Our Sports Diplomacy, Your Sportswashing: Western Liberal Rhetoric and Memory Loss

The neologism ‘sportswashing’ emerged in Western liberal democracies as a discursive response to the increasing prominence in global sport of illiberal nations such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. No doubt, all have used sport for strategic political, diplomatic, and economic reasons, but confining sportswashing to obviously illiberal environments deflects attention from, and represses memory of, the uses and abuses of sport among liberal-democratic nations with a malign imperial-colonial past, present, and legacy. This chapter challenges the deployment by Western countries like the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and France of a binary model whereby their own practices of, or akin to, sportswashing are benignly rendered as sports diplomacy. Advocating a sceptically auto-reflective approach to sportswashing in the West without resorting to ‘whataboutery’, a counterpoint is proposed to the conventional, self-congratulatory focus on the illiberal collective Other by returning the critical gaze to the liberal collective Self.