So far the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics have been going well. The skiers and snowboarders have been swooping and whirling to perfection. The competitors tested for drugs have all come out clean, bar a couple of isolated exceptions. And the cheerful inclusion of North Korea has greatly eased security concerns. (Back in 1987 the North Koreans blew a passenger Boeing 707 out of the sky, in pique at being denied a share of the 1988 Seoul Summer Games.)

Yet no Olympics is entirely free from underlying geopolitical tensions. The United States still aren’t sure they want to talk to North Korea — leaving us with the frightening risk of a nuclear exchange — and the Russians certainly aren’t happy about their national doping ban.

The modern Olympics were designed to channel dangerous nationalism into a benign and even positive form of competition. But while peace and harmony may reign on the surface, many commentators have argued that sporting competition between nations can’t help but stir up old antagonisms and resentments.

The Olympics “indulge precisely what they claim to transcend: the world’s basest instinct for tribalism,” wrote the historian David Clay Large, in 2016. At a time of rising nationalism across the globe, including President Donald Trump’s embrace of an America First stance in trade and foreign policy, perhaps we’d be better off without these international sports contests.

My own view is that the alarmists are mistaken. As I see it, international sport can’t help but boost understanding and counteract chauvinism. It is a natural leveler. What the critics miss is the way that sports compel respect for your opponents. This doesn’t, of course, mean you can’t support your own country, only that you should also recognize your opponents as moral equals.

The philosophers Bruce Ackerman and Kwame Anthony Appiah have written about “rooted cosmopolitanism.” Cheering for your own country during the Olympics fits that description perfectly. A pluralistic respect for other nations (admiring the Dutch speed skaters) is perfectly compatible with a special attachment to your own (hoping an American pulls off an upset).

Why Orwell was wrong that international sports produced mainly “orgies of hatred”

When he revived the modern Olympic Games in 1896, the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin looked forward to a future of harmony and understanding between nations. It can’t be said that it went very well to start with. The early games soon gave way to the slaughter of World War I, and the 1936 Berlin Olympics ended up as a propaganda exercise for the Nazi Reich.

George Orwell had no doubt that international sport was a destructive force. “War minus the shooting” he called it in his essay “The Sporting Spirit.” Orwell’s verdict was prompted by the visit of the Moscow Dynamo soccer team to Britain in 1945. At the time, foreign sports teams were an exotic novelty, and the Russians attracted huge crowds of more than 100,000. Orwell was horrified by the intensity of the contests and the fierce partisanship of the spectators. As for the Olympics themselves, Orwell saw them as producing nothing but “orgies of hatred.”

In truth, the bookish Orwell was no sports fan, and he couldn’t see beyond his mandarin disdain for working-class pleasures. What he failed to appreciate was the way that the passion of most fans is combined with an acknowledgment of their opponents’ worth.

To be sure, sometimes nations that meet on the sporting field will share a history of political conflict and perceived wrongs. But the sporting context itself washes out the past and places the two sides on an even footing, if only for a few hours.

On the sports field, all are created equal, and depend only on their skills for victory. (Admittedly, sometimes it turns out that one side has indulged in mass doping or other illegal performance-enhancement. But the revulsion that greets such revelations only underlines how sporting contests rest on a presumption of equality.)

This even-handedness ensures a kind of generosity about sporting results. You might be cast down if your country loses, or elated if they win, but no sane fan feels the kind of visceral resentment occasioned when a nation loses territory or is humiliated in a war. Sporting contests are essentially equitable. Both sides can see that the other is equally entitled to succeed, and that the right result is victory for the more skillful team.

In much of the modern world, international sport is demonstrably a serious force for peace. India and Pakistan have a history of bloody conflict and remain at odds over borders and religion. They are also among the leading cricket nations, and their top players have the status of film stars.

When the two countries meet on the field, the TV audience can approach 1 billion. Of course, passions are roused, and the fans care intensely about the result. But a loss simply signifies that the other side played better, and provokes the hope that the result can be reversed next time. No loss of life, no invasion, no subordination, no thirst for retaliation. Nothing like war at all.

Or consider Holland and Germany. The Second World War created a bitter rift between the two countries, and the enmity continued afterward on the soccer field. The hostility remained for some time, exacerbated for the Dutch when the transcendent team of Johan Cruyff and Johan Neeskens was beaten by Germany in the 1974 World Cup final. Yet over the years the rivalry has evolved from bitterness to mutual toleration (no doubt helped by Holland’s revenge in Euro 1988) and is nowadays a staple source of humor.

