Epilogue: Asia rising – changing circumstances and shifting successes: sport as a metonymy for regional renaissance

Abstract

For the rising nation-states of East Asia, triumph in sport was writ large as success in the context of the geo-politics of world powers. The international community, which has been largely dominated by the western hegemony of Europe and the United States, has rewarded the successful mimicry of their western institutions by East Asia which in turn contributed to the belief in the universality of their western institutions. For East Asia, inclusion into the global community has been complex both internationally and domestically. The use of sport as a metonymy for national and international prowess has been predicated upon the mutual fantasy by both the nation and the world community to see one another reflected according to often contrasting images. For the twentieth century, the reflection has been one of the dominance of American liberal democracy; for the twenty-first century, it will be of Asian ascendancy and regional renaissance. However, the specter of the twentieth century's exotic orientalism and western invention of Asia is visible in the West's assessment of a rising Asia in the twenty-first century. From fear and critiques of Asian despotism and opaqueness, Asia has been rendered as resisting the universal inevitability of becoming western. The discourse on ‘multiple modernities’ has attempted to explain the Asian difference from the West, but rather than speak of multiple and disparate experiences of modernity, it may be more prudent to speak of their conjoined nature. The difference, rather as others have shown, lays in the local inflection of global (and conjoined) processes of modernity, such as capitalism and the Olympic Games. While the dynamic processes of globalisation remain similar, they are inflected differently between the West and Asia and even within Asia. In the twenty-first century, the changing circumstances and shifting successes among Japan, South Korea and China have demonstrated the similarity and differences of their modernity to the West and within the Asian region. As such, global sport and the Olympic Games have been lauded by East Asia as sensational metonymys of their renaissance in the Asian region and the global community.