Politics & Power Quote by Pierre de Coubertin

Coubertin’s line carries the calm moral certainty of a founding document, but it’s also a strategic claim about who gets to set the rules of modern international life. “For the world” sounds like pure idealism; it’s also a bid to make the Olympics a legitimate global stage, not a European club with better branding. By insisting “all nations must be admitted,” he frames inclusion as a principle, not a favor, turning participation into a kind of right. That rhetorical move matters: it shifts the burden of proof onto anyone who wants to exclude.

The context is a late-19th and early-20th century order built on empires, racial hierarchies, and “civilized” gatekeeping. Coubertin’s universalism pushes against that logic, but it doesn’t escape it. The subtext is that sport can be a neutral arena where politics supposedly don’t belong, even as the very act of deciding which flags count as “nations” is political. “Admitted” is the tell: a doorman verb. Someone controls the door.

The line also anticipates the Olympics’ recurring contradiction: they sell themselves as a gathering of equals while functioning as a televised ranking system of states. Coubertin is trying to harness nationalism without letting it tip into war, to convert competitive heat into ritualized spectacle. The phrase is less a description of reality than a commandment aimed at the future IOC and host countries: if the Games are to mean anything beyond pageantry, they can’t be curated to flatter the powerful.