Obamania and the American Myth
From the desk of John Laughland on Wed, 2008-11-19 15:30
The reason for this outpouring is not difficult to fathom. Barack Obama represents to the highest degree all the values which European elites hold most dear – youth, progress, innovation and, above all, multiculturalism. As Obama himself faces a challenge in the Supreme Court to prove that was in fact born in Hawaii instead of in Kenya (which would disqualify him from being president of the United States) his very foreignness and mixed ethnic background is precisely what European leaders find so deeply attractive about him.
Obama corresponds to precisely the post-modern, post-national and multiethnic fantasies to which European leaders subscribe – and which they have been struggling for decades to realise in the creation of a United States of Europe. The European project, after all, is ideologically American. Not only has it always been supported and initiated by the USA (including the CIA) since its inception (see Gerd Lundestad, “Empire by Integration”, Oxford University Press, 1998); but also its very symbolism and vocabulary – from the stars on the flag to the use of the word “Convention” to describe the committee which worked on the European constitution from 2002 to 2004 – is based on the American model.
It is based, in particular, on what I call the American myth. People often talk about “the American dream”, by which they usually mean something rather banal about how people from the bottom of the social ladder can attain positions of great power. But America itself embodies another dream, or myth, which is connected to the former, namely that a state can be founded, and continue to exist, on the basis of contractual and universal values but without drawing legitimacy from the vagaries of history or geography. This is the true American dream.
We can see this in the way Americans often refer to their state as “young”. In reality, the American state is no younger than other states which never refer to themselves in the same way, Australia or Canada for instance. The reason for the difference is that Americans believe their country represents and new and different kind of society, created ex nihilo by the “Founding Fathers” on the basis of rational principles. According to the dream, those principles live on today, and continue to form the basis for the continuing existence of the American state as the result of a kind of necessity rather than historical contingency. The American dream is, in this sense, a sort of semi-religious “covenant” which never ages because it is constantly renewed by the adherence of each individual American to the social contract.
European elites are deeply attracted to this (in my view totally false) version of history. They want the same thing for Europe: they want the ancient nation-states of Europe to be subsumed into a post-modern, post-historical, post-geographical and of course post-national future, in which “French” and “German” will have little more than folkloric meaning. They want all European societies to be multicultural and multiethnic. They want Muslim Turkey to enter the EU to prove their point. They want to engage in a form of politics which denies that it is even politics, pretending instead that they are carrying out a vast humanitarian peace-keeping mission. They think of themselves not as politicians deploying power in the real world but instead as semi-Messianic figures, rather like Barack Obama. They think of themselves as belonging to the same ideological community as the Americans, a community which enables them to break the laws of geography and history and to feel closer to a country thousands of miles away than to their immediate neighbours. Speaking before the American election, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Policy, Javier Solana, said that Europe and America were together “a force for good in the world”.
One of the many negative results of this, in my view, is the damage it does to relations between Europe and Russia. Russia in 1991 abandoned any pretence that it embodied a dream of universal appeal to mankind. That dream – communism – had brought the country to the brink of destruction. Now, Russia’s politics are deeply anti-ideological and pragmatic, so much so that there is little difference between the state and the country’s numerous mega-enterprises supplying raw materials and energy. Because Russia now resolutely refuses to embody any “dream”, but instead wants normal inter-state relations with Europe, on the basis of sound economic relations and geopolitical mutual respect, she is shunned and regarded instead as a threat. Worse, she is regarded as embodying a reactionary force – one that refuses to join in the collective dreaming and instead want to engage in politics.
It is a ridiculous state of affairs. Russia is Europe’s geographical neighbour; most continental Europeans could drive there in their cars in much less time than it takes to cross the US. Russians are obviously themselves Europeans. Russia supplies Europe with what she needs (energy and raw materials) while Europe supplies Russia with what she needs (high-tech and precision engineering). By what possible standard of values should Europeans treat the election of an American president as something so intimately connected to themselves that one sometimes has the impression Barack Obama has come into their homes and sat down at their kitchen table, while their media simultaneously dismiss every move of the much closer Russian president as suspicious, ominous, cynical and threatening? This surely is the world upside down.
Recent comments
3 hours 27 min ago
8 hours 44 min ago
8 hours 52 min ago
16 hours 18 min ago
16 hours 18 min ago
18 hours 32 min ago
1 day 23 hours ago
2 days 12 hours ago
2 days 15 hours ago
2 days 16 hours ago