It’s a much loved sport and a much hated sports association. Last week, FIFA’s many enemies had a wonderful morning. The long arm of America’s law went to work on the grubby men who have long been suspected, but never convicted, of a litany of corruption.
This may seem like a click-bait article, hitting on a very popular news story and then glossing it over with geopolitics, but bear with me. Reason, as the Gang from Philadelphia used to say, will prevail.
So why are we talking about this? Isn’t geopolitics just about tanks and wars and power?
- FIFA in and of itself is geopolitically irrelevant, but it has become a way for upstart powers to try to challenge the established world order through what’s called “soft power.”
- In an ideal world, a World Cup would only be hosted in an established, secure, and lawfully organized nation-state; those conditions are only present in the most developed of countries.
- Since national development is a slow, generational process, elites wishing to short cut their status from “developing” to “developed” use relatively cheap soft power tactics to get there.
- Elites of developing nation-states want to do this because being seen as developed is safer than being seen as developing. A developed nation-state gets better trade deals, better security guarantees, and overall better treatment than a developing one.
- The World Cup was used by both Qatar and Russia to try to jump-start their countries towards that coveted developed status; alas, the methods they were forced to employ reveal the weaknesses of both states.
- Now the established, secure, and lawfully organized nation-states are striking back, wiping the sheen off the prestige Russia and Qatar hoped to gain from hosting the World Cup’s and thwarting their attempts to challenge the world order.
Okay, so what’s soft power, and why does it matter?
Soft power is insidious; it’s inside a Coca-Cola, a music track, a movie theater, a website. It’s very hard to measure and even harder to control. It can be seen in laws, diplomatic meetings, religious gatherings, and even the way cities are organized.
Soft power is a nation-state utilizing its economy, culture, legal system, diplomatic apparatus, religion, and language to wield influence over other nation-states. It is the largely peaceful form of geopolitical competition, and its much harder to stop than an invading army.
Hard power, conversely, is a government’s military prowess, its nuclear capabilities, and the size of the big stick it carries. A nation-state may have a great deal of hard power but virtually no soft power, like North Korea. As their example shows, vast stocks of military hardware don’t always get a nation-state what it wants. In the nuclear age especially, the best you often get from a big military is stalemate.
That leaves soft power as a means to achieve security and prosperity. Unlike the violence of hard power, it’s much harder for a nation-state to combat the forces of soft power. When Germany used its soft power to force Greece to austerity, it humbled the Greek state with very little risk of blowback to German power. Germany got Greece to not only agree to restructure its economy for Germany’s benefit, but forced the Greek state to enforce German edicts through the EU. Fighting back against German control of Greece’s economy has required several elections and years of wrangling; a counteroffensive is only beginning. All the while, Germany has accomplished national goals while exposing itself to much less risk.
Compared that with the last time Germany imposed its power on Athens during World War II. Almost immediately, a resistance movement siphoned German power and undermined the Nazi state. This required more and more German power, in the form of troops and treasure, to subdue Greece. Inevitably, defeats elsewhere forced Germany to withdraw entirely from Greece. Germany, in other words, got very little from militarily occupying Greece and suffered a large amount of hassle.
Soft power may not be this blunt, but states do try to spread their national identities as much as possible. (Source: tyzhden.ua)
Soft power is also different than hard power in that it’s much harder to measure.
Often, a state has soft power if other states believe it does; much like fairies, a state’s influence can vanish if others don’t believe in it. It’s partially based on the reputation of a country to succeed. America’s overwhelming power was deeply undermined by its war in Iraq; when hard power could not accomplish American goals, American soft power was eroded throughout the world. That made it harder for America to get things done short of war; one reason Iran has felt confident in the nuclear negotiations is that it knows America has no appetite for yet another long war.
People do, however, try to measure their soft power anyway, most often with money. If a state is debt-free and flush with cash, its elites often equate that with soft power. To a certain extent, that’s true. A state that can throw around bags of money can accomplish a lot.
Using money, soft power can be expressed through prestige projects, which is exactly where the World Cup falls. Prestige projects are often white elephants or so close as to make no difference; they are expensive, economically dubious mega projects that put a nation-state on the map. By earning a bit fame, they gain attention and normalize the status of their host nation-states in the international community. The more normal they seem, the safer they are, and the more likely they are to earn favorable security agreements or trade pacts.
Case in point is Dubai. In 2006, Dubai Ports World put in a bid to manage several American seaports. Because nobody had ever heard of Dubai, and because Dubai was Arab, the deal was sunk for no other reason than Dubai lacked the soft power to protect itself from the inevitable slander in the United States.
