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.