China’s brutal crackdown on Buddhist protesters in its annexed Tibet province has sparked a heated discussion in Europe about whether or not to boycott (at least parts of) the upcoming Beijing Olympics, which are set to begin with a grandiose opening ceremony on August 8. So far, the 27 EU countries currently meeting at the foreign minister level in Slovenia have failed to agree on a common approach on how to deal with this thorny issue. Among the big three EU powers, French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be most open towards considering various potential Olympic boycott options. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in contrast, has already announced his intention to participate at the games. Finally, Germany just announced today that President Horst Koehler, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will not be attending the games. However, Merkel’s spokesman was eager to stress that this was nothing unusual and that none of the three had ever planned to go to the Olympics in the first place. Foreign minister Steinmeier also reiterated his government’s view that a complete boycott of the games should be avoided. Germany is certainly treading very carefully as it just weathered a dramatic deterioration in its bilateral relations with Beijing following Chancellor Merkel’s controversial meeting with the Dalai Lama at her official residence in Berlin last September. France is already emerging as a key player in shaping Europe’s response to the Tibet crackdown. President Sarkozy, after all, will hold the rotating EU-presidency at the time of the Olympics this summer. Political leaders in Poland and the Czech Republic, for their part, have already announced that they will personally boycott the games and are urging other European politicians to do the same. In this context it is interesting to draw a comparison between Europe’s response to developments in Tibet and Darfur. For example, previous attempts by U.S. human rights activists like Mia Farrow and others to effectively bill the Beijing games as “The Genocide Olympics.” (because of “China’s role as business partner, diplomatic protector and underwriter of Sudan’s campaign of ethnic destruction in Darfur”) have had only a very limited if negligible effect on international public opinion. For sure, the U.S. human rights campaigners scored some relatively minor points back home, as evidenced by Steven Spielberg’s recent resignation as an artistic director of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
But by and large, China’s connection to Darfur was not enough to threaten the Olympics. To this day, Darfur has remained pretty much a non-issue for vast segments of public opinion in Europe. In contrast, things are very different when it comes to Tibet. For starters, the Chinese government is directly responsible for the brutal crackdown in Tibet. But there are also other factors at play. Thanks to the high-profile international lobbying efforts by the ever-smiling Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader’s message of “autonomy” for Tibet resonates among European public opinion at large. In fact, most Europeans would probably be support full independence for Tibet, beyond the autonomy the Dalai Lama advocates. In this context, one must not forget that Buddhism and its various tenets are also of growing appeal to post-modern Europeans, many of who have lost interest in their Judeo-Christian heritage. How else can one explain that otherwise strictly secular (left-wing) Europeans happily refer to the Dalai Lama as “His Holiness” or the “god king”?
