National and Post-national Dynamics in the Olympic Design: The Case of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games

摘要

Following Arjun Appadurai's call, this paper will attempt to pinpoint the "crisis of the nation" as revealed in the representation of a "new Greece"2 at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Taking as a case study Santiago Calatrava's design of the Athens Olympic Stadium (Figure 1) and its use during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games, I will examine questions of selfhood, otherness, and national identity in contemporary Greece as a means of proposing that alternative types of allegiances must be envisaged. As has been the case with most modern Olympic Games, Athens 2004 was conceived as a national rather than a civic event. The redesign of national identity was a conscious goal of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games organizers, who saw the Olympics as an opportunity to brand the look of a "New Greece." The aim of the organizers was to overhaul the country's outdated image as a nation caught between a glorious antiquity and technological backwardness, as well as convince the international community of Greece's modernity and Europeanization in both cultural and economic terms. The image of a "new Greece," it was thought, would stimulate new foreign and domestic investments and increase the country's prestige.