Quotes of the Day

Two weeks on from an historic American presidential election, the global sense of euphoria that an Obama Administration offers the change we need (to steal a slogan) remains undimmed. At the G-20 summit in Washington, heads of governments scrambled over each other to talk to Obama's two emissaries (the President-elect was not there himself). Surfing an Australian news website, I noticed that its top story was a report of a speech that Obama had just given by video to U.S. state governors on the need for Washington to stake a leadership position on global warming. The subtext: See, he's not just not George Bush; he's almost one of us!

If Obama is as wise as he seems, non-Americans will appreciate soon enough that he has just been elected President of the United States, not Secretary-General of the United Nations. Of course, every American President knows that his decisions have consequences for places far from the borders of the U.S., like the famous butterfly of chaos theory whose beating wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away. Obama and his advisers are doubtless sincere when they say that they want to restore America's reputation for decency and competence. But constitutionally and in every other way that really matters, Obama's primary responsibilities are to Americans, not to people overseas. It is to the American electorate that he is accountable, and it is American public opinion — not that in Barcelona or Bangalore — that will determine whether his Administration is regarded as a success. (See pictures of the world reacting to Obama's win.)

All of that, one hopes, will soon inject a degree of realism into non-American hopes for an Obama presidency, and cause policymakers to concentrate on their many own tasks rather than imagining a dreamy world in which competing national interests have somehow disappeared. Europeans, in particular, need to get past the lovestruck phase of their Obamaphilia — typified by that still astonishing crowd of 200,000 that cheered him in Berlin last summer — and have a clear look at the world they inhabit, and how they might best act in it.

For Europe's great and good, this will not be easy. Europeans love thinking about America, part in longing, part in envy, part in disdain. You could spend a nice year trotting from Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire to Salzburg, from the Italian lakes to German castles, doing nothing but ponder in earnest detail the state of the Atlantic alliance. It's a monumental waste of time. Nearly six years after those passionate disagreements on the invasion of Iraq, U.S.-Europe relations are just fine, with a clutch of Atlanticists heading the governments of Britain, France and Germany — and leading the European Commission in Brussels, too. The thing now is to figure out what the world's collection of rich democracies can do with their substantial power. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the New York Times recently that she once said to European leaders, "Can we take the trans-Atlantic relationship off the sofa? And stop analyzing it and analyzing whether it's healthy, and actually put it to work in common causes?" She has a point.

For many Europeans, however, thinking less about the U.S., and more about the rest of the world — about the projection of European power, hard or soft — is not a priority, and it's important to understand why. Europe is a special place at a special time. In France, they refer to the 30 years of economic expansion and modernization after 1945 as the trentes glorieuses, but you can make a case that it is really the last 20 years, since long-accreting rust began to degrade the Iron Curtain in the spring of 1989, that represent Europe's true Golden Age.

Those of us of with gray hair have seen things we once never thought possible. As a teenager in 1960s Britain, I remember once looking at a Düreresque woodcut of the steeples of Prague — which then seemed on the far side of the world — and thinking, "How sad that I'll never go there." But now Europe is free from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea, its peoples mingling happily, trading with each other, watching the same football games, sharing the same Aegean beaches. Hansa towns on the Baltic, once trapped in a frozen Soviet stubble, now bustle with energy; Poles revive Catholic churches in Ireland and Britain; Russians turn ski resorts in the French Alps into little St. Petersburgs.

This is astonishing. When one thinks back to how dangerously unstabilizing the collapse of the Soviet Union was thought to be in the early 1990s, it is little short of miraculous that the Continent should have been so peaceful, and so prosperous, for so long. Even the wars of the Yugoslav succession, long and brutal though they may have been, were contained. In the mid-1990s, there were fears that other parts of Central and Eastern Europe would see the same sort of ethnic cleansing as the former Yugloslavia. It never happened.

Read a special report on the recent war in Georgia.