Since then, Dubai has been working hard on its soft power through careful image management. It built the world’s tallest tower and earned the corresponding fame, culminating in music videos and movies that have gone a long way in making Dubai a “normal” city. Now that its flagship airlines, Emirates, is seeking to push further into American markets, its soft power has, thus far, protected it from the same level of hysteria that accompanied the DPW affair. Americans now know Dubai as a real place and aren’t immediately assuming Arab-piloted airlines will be used to attack their cities.
And this sort of success is why both Russia and Qatar sought the World Cup.
Both Russia and Qatar hoped to capitalize on successful World Cup games to short cut their status from developing states, and the accompanying treatment, to developed. If they could hold world class games – in Russia’s case, on top of the Olympics – then they would be normalized in the world’s eyes. It would allow Russian elites greater ability to write trade deals and wield influence by softening the edges of Russia. Forces that might unite against an obviously aggressive Moscow would instead be confused by memories of happy international games. It would also provide a morale boost to Russia’s citizens, unifying them behind state power.
Qatar, meanwhile, sought to out-Dubai Dubai itself. If they couldn’t build the world’s tallest tower, they’d be happy to host the world’s largest sporting event. The accompanying boost in Qatar’s prestige would make Qatari diplomacy, which back in 2010 seemed rather successful, all the more so.
Alas, a major sporting event like the World Cup requires the skills and economies of a developed state to be carried out well. Russia is further along that road than Qatar, but nevertheless, as revealed by some of its Sochi debacles, can’t sometimes manage to install a decent toilet. In both cases, the decision by FIFA to allow developing states to host the World Cup raised eyebrows at best.
And since both Russia and Qatar could not make the case that they were ready from a development standpoint, they could use their ample cash reserves to buy success.
FIFA’s own technical team warned against using a place as rough as Qatar for such an advanced project. Herein the soft power of money attained a short term success. It seems increasingly likely that both states used cash to bribe and manipulate the votes to bring the World Cup to their borders. To them, this was an appropriate use of their soft power; the risk of being caught was outweighed by the benefits of earning international prestige.
However, by doing so, they irked a nation-state with the resources and soft power to undo everything: the United States.
The U.S., as the West’s sole superpower since 1945, has been the center of the international legal system since World War II. American lawyers are well-versed in it because they’ve been intimately involved in building it. When accusations of dodgy transactions emerged about FIFA, the U.S. was the country best poised to act. Its overwhelming soft power meant its lawyers could earn the cooperation of even recalcitrant nation-states like Switzerland.
Here now is how geopolitical necessity helps shape behavior. On a grand strategy level, the United States desires stability and predictability; when states try to change their pecking order, whether in soft power or hard power, it is a threat to American domination. But it’s unlikely in the extreme that any American investigator was thinking that as they sought to bring FIFA’s top lads to justice.
Instead, the geopolitical system built by the United States encouraged their behavior by providing them with all the means to arrest FIFA’s executives. The nation-state of the United States, as a mass of people, has been using its soft power slowly over the past 70 years to cement an international system that favored Americans. When an upstart nation-state like Qatar tried to go against that grain – without earning the permission of the system America had been instrumental in establishing – it put itself in the crosshairs.
None of this was an intentional act or a conspiracy, as Putin now alleges, but it was a geopolitical need being satisfied by individuals who don’t think about things geopolitically. A system had been built to protect American security needs by putting as many things as possible under a predictable international order. That international order encompassed sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup, which have grown in such scope and scale that they can only be successfully accomplished in the nation-states that established them. For states seeking to use them to short cut development, the system left them no option but bribery and scandal, since they could never compete in the meritocracy set up by the West.
With that in mind, the counterattack was predictable. The system had been deliberately designed as meritocratic, and anyone who tried to ignore that would draw the ire of its many enforcers. The very moment Qatar’s name was pulled from that card in 2010, these enforcers knew something had to be very, very wrong. Order had to be reestablished; now, it seems, it is beginning to be. Neither Qatar nor Russia will be able to save these FIFA executives; as American soft power is brought to bear on their respective tournaments, influential sponsors in addition to European leagues might pull out, gutting the games of any meaning.
That would be a success for the American-led international system and a slap in the face for those who want to change it. It would also be a prime example of how soft power is used to maintain a nation-state’s domination.
For elites in Doha and Moscow hoping to spend their way to rapid influence, it will be a sore disappointment. For many Americans, and soccer fans in general, it will seem like justice. But in fact, it will be the hegemon jealously protecting the system it has worked so hard to establish.
