NEW YORK, NY.- Welcome back to the Olympics, and a five-ringed circus of sport and security, national pride and international sponsorship.

This summer’s Games begin in Paris this Friday, with an uncommon opening ceremony: athletes and acrobats floating along the Seine for as many spectators as the anti-terror police will allow.

“No other country would have tried this,” President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview this week, though the ministers by his side will be from a caretaker government. France is still processing its recent snap legislative election, which nearly brought the far right to power. The ceremony will be all about France’s openness to the world. Not all the local spectators will approve of the message.

A big modern show, then, after the COVID-shocked, zero-spectator Summer Games in Tokyo. But for all its contemporary soft power — the “Emily in Paris” tie-in, the medals displayed in Louis Vuitton trunks — these Paris Olympics will also be a throwback.

The modern Games are a French invention, after all: a projection of Panhellenic manhood onto contemporary Europe by a romantic educator and “fanatical colonialist” (as Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Games, called himself). The opening ceremony, especially, plunges the world’s athletes into the nationalist structures of the late 19th century. The flag-waving of the Olympics, the it’s-a-small-world amusements of the universal exhibition, or the repellent human zoos at colonial fairs: There have been many ways to bring the whole world to Paris.

The heart of the ceremony remains the parade of nations: the world shrunk to an hourlong cortège, when athletic prowess takes a back seat to country-by-country voguing. It dates back to the 1908 Games in London. Among the innovations of Friday’s fluvial festival is a rethought approach to the athletes’ arrivals: With no stadium to enter, the participants will be mixed into the larger ceremony, floating in throughout rather than entering en masse.

The organizers of the 1908 parade proclaimed that “every athlete taking part will be in the athletic costume of his country,” and that decree has stuck. The national committees call in their local designers; the United States is reliably in Ralph Lauren, Sweden wears H&M, while the Canadians this year will be athleisured out in Vancouver, British Columbia’s own Lululemon. A homegrown fashion industry does not guarantee chic, though. The Italians look reliably tacky and showed up in Beijing two years ago in green-white-red ponchos.

At recent parades of nations, women on the Indian team have worn saris, and on the Nigerian one geles. Caribbean contingents can be relied on for color. There is usually that guy from Tonga with oil-slicked pecs. Somehow we still have a taste for these kitschy motions of peace and brotherhood, especially when they come with a little geopolitical frisson, as when the two Koreas marched under a single flag at Pyeongchang 2018. The clash of civilizations becomes a costume party, and with the right fits, the formerly colonized world can outclass the great powers.

Like the World’s Fairs, the parade of nations relies on apprehensible signs and colonial-era uniformity — here come the Bermudians, in their shorts! — that might embarrass you back home. When you are waving to a billion viewers from a bateau-mouche, though, symbols and costumes are all you’ve really got. A stereotype is a kind of metal plate developed in the late 18th century for high-volume printing; with a stereotype, you can make a quick impression.

“The members of even the smallest nation,” anthropologist Benedict Anderson wrote in 1983, “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

If the sovereign state is a thing of politics, the nation is cultural to the core: a ghostly picture, somewhere inside us, that triggers an affective investment in borders, flags, tracksuits and canoe slalom teams. Soft national spectacles like the Olympic parade — where San Marino gets as much stage time as China, where Norway gets its moment as a major world power (at least in winter) — may not inspire anyone to assassinate an archduke in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. But a gentler nationalism is still a nationalism, and to indulge the fantasy of difference, some of us will don ridiculous uniforms.

At the ethnopop festival of Eurovision this year, the Greek act sang along to a karamuza, and Australia’s to a didgeridoo; Turkey won one year with a belly dancer. At the Miss Universe pageant (once owned by the Republican candidate for U.S. president), the reliably funniest part is the national costume competition: Miss Canada as sexy Mountie, Miss Venezuela as Bolívarian showgirl.

When does the tongue-in-cheek national brand become indistinguishable from the derogatory cliche? (Item: the Air France in-flight safety video, with its air-kissing Parisiennes in Breton-striped blouses.) Perhaps, with a postcolonial glint in your eye, you may think you can first play along with others’ categorizations and then spring a surprise on them. But you may instead find yourself, like Miss Netherlands, dressed up as a tulip and wondering where it all went wrong.

If you must put on a parade, there is a third way between solemnity and stereotype. In 1989, the 200th anniversary of the Revolution, the French government invited designer Jean-Paul Goude to stage a Bastille Day procession with global resonance — a national celebration that dissolved, rather than enforced, the cultural specificity of the nation. On the Champs-Élysées, there were Chinese students with bicycles and Soviet dancers dressed like constructivist sculptures; the British made their entrance under a rain machine; and Jessye Norman sang “La Marseillaise” in a billowing blue-white-red hooded dress. Each national costume was so stylish that it became preposterous, and could therefore be channeled into something hybrid, impure, far removed from de Coubertin’s fin-de-siècle flag waving.

One of the organizers of Paris’ 2024 opening ceremony said recently that Goude’s 1989 parade was a major inspiration for Friday’s celebrations: an anti-national festival that rolled all of us into a “worldwide melting pot, with an optimism that we’ve lost today.” If you are going to play dress-up on the world stage, you had better go for the gold.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.