The Winter Olympics was a Show of Great Unity and Healthy Patriotism

The Winter Olympics encourage a healthy feeling of patriotism that does not unleash the tiger of unthinking nationalism.

The Winter Olympics have come and gone. Britain, my home country, exceeded expectations and won five medals. On the diplomatic front, North and South Korea managed to mend the wounds of 60 years of conflict and tension enough to walk out together at the opening ceremony and compete as a united team. Despite the inevitable intrusion of politics, the games seemed to herald a brief interval for the countries participating to put aside some of the animosity they feel for each other and compete in a non life-and-death struggle.

These games demonstrated that the nation is still the social unit that most people associate themselves with today. It is hard to imagine a European Union team inspiring much loyalty and enthusiasm, for example. The Olympics, as with other sporting events, showed that patriotism is not automatically a bad thing that leads to violence and bigotry, as some assume. Far from being an example of malignant globalism that some on the right see through their ideologically skewed lenses, the Olympics proved that sport is a way of bringing people together while still retaining the boundaries and attachments of nationhood.

The Olympics and other international sporting events are arguably examples of Henry R. Nau’s conservative internationalism seen through the prism of sport. Nations are a small enough unit of social organization that they are comprehensible to people. They are made up of people who share a similar culture, history, language and ways of doing things. Amorphous transnational organizations like the EU and the United Nations are too big for people to relate to or feel any real affection for. When bureaucracies like the EU and UN displace the nation as the largest conception of a tangible “we,” people are left feeling disconnected from their peers, wallowing in a sea of atomized individuals who are all alone together, to borrow Sherry Turkle’s phrase.