Boycotts Are Sometimes Effective, But Not Against the Olympic Games in Beijing

By Tracy Dove, Ph.D
Editor, The Russia News Service

April 10, 2008

The world media has been quick to report brutal Chinese reaction to Tibetan demonstrations, video clips and photographs testifying to a whole lot of anger bubbling over in a contentious and potentially explosive region that is illegally occupied by China. Interestingly, commentators for CNN and the other monosyllabic media have been unusually silent throughout, opting instead for the careful path of benign commentary so as not to upset the Chinese giant and its pocket full of US T-bonds. But it doesn't matter, since most Americans wouldn't even know where Tibet was if the camera didn't love the images of Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama as much as it does. The US government, too, has been sitting tight on the sidelines as well- again, the risk of a vindictive T-bond sell-off is too ugly for legislators at this time to contemplate. Still, there is talk of boycotting the games to some degree, and the echoes of concerted action are resonating softly in at least a few capitals of the world. The US and its allies have once before boycotted the Olympic Games, and all that came of it was hundreds of heart-broken athletes and a tit-for-tat response 4 years later from the side of the boycottee. Such actions are sometimes effective, but regarding the Olympics this year, it is a game of folly that will do nothing to help the people of Tibet.

Interestingly, we owe the word "boycott" to an unfortunate British captain named Charles Boycott who would have otherwise never made the history radar screen had he not been so careless in his human resources relations. As part of the Irish land wars of the late 19th century, Boycott managed to rile up a significant percentage of the Irish peasantry who worked his land when he responded in 1880 to their calls for reduced rent payments by evicting them. The Irish farming community was quick to react to Boycott's harsh actions and responded by organizing the countryside into a stalwart reactionary force that refused to deal with Boycott or any of his business activities. The peasants, postal workers, local businessmen and others soon made Boycott's life difficult, and as a result he had to import harvesters from Northern Ireland which ended up costing him more than the crop was worth. The showdown was well-recorded in the press at the time, and since the proper word for such a grassroots action had been lacking in the English language until then, Boycott's name was quickly used to fill the gap. Before the year 1880 was out, captain Boycott found his place in history as the originator of a very useful and reactionary verb.

By the time the Cold War became a household name (the origin of that word being stuff for a later article) the Soviets had become the masters of the theatrical boycott. In 1948 they boycotted the Allied Kommandatura in Berlin, effectively ham-stringing the post-war reconstruction efforts in Germany, and they boycotted the UN Security Council meetings after Taiwan got that coveted seat which they wanted to go to Communist China in 1950. The result of that last harrumph cost them their veto of the Korean War, and as a result Truman was able to get a UN mandate to push the North Koreans back beyond the 38th parallel. The Soviets never learned their lessons about mounting frivolous boycotts; Every year until 1988, the Soviet delegation would drive into West Berlin to attend the regular Allied meetings, and just as it was about to start, they got up, walked out, took their flag back down and drove back to East Berlin with communist indignity and disdain for world capitalism everywhere. For them, the boycott was about principle, and in the end, it was a costly principle to stand up for.

The time had come for the US to show that it wouldn't tolerate a boycott gap and staged one of its own frivolous boycotts against the USSR in 1980. At the end of 1979, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in order to murder their communist dictator there who had gotten out of line, and by early 1980 Jimmy Carter had a convenient distraction from the Iranian hostage debacle to run up the patriotic flagpole at home. Lacking any other diplomatic tools and not wanting to break out the big guns, Carter opted for pressuring the Soviets by calling for a boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games scheduled for summer, 1980. The Americans alone couldn't make much of a difference, so Carter bullied US allies into keeping their athletes at home, too. Japan and West Germany were still suffering from World War II trauma and agreed not to go either, and interestingly China sided with the US and refused to send its athletes to Moscow as well. While this last instance of boycott constituted a formidable absence it had little to do with Afghanistan. China was in a deep ideological and border battle with the Soviet Union at the time and realized that it had a lot to gain by climbing on board the US lead boycott of Russia.

The counter-reaction came precisely 4 years later when the Soviet Union announced that it and its allies would not be participating in the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984 for reasons that it called the "chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria being whipped up in the United States". This possibly suited American President Ronald Reagan just fine, since he was busy toting the values of the Strategic Defense Initiative at that time and would prefer not seeing a bunch of Godless communists defiling his state. In the end, 14 nations did not go to the 1984 games- one of them surprisingly was not a Communist Bloc nation- Iran. This country was not invited to participate in either the 1980 or 1984 games for reasons that stemmed from their recent revolution, which was highly unpopular with both Cold War foes. It seems that in this respect the US and USSR was finally able to agree on the criteria for a common enemy.

It is widely being reported in the press now that a number of heads of state may not go to the Beijing opening ceremony. But there will be nothing like a repeat of the 1980's fiascoes of Olympic boycotts as long as the protests and violence in China do not get out of hand. The western world simply has too much to lose from such a showy nose-thumbing at China, and most people are still somewhat confused as to what Tibet actually is to China- and vice versa. In the end, only the athletes suffer from such frivolous decisions, and this is sad. After music, sports are probably the healthiest form of international competition where politics and chauvinism are easily shelved by healthy cooperation and mutual respect for the rules and dignity of the individual.

Tracy Dove, editor of The Russia News Service, is a Professor of History and Dean of Summer Programs for the Lessing Institute. He also teaches history at the Anglo-American College in Prague.

See all previous articles by Tracy Dove here.