Hello, I fundamentally disagree with several of your premises in this article.
First, FIFA is an organization that bundles and orchestrates the activities of the most important sport worldwide. FIFA is democratically organized and votes for the hosting of future World Cups have equal power. Since it is a global sport, the hosting of the World Cup needs to be given to nation-states in different parts of the world.
Arguing that World Cups should only be hosted “in an established, secure, and lawfully organized nation-state” robs it of its global legitimacy. Arguing that these conditions are only available ” in the most developed of countries” smacks of a belief in the superiority of the Western model. It certainly invites accusations of cultural/social darwinism.
This is not the role that FIFA has in its mission statement.
Second, while there is no doubt whatsoever that FIFA is highly corrupt, the move by the US to indict FIFA functionaries is a seriously fraudulent and fundamentally flawed move. The US has made very clear with that action that they consider US laws to be globally applicable and that they use the most spurious connections to exert “justice” and extradite people.
It is debatable as to whether the impulse came from an aversion to the World Cup in Qatar, Russia, or the possibility that Israel might have been expulsed from FIFA. It is, however, very clear that the US used its power to shore up its crumbling hegemony to force its will on FIFA and lay claim to a legitimacy of global jurisdiction.
From a purely geopolitical perspective it demonstrates that the US becomes increasingly desperate to defend its waning hegemonic weight and that it attacks and oppresses any institution in its reach to do so. Imperial overreach comes to mind.
Ps. Recent revelations point to the fact that the US had to pay bribes as well to host the World Cup in 1994. This was a geopolitical grab of power by the US. Nothing more, nothing less. But please do not conflate it with some intentions of moral or cultural superiority. The US lost those, in the eyes of the global majority, a couple of years ago. The date, for me, was 2003 with the attack on Iraq.
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Hi HnH – Thanks for the comments. Let me reply as best I can.
The article wasn’t meant to imply that the U.S. is morally or culturally superior, merely more powerful and using its superior soft powers to exert its geopolitical superiority.
I do agree that for the World Cup to be fair, it should be open to all countries willing to host it. But there is the problem of technical capacity, which is greatest in developed states. A state that is lawfully organized (and therefore less corrupt), secure (and therefore not prone to war or unrest that might upset the World Cup) and established (and therefore had predictable rules that allow a project of the scale of the World Cup to be finished both on time and with less cost to both people and budgets) are universally developed states. The many debacles in Brazil in 2012 helped demonstrate the shortcomings of hosting a project as complicated as the World Cup in a nation-state not yet ready to take on that kind of task. This isn’t about moral or cultural superiority, but about how well states are organized and capable of carrying out a complex task.
Geopolitics doesn’t really factor culture or morality into its understanding of the world. There are a few cultural traits that certainly harm states geopolitically (refusing to let women to vote or participate in the economy comes to mind), but most are irrelevant. I don’t think its social darwinism to say that liberal democratic capitalism is more effective than authoritarian capitalism as practiced by China, Russia, and Qatar. The latter three all suffer from corroding effects of authoritarianism with their varying degrees of corruption; that hampers their power. It has nothing to do with their indigenous cultures, but with the political models their elites have adopted and their people live under.
Finally, I’d like to respond to your idea that this was a desperate power grab. I fully agree it was a power grab – that was the point of the article – but I would not agree it was desperate. Very little American power was utilized to chastise FIFA; a few lawyers in Brooklyn, a couple of phone calls to the Swiss, some police cooperation, but not even a drop in the bucket of potential American power. This was a power grab accomplished on the cheap by a superpower with still formidable capacity.
It remains to be seen if America’s traditional geopolitical advantages – its relative isolation, its resource rich continent, its younger population, its efficient river systems and bi-coastal position – will continue to keep it at #1. Certainly none of its rivals have that same combination. Personally, I foresee only if the U.S. falls behind a rival in space (negating America’s advantages as an isolated, bi-costal power) could it slip out of the top spot. That, in my mind, is a very real possibility; time will tell if it happens.
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Hi MRB, Thanks for the reply.
One could argue that soft power is nothing else than the attractiveness of a particular culture. The adoption of Coke and Pepsi, McDonald’s, and the consumption of US movies is, at least partly an adoption of cultural icons. This translates into easier diplomatic victories.
The FIFA issue is something that the US administration would like to sell as an expression of the soft power of the US. I do not see it that way. Historically, the US and soccer would not be mentioned together in one sentence. American football, basketball and baseball are American sports. Soccer is not. This may change now with the increase of US citizens with a Latin American background, but to argue that FIFA was set up and given form under the tutelage of the US does not consider the context of soccer.
