Olympics and Public Diplomacy

Olympics and Public Diplomacy

In our first class we talked about China and their performance during the Olympics. We all totally agreed that it was a PR move to establish the country’s image among western states, especially in America. China did a pretty good job in promoting themselves and indicated their potential, abilities, and power. However, as I found out, China is not the only country that used Olympics as public diplomatic move. In 2012 the Olympics will be organized by the United Kingdom and as I read in the article “UK weighs special unit to combat Olympics bad news”, the only thing that the British are concerned about is public diplomacy and worlds opinions about Britain during the Olympics. They recommended "that the The Foreign Office should form a 'rapid response unit', set up well before the Games, which is adequately resourced and prepared to take swift action to rebut or challenge negative stories appearing in the world media." Their goal is for the rest of the world to see them as a "diverse, inclusive and friendly country. Or in a word ... generous." This situation disappoints me a little bit just because I always saw the Olympics as a friendly tournament between countries, and its objective was to unite and get some gold medals. Was not that the point when the Greeks start the Olympics? They had to stop all the wars just during that time in order to have some fun. But now I can clearly see that Olympics have become a tool of international politics and are used by the countries to propagate their image. Guess Arthur Schlesinger was right when he said that the “ability to attract others and move [public] opinion was an element of power” and power is what matters in today’s world. Why not attract people by a phenomenal performance and organization during the Olympics? (Nye, 96). Well what we can conclude is that the 2012 Olympic Games will be a show full of generosity and kindness… Who would though?!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/06/us-britain-olympics-foreign-idUSTRE71503620110206