(Some of the history lingers, though. My book Knowing the Score — about philosophical themes in sport — is currently being translated into Dutch. At one point in the book I describe my distress at seeing a German player “dive” to fake an injury. Germans don’t do that, I said. “It was like seeing Mary Poppins steal a purse.”

My Dutch translator objected that this would make no sense to Dutch readers, going on to explain that “everybody knows” that Germans invented diving. Indeed, the Dutch term for the practice is “Schwalbe, the German word for swallow, in reference to the bird’s outstretched wings. In the end, we agreed to insert a footnote explaining that the Germans have always enjoyed a rather better sporting reputation outside Holland.)

Most nations have far more experience with international sports competitions than America

Americans are relative strangers to international sport. In American football there is no real question of a national team, for lack of any plausible opposition. The other major sports — basketball, baseball, hockey — are played in other countries, it is true, and indeed the USA sends teams to a number of international tournaments.

But, with the occasional exception of basketball, nearly all these teams lack most of the top professionals. Their teams’ owners aren’t keen to let them go, and many of the stars often seem to think they have better things to do anyway. (This time around, it’s even worse. The NHL owners have simply blacklisted these Olympics. No player with an NHL contract is playing for any country in Pyeongchang.)

I sometimes worry that this lack of American sporting involvement has political consequences. Exceptionalism on the sports field can encourage exceptionalism off it. It is easy for a country that shies away from international sport to stop thinking of itself as one nation among others. In my view, international relations would have a more secure footing if America were less isolated in sporting terms.

Still, Americans do at least have the Olympics. This is the one time when Americans sports fan become excited about international sports competition. (The US sports website the Bleacher Report has a slighted dated list of the “50 Biggest International Sports Moments in US History.” Most other countries would first think of many famous international matches under this heading, but fully 38 of the Bleacher Report list are from Olympic Games.)

Article 6 of the Olympic charter says that  “the Olympics are competitions between athletes … and not between countries.” Well, that might have been de Coubertin’s idea, but nowadays we tally medals by country. During the Cold War, the rankings of countries were widely viewed as measuring communism against capitalism, and even now most nations will still regard a healthy medal count as a source of national pride. By their nature, these medal tables fuel baser nationalist sentiments, and no doubt the American enthusiasm for the Olympics is bolstered by the USA’s regular position at the top of the medal rankings.

But the virtues of sporting competition still apply. It might be America First, but at least it is first among equals, primus inter pares. By competing you recognize the standing of the others. Americans might regard the United Nations as an illegitimate constraint on your world power, but it makes little sense to take the same attitude to the International Olympic Committee.

It is precisely this cosmopolitan aspect of the Olympic ideal that turns some people against it. In 1996, Eric Rudolph exploded a pipe bomb in a car park at the Atlanta Summer Olympics, killing one person and injuring 111.* When he was finally tracked down, seven years later, he explained his motivation. The Olympic movement was promoting an agenda of “global socialism,” he claimed, and he’d wanted to provoke the cancellation of the games.

Rudolph was mistaken to see an inherent conflict between “globalism” and his American loyalties. Recognizing the worth of other nations does not require you to abandon your commitment to your own. The notion of rooted cosmopolitanism shows us how it is possible to combine patriotism with internationalism.

In this respect, nations are like families. My children are more important to me than other children. I will do things for them that I wouldn’t dream of doing for other kids. But I am not so benighted as to suppose that, in the greater scheme of things, they are more deserving than other people’s offspring, and generally entitled to preferential treatment. In just the same way, I can honor my own nation above others, yet at the same time acknowledge that other nations have an equal claim to fair dealing.

It is a good time to recognize the significance of Baron de Coubertin’s vision. Relationships between nations are increasingly beset by enmity and suspicion. Trust is ebbing, and all are likely to suffer. We look nervously at the saber-rattling of President Trump and Kim Jong Un, and hope that diplomats contain the conflict on the Korean peninsula.

Perhaps we should be grateful to the example of international sports for reminding us that rivalry does not have to mean conflict. In politics, as in sport, we can strive for our own side without ceasing to respect the other’s right to a level playing field. Let us hope that things continue to go well in Korea on both fronts.

Correction: This piece originally included the wrong year for the Atlanta Summer Olympics. Atlanta hosted in 1996.

David Papineau is professor of philosophy at King’s College London and at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Knowing the Score: What Sports Can Teach Us About Philosophy (And What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Sports).

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