Additionally, FIFA is located in Switzerland. If money has changed hands because of corruption, then it certainly did not take place within the US. Switzerland was pressured by the US to extradite the accused. Given the official arguments made by the US, which fly in the face of national sovereignty over its own jurisdiction, it is safe to assume that the US administration did not just say “pretty please”. This is also supported by the fact that the US promoted its own candidate for the presidency of FIFA, this Jordanian prince. The sudden retirement of Blatter, after his resounding reelection, further suggests that considerable pressure has been exerted.
I would also not say that the World Cups in South Africa or in Brazil have not been a success. They actually passed very well. They had or built the necessary architecture and the World Cup processed without a hitch. Similarly, the Olympics in Russia processed without a hitch. The unfinished toilets were, as far as I am aware, a canard by Western newspapers who used an old photo from three weeks prior to the begin of the games. However, I may be mistaken here.
Whether a country would need to conform to all Western norms (e.g. women’s rights) to hold a successful tournament is up for debate, and I do not think that your argument holds water here.
You may be right that the power grab vis a vis FIFA had not been desperate. In many other aspects it remains very true. Eurasia is the landmass where the new impulses for growth and power will originate from, and the US can see these writings on the wall. The Dollar, as the reserve currency for the world, has lost a lot of shine. 30 years ago it was used in about 65% of all global transactions; it is now used in about 40%. Similar developments are the AIIB development bank which was joined by many European and Asian countries despite a strident opposition mounted by the US. Then there is the mess in Ukraine which, to many European eyes, was created by a US instigated “color revolution” to drive a wedge between Europe and Russia. There is the growing alliance between Russia and China, etc., etc. the list is very long.
The US has managed to offend and endanger its most important allies in Eurasia: Europe. The fear of a war on European soil is very real and tangible for many Europeans. My grandmother, for example, told me just a bit about the horrors of WW2. The Ukraine crisis reawakened those feelings. It is also very clear that NATO could not bring Russia to a halt, because its military force, close to the Russian borders, can not be matched; neither by the US nor by NATO. Russia has always been a land power and it remains so today. Especially now that it started its rearmament.
Then there is the growing political intractability within the US itself. The gulf between the GOP and the Democrats has grown to such an extent that a functioning government starts to become wishful thinking. Economic inequality in the US is the highest of all developed nations (except Israel, but that is a special case), and social mobility is very low. Extreme inequality of wealth is an excellent indicator for civil unrest.
Economic and political power is not the only thing that has waned for the US. The US is, mirroring closely the British Empire, a naval power. It rules the waves. However, its biggest military bet on the future, the F-35, is by all accounts a dud and not fit for purpose. China is pushing back with its promotion of the “string of pearls” and the megalomanic New Silk Route, that induces slavering in all involved nation-states. Russia challenges its hold over Europe with its monopoly on cheap gas and oil. Without Russian gas and oil many European countries would stay could in winter and enterprises would shut down.
I could go on for quite some time, but I think I made my point. The US is becoming desperate to secure its global hegemony in any way it can. I am not saying that its regional hegemony (the Americas) is in danger, but globally? Hell, yes. I am also quite sure that many in the US administration sense it as well. That makes it desperate.
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Hi HnH –
Thanks for those thoughts. I agree with large segments of what you say (that the U.S., a naval power, mirrors Britain, another naval power, as well as your take on soft power). Let me reply to a few sections.
“but to argue that FIFA was set up and given form under the tutelage of the US does not consider the context of soccer.”
Here is why I would disagree on a geopolitical (but certainly not cultural) basis. FIFA as a cultural construct is not at all American, but the way it has flourished and succeeded has been because of globalization, a phenomenon I would argue is the result of the U.S.-led international system. FIFA is a capitalist organization; the steward of capitalism has been the United States since 1945. While the U.S. did not in any control the growth of FIFA, I would argue it set the conditions to let it thrive the way it has.
In regards to whether or not a crime occurred under American jurisdiction, the Americans are arguing money changed hands through U.S. banks, thereby making it an American crime. But from a large standpoint, I would argue the U.S. has worked hard to build a system where moving money without using an American bank – or a bank somehow under U.S. law – is extremely hard. That’s certainly on purpose and secures the United States against rivals, forcing them to learn and adapt to American rules.
Finally, I think I’ll respond to your point about China’s rise in a full article on Monday (thanks for the inspiration!). I would very much like to see your response and thoughts to it.
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