In this article Stephen Wagg, co-series editor of the Global Culture and Sport Series, examines the link between politics and sport on the global stage.

You still, occasionally, come across a website, a newspaper column or a pub conversation in which someone is arguing that politics and sport shouldn’t mix. However, for most people – many of them academics – the notion that politics could be kept out of sport became absurd long ago. As the cultural analyst Garry Whannel put it in Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sport (London: Pluto Press), his book of 1983, the term ‘keeping politics out of sport’ really only meant ‘keeping the politics of sport as they are’. Ironically, the slogan was effectively undermined by its leading proponents – the political right wing. In 1980 many of the same people who had condemned sports boycotts of South Africa because of its racist apartheid regime, now proposed that the world’s athletes should stay away from the Olympic Games in the USSR, because of the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Since then there has been a wide acceptance of the importance of sport in international politics.

In truth, many politicians and not a few scholars recognised this importance a long time ago. British colonialists, for example, saw in the shared sports of rugby football and cricket the possibility of strengthening the bonds of empire, particularly between the home country and the white settlers of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Likewise, the Soviet Union (whose government was the first to have a Ministry of Sport) employed regular sporting spartakiads to forge ties between the constituent Soviet republics and put sport and physical culture at the heart of their GTO (’Ready for Labour and Defence) programme of the 1930s. And the National Socialist administration of Adolf Hitler, despite privately repudiating both sport and internationalism, nevertheless welcomed the Olympic Games to Germany in 1936 because they acknowledged the prestige the Games would bring. The outcry in several countries that attended the Berlin Olympics was among the first major crises of international sport.

These and other related issues are as pertinent today as they were in the early twentieth century. To take a few examples:

• North and South Korea, separate countries and markedly different political regimes since 1945, have agreed to march under a unified flag and combine their women's hockey teams at the 2018 Winter Olympics in the South Korean county of Pyeongchang
• Amid widespread intimations of a new Cold War being incubated in Washington, in 2016 the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accused Russia of running a state-sponsoring doping programme for its athletes and Russia were suspended by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The accusation has been repeated several times since.
• International sport has continued to be a subject of, and theatre for, political protest. The Paralympic Games of 2012 in London attracted a number of protests by disabled people angry that the Games were sponsored by Atos, a French IT company then administering ‘Work Capability Assessments’ for the British Department of Work and Pensions which had resulted in many disabled people losing their benefits. The Winter Olympics of 2014, held in the Russian city of Sochi, brought angry demonstrations and calls for boycott from LGBT activists following the passing of anti-gay legislation in the Russian duma.
• Arguably since the Montreal Olympics of 1976, the desirability of the contemporary Olympic Games themselves has become a matter of academic debate and political contention. Furious opposition was, for example, mounted in Brazil against the expense incurred in staging both the football World Cup of 2014 and the Summer Olympics of 2016. Moreover several cities – Hamburg, Rome and Budapest among them – have recently withdrawn their bids to host the Games, chiefly on the grounds of expense.

The appreciation and exploration of this history and of issues such as these has brought forth much interesting and important scholarship, a good deal of which we have been able to capture in our series. Our current list offers books on: sport and national identity in Spain, Mexico and Africa; sport and politics in the Arab world; sport, protest and globalisation; sport as a purported tool for development; sport under communism; women in action and combat sports; and the (often vexed) politics of the Olympic movement.

Stephen Wagg is Professor in the Carnegie Faculty, Leeds Beckett University, UK. He has written widely on the politics of sport, as well as on the politics of childhood and of comedy.