Cosmopolitanism, Olympism, and Nationalism: A Critical Interpretation of Coubertin's Ideal of International Sporting Life

Abstract

1The first view, championed by friends of the Olympic Games, concedes the pervasive influence of nationalism on the Olympics, decries its presence, and strives to eradicate it to further the international aims of the Games. The second view, offered up by left-wing foes of the games, likewise concedes the nationalistic bent of the Games, but takes this as definitive proof of its bogus internationalism. On this rendering, Olympism is just an ideological cover for execrable nationalistic displays, in particular, for the subordination of non-western nations by Western ones. The third view, advanced by proponents of so-called real-politik, further concedes that the Games are presently dominated by nationalistic interests, but thinks this is nothing to get worked up about, and certainly nothing to warrant either concerted reform or wholesale condemnation of the Olympic project. Instead, they suggest that we had better accept and adapt to this upsurge of nationalism and put off our aspirations for international good-will and greater intercultural contact until these local stirrings play themselves out. To seek anything more, they confidently assert, is to invite disappointment and disillusionment. What these three views share in common, of course, notwithstanding their obvious differences, is the presumption that nationalism and Olympism stand in an antithetical relation to one another, that, in other words, the particularist aims and commitments of the former contravene the universalist aims and commitments of the latter. What is wrong with this view of nationalism and Olympism, Hargreaves opines, is that it treats both terms of this relation, not to mention the relation itself, in a taken-for-granted manner. And he is right as far as he goes. For boosters of Olympism, on the one hand, pretend that it can be rescued by simply abstracting its unique brand of internationalism from the prevailing social and political context, taking for granted in the process that it suffers no distortion when it is decontextualized in this way (the notion, for example, that Olympism has nothing whatever to do with political engagement when, in fact, it has everything to do with such engagement). Leftist foes and realist observers of Olympism, on the other hand, pretend that it can be discredited or effectively nullified by reducing it to this same