An Analysis of US Foreign Policy

As its ideational hegemony this week, and as I spent a good 3+ minutes in class Monday talking about the Superbowl, I though that this might be appropriate, at least to start.

Gregg Easterbrook, Brookings Institute scholar and author of one of my favorite columns (where else can you get a discussion of football with asides in public policy, international politics, and science fiction?), Tuesday Morning Quarterback, writes today:

The popularity of American-style football is likely to grow internationally – gridiron is taking off in Mexico at the moment, for instance. Not only is football fun to watch and to play, most of the world continues to admire the United States and look up to us – it's our foreign policy the world disdains; the American dream remains beloved almost everywhere. As democracy expands and more nations liberalize, more nations will long to become like the United States. And since football resides near the core of American culture, more people internationally will want the sport. They will reason, "America is strong and free and prosperous, America loves football, maybe football somehow helps you become strong and free and prosperous." There's a case to be made that football actually does help society – I'll suggest why in a moment. Anyway, this awareness, spreading globally, will increase the impact of the sport.

Rather nicely dovetails with Joe Nye's soft power arguments.
Easterbrook continues, however:

Now we get to the major ways in which football will become more important – ways that concern the evolution of culture and economics. As Michael Mandelbaum wrote in his wonderful 2004 book "The Meaning of Sports," football in the past century has leapfrogged other team games in importance because its structure reflects the modern industrial era. Like big corporations and complex organizations, football requires large numbers of people cooperating. As recently as the stillness before World War II, most Americans made their livings working alone or in small groups in agriculture, craftsmanship, merchandising or owner-operated industry. For the past 60 years, large organizations have dominated the social structure of the West. Large organizations ask large numbers of people of diverse backgrounds to work together cooperatively. Football asks large numbers of people of diverse backgrounds to work together cooperatively. And it's not just the guys on the field who must cooperate. TMQ's Law of the Hidden Moms holds that for every boy who steps onto the high school football field, two people worked behind the scenes to make it possible. In big-college and the pros, it's more like five or six behind the scenes for every one on the field. Other team sports require much less in terms of group commitment. For football to happen, large numbers of people who otherwise would have nothing to do with each other must make a commitment to get along. And that describes a modern economy, doesn't it?

Now consider the direction in which the global economy is headed. In a global world, communication and interpersonal skills grow ever-more important. The explosion in communication, especially, means the successful person of coming decades must be able to cooperate with not just those in his or her immediate field of vision, but people all around the country and all around the world. Daily contact with people all around the country, if not all around the world, is the likely state of affairs for coming generations. Because sports are part of education, there will be rising emphasis on sports that teach interpersonal skills. And that points to more importance for football.

Learn to love football, and learn to organize your society and economy in a way that serves the "modern industrial era." Learn to want what we want to uphold a particular economic and cultural order. Almost Gramscian (via Cox in IR), one could say.

Football as the new tool of hegemony?

Labels: football, hegemony