden Gate Bridge, setting the stage for the demonstrations that followed. The route of the Olympic torch was kept secret by city officials as long as possible, and then as the torch made its rescheduled trip, it was protected by police on motorcycles, who finally decided the best way to deal with the demonstrators they faced was to place the torch on a bus and drive it to the San Francisco airport.

But the failure of these global protests to have any discernible effect on Chinese foreign policy raises the question, What’s next?

For many European heads of state the next step is a boycott of the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games. Britain’s prime minister Gordon Brown, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel, Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk, and the Czech Republic’s president Vaclav Klaus have all announced they will not attend the opening ceremonies. But as long as China continues on its current path, this step, too, is an ineffective one.

What few seem to want to talk about is a full-scale boycott of the Olympics as a strategy for changing Chinese foreign policy. That’s said to be unfair to the world’s athletes, who have spent years preparing for the 2008 Olympics, and it is considered likely to increase rather than decrease Chinese nationalism.

For those who counsel restraint toward China, there are, however, a few final questions to think about. Was it right for America and its future allies to have sent their athletes to the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin? Were the benefits of participation worth the propaganda Adolf Hitler and Germany got from holding the games? Would a boycott of those Olympics have predisposed Europe and America to make different foreign policy decisions about Germany in the late 1930s?

The Berlin standard is the most extreme one we have, and it is easy to argue that today’s China is not 1936 Germany. But then what becomes important to ask is whether there are any circumstances that we now think would justify an Olympic boycott? Or is our assumption that all nations, including our own, carry such heavy political baggage that nothing any longer justifies an Olympic boycott?

Such a realpolitik would certainly be in keeping with the times, but it is hardly reassuring. Perhaps that is why when so many sports fans think of the 1936 Olympics, it is not Hitler whom they recall but Jesse Owens winning four gold medals in track and field.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.