Leiden; Boston: Global Oriental/Brill, 2012. x, 188 pp. US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-23339-3.
Most research on sport politics either focuses on state government of sport and the implementation of public policy or on the way in which sport organizations wield their power for their own sectional interests, usually at the expense of other interest groups. Brian Bridges, the recently retired head of the Department of Political Science and director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, takes a distinctively different approach by placing the state into the centre of analysis and introducing a functionalist dimension to the political scientist’s understanding of sport in international relations. His double history of Korean sport looks at the simultaneous development of sport politics in two states and their interactions in national and global sporting arenas over the past sixty-something years. The result is a valuable, though way too pricy contribution to the still sparse literature on sport in non-Western nations. It is unique in the sense that it attempts to compare the development of national sport systems in both Korean modern states.
Bridges has been known as an avid writer on sport in East Asia among the few political scientists who acknowledge the political nature of sport. Bridges is particularly interested in the dimensions that make sport politically useful in international relations in East Asia, e.g., for the projection of national images, the conveying of messages of dissent or consent, or the mitigation of rivalry and conflict. Some of his earlier journal articles, in which he discussed the aforementioned aspects, provide the core chapters of this book: the troublesome relations of the International Olympic Committee, with two states claiming to represent one nation (chapter 4); the politics behind the Seoul Olympics (chapter 5); and the exaggerated expectations towards the Beijing Summer Olympics as facilitator of inter-Korean encounters (chapter 7). Previously unpublished work fills the gaps within the historical account of sport politics in Korea. Since chronology dictates the sequential arrangement of chapters, the 23 pages (chapter 3) between the theory chapter and the ICO chapter must tackle the ambitious goal of summarizing the trajectory of sport in Korea from premodern times through centuries of feudalism, exposure to the Chinese cultural sphere of influence until the colonial period and the early years of postcolonial state formation. Similar gap fillers—all of them descriptive rather than analytic—are chapter 6 on sport relations in the 1990s and chapter 8 comparing the two Korean national sporting systems in contemporary times. All chapters also contain a useful overview of the two Koreas’ domestic policies and the changing international environment, which are crucial impact factors.
The book sets out with a short overview of its content and a more detailed introduction to the linkages between sport, nationalism and international relations. Political scientists argue that because of its socio-cultural functions and its strong association with ideas of the national, sport can play an important role in the domestic politics and social order of modern nation-states. Bridges differentiates state nationalism from popular nationalism, which is a useful distinction, particularly in the realms of sport, where state-run actions as well as popular images and media productions contribute to the construction of national ideas and the perpetuation of nationalist sentiments. But Bridges is more concerned with the top-down approach of state actors who are getting engaged with the world of sport for the purpose of outlining the contours of the national. He grasps sport as a selected functional field in which states can cooperate, thereby building up ties that compel them to cooperate in other areas as well. Because spill-over effects can be achieved (and indeed are desirable), sport becomes a powerful factor in foreign diplomacy and the management of international relations.
Well, in theory. Most of the chapters following the introduction look into the ways in which the two Koreas have tried to utilize their entanglement with supranational sport organizations and high-profile sport events to gain clout in the global arena or to emphasize their claim for national representation. North Korea’s spectacular advance into the quarterfinals of the 1966 FIFA Football World Cup in England or South Korea’s successful hosting of the Seoul Olympics in 1988 provide some evidence of the weight of sport for nation branding. However, in the end (chapter 10) Bridges concedes that sporting contacts did not help to improve relations between the Korean states, because sport in general is held hostage to political relations, or sport is not such a heavyweight in international relations as theory wants us to believe. Just the contrary seems to be the case, judging from the sketchy survey of sport in other divided nations (chapter 9). Evidence from the case studies of Germany, Vietnam, Yemen and China (Ireland is conspicuously absent in the review) unanimously confirms the negligible leverage or even total irrelevance of sport in the promotion of reconciliation.
Placing Korea into the context of competing representation or divided nationhood would have been a great jumping-off point. Such a study would generate more analytical depth and theoretical insight than a primarily descriptive and ultimately hermeneutical approach could ever produce. The methodological weakness is particularly profound when considering the kind of sources Bridges is relying on. Most of his account is based on academic literature and other secondary sources in English, including media clippings and government reports. Archival material is hardly used, government officials are hardly questioned, and other agents are not surveyed. The quantitative data is not explored to a degree that would allow the reader a clearer picture of any of the Korean sport systems, while many of the qualitative accounts are drastically devalued by the selection bias and the question of provenience and partisan interests behind them. The gap between social reality and scholarly account is uncomfortably large in the case of North Korea, for which no reliable material is available, which is a shortcoming acknowledged by the author himself. For the time being, therefore, in the end we still do not know that much more about the contours and content of Korea’s sport systems. At least the context has become a bit clearer.
Wolfram Manzenreiter
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
pp. 333-335