Many in Europe know just what to do with this peace and prosperity: lie back and enjoy it. As Gideon Rachman argued in a provocative column in the Financial Times in May, Europe has become a "giant Switzerland." Its people do not consider themselves threatened by the turmoil in the world around it, and see little point in going out looking for dragons to slay. Barack Obama may be Europe's darling, but he will find that his suitor's ardor cools pretty quickly the moment he asks European parents to volunteer their sons and daughters to beef up NATO forces in Afghanistan.

This unwillingness to engage with the rest of the world — to risk the sense of security that it enjoys within its own borders — led Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, to reply to Rachman's column by saying that Europe was a "political dwarf in ... the rapidly changing geopolitical environment." There's an element of truth to the charge, but it goes too far. For one thing, it ignores the triumphant role of exemplar that the European Union has played in the last two decades. Yes, the pettifogging rules and endless bureaucratic wrangling of the E.U. may be easy to satirize — and when asked in referendums, Europeans repeatedly indicate that they do not want the E.U. to turn into a giant superstate. But it was the promise of accession to the E.U., with all its economic benefits, that did more than anything else to extend a zone of peace and prosperity from the borders of the old West Germany further east.

Nor have today's European leaders been entirely supine in the face of Mabubhani's "rapidly changing geopolitical environment." The British leaders Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have a long record of arguing for assistance for the poorest parts of the globe. The initiative this year of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to start building a true community on both sides of the Mediterranean, grandiose though it sounds, is important. It recognizes a fundamental truth; that the futures of the aging populations of rich Europe and the young ones of the poor Maghreb are inextricably linked, and that institutions need to be built to ensure that those futures are happy ones. And when one turns to nonstate actors, European engagement in the world is striking. From ngos like Médecins Sans Frontières and Greenpeace, to the actions of two scruffy (but very, very rich) Irish rock stars, Europeans have been in the forefront of the movement to put a human face on globalization. (Read world leaders' view of Obama's win.)

Still, more needs to be done. Europe is not an island, and even judged by the narrowest tests of self-interest, it has an abiding need to ensure that its neighbors can savor the same peace and prosperity that Europeans now enjoy. From that logic of geography should flow two pressing priorities of European strategic policy: closer engagement with Russia and with Turkey. Both nations feel aggrieved at their treatment by Europe, Russia because (in breach of promises made in the early 1990s) NATO was extended not just to the borders of the old Soviet Union but actually inside them; Turkey because it thinks that the E.U. intends to dangle the carrot of accession, while never truly intending Turkey to nibble on it.

Europe's Challenges
In the wake of the Georgian weekend war this summer, and amid the usual bellicose speechifying by Russian leaders, finding common ground between Russia and Europe will not be easy. But it is important to make a start, because the risk of alienating Moscow is a real and dangerous one. And as Joe Joffe argues in the accompanying essay, when talking to Russia, Europe is stronger than its behavior would often suggest.

In the case of Turkey, the question for Europe is not, as with Russia, how to avoid a dangerous rivalry. It is, rather, how to institutionalize relations with Turkey so that it can be Europe's partner in a dangerous neighborhood. At a recent World Economic Forum conference in Istanbul, I was struck both by how creative Turkish diplomacy now is in the whole ring of instability to its east and south, from Armenia right round to Syria, and how much Turks wanted to work with Europeans to extend the area of peace and economic integration which has, since the Treaty of Rome 51 years ago, steadily moved from the North Sea eastwards.

It will take skillful diplomacy and sustained political and economic engagement for Europe to find new and better relations with Russia and Turkey. And here is the key thing: the U.S., however charismatic its new President may be, will be little or no help. Russia and Turkey are Europe's neighbors, not America's. Washington will always see relations with its former superpower rival differently from the way Europe does — as, indeed, was demonstrated in its reaction to the Georgian war.

And that, perhaps, is the best of all reasons why Europe needs to get over its crush on Obama. In the things that really matter to Europe, it doesn't help. Love is a fine thing; but as all who have loved know, it does not solve all the problems that life throws our way.

See behind the scenes pictures of Barack Obama's campaign.

• MICHAEL ELLIOTT
• Obama's win has filled Europe with joy, but the Old World has its own work to do