#3 RW

Should states care about the performance of their national team at a global sporting competition, such as the Olympics or the World Cup? Why or why not?

            In international sporting events, states should exhibit pride and applaud their national teams performance. However, states should not assume superiority over another or allow inferiority to impinge negatively upon international relations. Cheering on ones state has many beneficial factors. The global games present each state with a common goal of winning medals. Such contiguity reinforces community on national and international levels. This community causes states to come together to cheer on their athletes, “altering the international political and economic climate,” according to Deborah P. Low of Pennsylvania University. A communion of diverse people within a single state can cause them to “act” together and create changes in their particular society. Global games cause a community to exist on an international level as well. The communities within each state collaborate with the communities of other states participating in the games, generating a worldwide community bound by common interest.

Each state displays their equality, promised in the preamble of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, with equal opportunities of receiving a medal. Every athlete arrives a representative of their state exactly as diplomats do and from their established communities to acknowledge that “unity, profit, salvation, and preservation of fundamental values,” can exist between nations, as Professor Jackson described in Lecture 3: Community. The games unit and welcome every nation to build relations and communities of the world as a whole instead of individual states. “Global Games: Theories and Applications,” states that the cost of production of the games benefits the majority of nations economies, creating a profit. Cheering on ones state’s team promotes the games which endorses the reasoning as to why we have them to begin with. This newfound community allows participants and citizens to socially converse about global happenings and act together. For example when Hitler attempted to demonstrate his belief of racial supremacy in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, by only allowing Aryan athletes to compete. Thousands of communities and athletes came together in boycott of the Olympics to promote higher moral standards and the racial profiling exhibited by the games. The 1936 Olympics allowed culturally diverse citizens to take initiative in newly built communities of common interest to act for what the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights stands for by abolishing the unlawful and wrongdoing by Hitler. Without national pride and the games, relations between those states would not exist. This is only one example of the numerous ways citizens and athletes alike have banded together and built relations based upon actions of the Olympic and World games. In conclusion, states should care about the performance of their individual nations team and athletes in order to instill a sense of national pride while building international relations.