The UEFA Champions League: a political myth?

Discussing the UEFA Champions League (CL) as a political myth, we want to focus on specific renderings of this continent-wide competition in club football. Two broad narratives are identified in th...

Book Review: General Politics: Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defence, and Subversion

A European mind? Europeanisation of football fan discussions in online message boards

Across Europe, national professional football leagues have seen increasing numbers of players from other EU states, while the Champions League and the Europa League have become a focal point for ma...

Farewell to leadership? Ideas of hegemony and counter-hegemony in the Americas

Mainstream International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis have often concentrated on material factors and actors’ preferences, leaving out ideational dynamics. However, US–Latin American relations in general seem fraught with ideas, narratives and historical references re-articulated from time to time on both sides. In his campaign, Barack Obama announced a fresh start of US–Latin American relations, promising to “restore American leadership in Latin America”, at the same time creating “a new partnership for the Americas”, combining two narratives in US–Latin American policy. “Leadership”, enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt corollary, which declared Latin America the “…

An ‘Authoritarian Nexus’? China’s Alleged Special Relationship with Autocratic States in Latin America

China’s rise is often interpreted as a harbinger of a new era in world politics and raises the question if such a power transition may impact upon patterns of democratic rule across the globe. There is growing interest in whether China acts as an outside stabilizer for other authoritarian regimes. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on the international dimension of autocratic rule by focusing on Chinese Latin American policy. Using the method of structured focused comparisons, we want to assess whether China’s relations towards the Latin American autocracies Cuba and Venezuela differ from those with structurally similar, but democratic cooperation partners in the region, name…

Cosmopolitans and communitarians: A typology of football fans between national and European influences

International audience; The past 25 years have seen an unprecedented Europeanisation of the structures and governance in football across the continent. A European (and global) transfer market for players and managers has become the norm and a pan-European league system has been established that regularly exposes supporters to transnational competitions and players from all over Europe. At the same time, manifold typologies of football fans have been established, distinguishing groups of fans based on, for example, fan intensity, fan behaviour or their attitudes towards different actors in the field. The attitudes towards Europe and the self-identification of these fans within Europeanised f…

Navigating Stormy Waters: The Triangular Relationship between the United States, Vietnam and China and the South China Sea Disputes

The growing triangular relationship between the U.S., Vietnam and China represents an interesting case study as to how the smaller powers around the South China Sea try to balance China’s increasing assertiveness in the region by engaging the United States. Analyzing the respective sets of bilateral relationships (U.S.-Vietnam and China-Vietnam) hence seems to be promising in order to understand the conflict dynamics in the South China Sea against the background of an often assumed, to a lesser degree examined regional (and eventually global) power transition dynamic. Vietnam has a checkered history with both the U.S. and China, all the while these countries are its most important economic …

Hegemoniale Rivalität. Brasilien, China und die USA in Lateinamerika

Die zumeist okonomische Bedeutungszunahme der sudlichen Schwellenlander wird oft als Machtverlust der Vereinigten Staaten interpretiert. Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich kritisch mit dieser Annahme auseinander, indem er Aktivitaten und Machtpotenziale Chinas, Brasiliens sowie der USA in Lateinamerika vergleicht. Als „traditioneller Hinterhof “ US-amerikanischer Ausenpolitik sowie Zielgebiet zunehmender Bemuhungen sowohl Chinas als auch Brasiliens eignet sich die Region daher, um Form und Ausmas einer gegebenenfalls aufkeimenden hegemonialen Rivalitat zu untersuchen. Analytisch wird vorgeschlagen, die Aktivitaten der relevanten Akteure in den vier Bereichen militarischer, okonomischer und …

Europeanised identifications among football fans. The analysis of discussions in online message boards.

International audience; Across Europe, national professional football leagues have seen increasing numbers of players from other EU states, while the Champions League and the Europa League have become a focal point for many teams. This article seeks to investigate how far this Europeanisation on the organisational level of football is reflected in identities and discourses of fans. We develop a framework to analyse Europeanisation of identities among football fans. In the empirical part we conduct a qualitative content analysis of fan discussions on publicly available message boards among fans of four first league teams in England and Austria. Our empirical findings indicate that fans’ iden…

Development Policies of Central and Eastern European States: From Aid Recipients to Aid Donors, edited by ONDŘEJHORKY-HLUCHAŇ and SIMONLightfoot (London and New York: Routledge, 2013, ISBN: 9780415639125, £85.00, Hardcover, pp. 135)

Non-elite conceptions of Europe: Europe as reference frame in English football fan discussions

International audience; Discursive approaches to Europe usually focus on elite discourses and target a narrow political understanding of Europe. Against the backdrop of rising Euroscepticism and the known elite-mass divide on issues of European identity, it seems important to shift the focus toward non-elite discourses on Europe. Given that club football is largely Europeanised (player markets, continent-wide club competitions and broadcasting of matches), we analyse how fans of the English Premier League club Manchester United discursively construct ‘Europe’ in relation to their sport. Our main research question aims at identifying how identifications of fans have been unconsciously Europe…

The two-track Europeanization of football: EU-level pressures, transnational dynamics and their repercussions within different national contexts

This article contributes to the under-researched literature on the Europeanization of sports. We distinguish between two modes of Europeanization (broadly signifying the impact of European integration on the domestic realm): the traditional top-down approach and the neglected societal/transnational Europeanization track. Both modes are examined with regard to their effects within two national contexts (Germany and Austria), and across two cases: the Bosman ruling (the nationality issue) and European club competitions as an engine of Europeanization. Our analysis reveals some important differences: the domestic countermeasures regarding the nationality aspect of the Bosman ruling were more s…