The Change the Old World Doesn't Believe In - Yet

Is the change Europeans seek for America not the change they believe in for themselves? An article from the Washington Post.

By Dan Hamilton and Sushmitha Narsiah

The main reason Europeans give for supporting Obama is his perceived ability to represent change from the Bush administration. Other strengths are his personality and youth. None of this is particularly surprising, and confirms most anecdotal evidence.

What is particularly striking about the poll is not what Europeans think about America but how they think about themselves.

Electing a "candidate of color" is the change Europeans believe in when it comes to America, according to the poll. But that's not the change Europeans believe in for their own political systems. 71 percent of those polled in Germany, for instance, expect the election of a leader of color to have a positive effect on the United States, with just 3 percent negative. But only 35 percent in Germany believe a leader of color would be positive for their country; 16 percent believe the effect would be negative. This difference in view is mirrored across Europe.

Is the change Europeans seek for America not the change they believe in for themselves? The poll itself doesn't necessarily give us the answer. By asking to weigh the pros and cons of a "candidate of color" the pollsters are asking people to judge a candidate on the basis of color alone. Yet Obama has been successful in large part because he has not defined himself as a "candidate of color." Obama transformed the idea of "change" into an extraordinary lyric by transcending the issue of race, and thereby won the support of most voters irrespective of skin color, socio-economic status, or traditional party loyalties. Obama has been careful to define himself not only as "post-partisan," but also as "post-racial," even trans-ethnic.

This approach cuts against the grain of a good deal of politics in both America and Europe. Yet some of the most successful minority politicians in Europe have done the same thing. "I do not regard myself as a black member of Parliament," declared Paul Boateng, after he became Britain's first black cabinet minister in 2002.

Cem Özdemir, Germany's most prominent politician of Turkish descent, has the same message. "Obama is an American and he is as black as he is white. I am a German with a Turkish background and at the same time I am as Swabian as I am European," he told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. "We have to give up seeing every political figure from an ethnic minority as an ambassador of the country of his forefathers." Özdemir, who has served in both the German and European Parliaments, is about to become the co-chairman of the German Greens.

Minority politicians have advanced elsewhere in Europe as well. French President Nicholas Sarkozy appointed three ethnic-minority ministers to his cabinet. As the U.S. election results became known Wednesday morning in Europe, Rama Yade, Sarkozy's junior minister for human rights and the only black government minister, exclaimed to French radio that Obama's victory was "the fall of the Berlin Wall times ten...America is a New World again. On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes."

Decades of immigration are changing the face of western Europe. Blacks, Asians and Muslims account for at least 10 percent of the population in countries such as France, Britain and the Netherlands, and even 7 percent in Sweden. Islam is Europe's second-largest and fastest growing religion.

These changes are transforming the politics of some localities. Nearly half of the residents of the Dutch city of Rotterdam, for instance, are not native to the Netherlands or have at least one parent born outside the country. A quarter of the city's residents are Muslim. Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan-born, Muslim Dutch politician, will become mayor of Rotterdam on January 1.

On the whole, however, European leaders of minority descent are underrepresented in democratic bodies across the continent, and it has been difficult for minority politicians to rise to the top of national politics.

In the British House of Commons, for instance, only 15 of the 646 Members are of an ethnic background. None of the 555 deputies in the French Assembly representing districts in continental France is black or Muslim, although minorities do hold some of the 22 seats representing France's overseas territories. Only 2 of the 612 members of the German Bundestag are of Turkish descent and only 10 of minority background, despite the country's sizable German-Turkish community and the fact that almost 20 percent of the population has some minority background.

Europe is clearly not America, of course, and it is facile to transpose the experience of one continent to another. Moreover, almost all of the African-American representatives in the U.S. Congress hail from majority-black districts, whereas there are still relatively few majority non-white districts in Europe. On the other hand, in many European countries members of parliament are elected from party lists rather than directly by their constituents. In such cases, a party intent on ensuring greater minority representation could simply opt to place attractive minority politicians on its list.

In short, grass-roots politics in Europe may be changing, but the Old World has yet to discover its own Barack Obama.

Source: Washington Post, 13.11.2008

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