The German Times, August 2008
No, there was no Obamania in Berlin – no frenzy, no irrational exuberance. The 200,000 people who intently followed Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin last month were not “the enthusiastic crowd” that the pundits had expected. They came to show their respect for someone whom they see as a beacon of hope, a man they want to trust. They assembled at the Victory Column in the heart of the German capital because they dare to hope again.
The Berlin audience was representative for Europe – Obama’s warm-hearted reception in Paris and London underscored the point. The Old World is yearning for a new leader in the White House. People in Europe are ready to dream the dream of a better world. They hailed the man who seems to be the exact opposite of the incumbent American president.
Obama sold the world a different America than that epitomized by George W. Bush. He enchanted the throngs. But when the charismatic candidate had departed for Paris and London, questions came popping up. Is the senator from Illinois more than an illusionist or an accomplished wordsmith? Is he just a political conjuror? What is the concrete program behind all those lofty phrases? Would he really be capable of making the world a better place?
Jan Techau of the German Council on Foreign Relations dispelled the doubts: “In diplomacy, words are deeds.” Obama made a promise, Techau says. His Berlin speech, just as his entire overseas trip, was a job application, an appeal addressed to the whole world.
The candidate passed the test. He did so despite the fact that his promise is not entirely congruent with the interests and policies of Europeans. In particular, it does not tally with the wishes of the predominantly anti-military and environmentally concerned audience. The 200,000 Berliners applauded the senator’s half-hour speech but they went home pensive – moved yet not necessarily convinced.
It was not so much Obama’s harking back to the Berlin airlift that captured his predominantly young audience. He enticed Europe with sentences like: “I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city,” and “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic can not stand.” The latter statement’s dissociation from George W. Bush earned him the loudest applause. It was interpreted as a pledge to make a new start and the commitment to shape a better, freer, more peaceful world.
Obama got through to his audience by listing the horrors of our age: terrorism, melting ice caps in the Arctic, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, drugs, unjust distribution of wealth between North and South, violence in Somalia, genocide in Darfur. “In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them,” he said.
To cope with these nightmares, we must resuscitate the transatlantic partnership – that was the thrust of Obama’s message: “We cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone.” The Berlin audience interpreted this, too, as a promise: On his watch, multilateralism would once again replace the unilateralism of the recent past.
Obama spoke of “true partnership,” “constant work” and “sustained sacrifice,” and underlined that the burden must be shared more broadly: “A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more – not less.”
With a transatlantic partnership renewed in this spirit, the Germans, the Europeans are in for a surprise. Obama expects from them more financial commitment and, more importantly, additional boots on the ground in the armed conflicts around the globe. This goes in particular for Afghanistan. “In order to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, the Afghan people need our troops and your troops.” There is no going back, he added. “We have too much at stake to turn back now.”
Had President Bush made this demand, he would have been whistled off the stage. But there were no catcalls.
The fact that Obama, too, sees a “global NATO” as the world’s peacemaker rather than the United Nations has not escaped the transatlanticists. “Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic,” Obama said in Berlin. There was not a single whistle from the audience at that point either. “Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”
When the 44th president of the United States is inaugurated on Jan. 20, Germans will be getting ready to elect a new parliament and with it, a new government. Some of the questions that Obama broached in Berlin will certainly play a role in the campaign for the Bundestag. Then it could turn out that not only the majority of the electorate but also the bulk of parliamentarians are quite unwilling to take on more responsibility for the fate of the world, not to speak of sending more troops to distant hot spots.
The German government continues to set different priorities here. A few days after Obama’s visit to Berlin, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier traveled to Afghanistan and inaugurated a project in Herat that will supply half a million people with drinking water, as if he wanted to demonstrate: To win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, civilian post-conflict management is essential, soldiers alone aren’t enough.
Obama, if he returned to Berlin as U.S. president, would quickly find out that the Berliners who cheered him so enthusiastically last month are by no means prepared to buy his every prescription for “joining together.” Europeans, in general, will judge him by his willingness, and his ability to accommodate their way of looking at the world.
But as Obama’s July visit to the Old World proved, he has a lot of capital to draw on.