Obama and Europe

A very interesting piece -- and perhaps true... .


RECKONING: AGAINST 'INTEGRATION': THE EMPIRE STRIKES BARACK
A startled Europe asks, 'Could Obama happen here?' Answer: No
While they were busy fussing about "integration," those inventive Yanks had come up with a better product - inclusion.

DOUG SAUNDERS
The Globe and Mail, November 15, 2008

LONDON -- Europeans expected the election of Barack Obama to change the way they related to the United States. What they didn't realize was how much it would turn their own worlds upside down.

The election across the Atlantic has acted like a grenade tossed into their own camps: For the past 10 days, almost from the moment the president-elect took to the stage in Chicago, the people of European countries have turned against their political systems in an unprecedented wave of self-recrimination.

How can it be, they ask, that the most powerful man in the world is the son of an immigrant from Africa, has Hussein for a middle name and worked his way up from nothing - all qualities that are shared by many Europeans today but do not exist in a single major party leader among the 27 European Union countries?

This is not a matter of identity politics. In fact, it is the end of identity politics, for Mr. Obama was elected in a country that has a larger proportion of white people than many Western European countries do, and not on anything like a racial or ethnic platform.

The ethnic-minority politicians of Europe tend to be elected by people like themselves, and speak largely of ethnic issues. They are not national figures. They are instruments of division, and so are their paler counterparts.

This fact calls into question, for many Europeans, the whole notion of political representation, in both senses of the word: When we vote, we are selecting someone to represent us, to be our surrogate; we are also selecting someone who is representative, who projects our intended image and our idea of ourselves on the world. In either sense, representation isn't working.

The first blast came from Trevor Phillips, the head of Britain's equality commission, a black Englishman with Guyanese parents, who declared very publicly that a British Obama would not be possible in his lifetime.

"It would be very difficult for somebody like Barack Obama to find their way through the way we do things," he said in an interview that made the front pages of most London newspapers this week.

Mr. Phillips is a subtle thinker who is not interested in being a professional decrier of racism. His argument was all the more devastating in that it wasn't about crude popular racism, which is largely a thing of the past in Britain, but about a political system, much like Canada's, that is deeply resistant to leaders who actually represent their people.

"I don't think that the public of this country would be at all resistant to electing a black prime minister - in fact, in this new age, following what's happened this week, they would rather like it," he explained. "My point is that it is very difficult for people who don't fit a certain mould ... to find their way into the upper reaches of politics."

In Germany, a string of Turkish-German and Balkan-German politicians declared that a Deutsche Obama would not be plausible in the foreseeable future. Half of them blamed "Germans" - meaning white Germans - for refusing to recognize them as equals, while an equally vocal half blamed the ex-immigrant communities for failing to cultivate viable leadership candidates.

The fact that they all spoke of "Germans" and "immigrant communities" as separate things tells you how far their country is from the U.S.

In France, the reaction was even stronger, and it came from within the government. That might seem surprising: After all, President Nicolas Sarkozy is a child of immigrants, a guy with a funny-sounding name to French ears, and has given three cabinet positions to black or Muslim women.
But it was that circle of women who were the first to declare a French Obama an impossibility. Rama Yade, the black, Senegal-born human-rights minister, denounced her own colleagues (presumably including Mr. Sarkozy himself) to a reporter, calling their embrace of the Obama cause hypocritical. "The enthusiasm they express toward this far-away American," she said, "they don't have it for the minorities in France."

To understand this, I got in touch with the European politician who I believe most resembles Barack Obama in upbringing and outlook.

Azouz Begag was born to poor Algerian villagers and spent his childhood in a cardboard-shack shantytown on the banks of the Rhône; it was a fetid, packed pile of Mumbai-style shacks called Chaâba, in Lyons. His 1980s memoir of that time, Le Gone du Chaâba, launched a wave of Afro-French literature, and his 20-odd books on economics, politics and French life are all excellent. He served as "minister for equal opportunities" under Jacques Chirac, but quit when he felt that the up-and-coming Mr. Sarkozy was using immigrants as scapegoats

"I'm 51 and I'm sure I won't see any Barack Obama in France in the next generation," he told me. "I keep saying that France, as far as issues of integration of minority ethnic groups is concerned, has a generation delay on what's going on in the USA and even in the U.K."
Europeans have developed an unhealthy obsession with "integration" - that is, with the idea that immigrant citizens need to be treated specially as they are brought up to speed with non-immigrant citizens. The whole concept is divisive: It ensures that they will be different and isolated people until they meet some unknown standard, that their politicians will be forced to speak only of ethnic issues.

"Here is the challenge with Obama," Mr. Begag said. "All over the world, the black, the Muslim, the Arab, the poor ... now feel represented by Obama. This is the new fact, for an obvious reason: He is inspiring." Mr. Obama, he added, "wants to gather people," while Mr. Sarkozy, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, Austria's Jorg Haider and other European leaders "divided them."
During the campaign, the big question in Europe had been whether Mr. Obama's liberalism connected to the values of the social democrats and socially moderate conservatives who tend to govern Europe. Was he good enough to be a European? The question now, and probably for some time, is whether European leaders are capable of representing their people the way Mr. Obama represents Americans - and much of the world.

While they were busy fussing about "integration," those inventive Yanks had come up with a better product - inclusion.