Coubertin’s idealistic internationalism, developed when planning the Olympics, is predicated upon the inviolability of the nation state.
This reveals his vision of international sport - which he saw as having the potential to displace conflict, to serve as a vehicle for the promotion of peace and harmony within an “international community” - as a structure that reinforces the ruling class.
Coubertin’s “international community” is a community of nations. Not a community of people. The Olympics assume that internationalism and patriotism are not contradictory but complementary.
It’s for precisely this reason that the Bolsheviks refused to send competitors to the bourgeois games since these games were an effort to “deflect workers from the class struggle and to train them for imperialist wars.”
Adapted from Garett Edwards essay (2012) in the Irish Marxist Review, Faster, Higher, Stronger: A Critical Analysis of the Olympics
Coubertin’s idealistic internationalism, developed when planning the Olympics, is predicated upon the inviolability of the nation state.
This reveals his vision of international sport - which he saw as having the potential to displace conflict, to serve as a vehicle for the promotion of peace and harmony within an “international community” - as a structure that reinforces the ruling class.
Coubertin’s “international community” is a community of nations. Not a community of people. The Olympics assume that internationalism and patriotism are not contradictory but complementary.
It’s for precisely this reason that the Bolsheviks refused to send competitors to the bourgeois games since these games were an effort to “deflect workers from the class struggle and to train them for imperialist wars.”
Adapted from Garett Edwards essay (2012) in the Irish Marxist Review, Faster, Higher, Stronger: A Critical Analysis of the Olympics
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/irishmr/vol01/no02/edwards.html