Sport and Canadian Diplomacy

Raymond B. Blake is director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount
Allison University and the author of Canadians at Last: Canada
Integrates Newfoundland as a Province.

This book attempts to demonstrate (i) that sport now plays an important
role in Canada’s foreign relations, and (ii) that the classic realist
theory of foreign policy is too limited a conceptual frame-work within
which to fully explain international relations. According to Macintosh
and Hawes, international relations can be understood only within the
context of the “world politics paradigm,” which focuses attention on
transnational institutions rather than the relations between
nation–states. They attempt to prove their case by exploring the 1972
Canada–Russia hockey series, as well as Canada’s involvement with
the Olympic and Commonwealth Games in the 1980s and early 1990s, but
only partially achieve their objectives in this rather tedious book. As
their story ends, in the early 1990s, the International Sports Relations
Section in the Department of External Affairs is transferred to Fitness
and Amateur Sport, suggesting that sport will become less, not more,
important in the execution of Canadian foreign policy.

Macintosh and Hawes argue throughout the book that the Canadian
government and that of other Commonwealth countries used sport to push
their anti-apartheid agenda in the 1980s. One can reasonably make the
case, however, that sports sanctions were among the easiest to impose
against South Africa, in the sense that they would generate the least
opposition, both in Canada and elsewhere. However, the authors are
correct in arguing that “the world cannot be understood in terms of
simple state-to-state models,” given the fact that transnational
organizations such as the International Olympic Committee are starting
to play a more important role in the creation of foreign policy.