You may have noticed that I didn’t comment on the US election on this blog, and very little on US politics in general (although you will not be surprised to hear that I like Barack Obama better than the other guy). That’s because I’m pretty busy critizising my own country, I do not even have time to interfere with other peoples business.
But that does not mean I’m not interested in politics and in the relations between the US and the European Union; so I will comment on an article I found via Deborah Lipstadt’s Blog – a post by Andrei Markovits who contends that Europeans are hypocrites for praising Obamas victory, since they would never elect a black man (or a member of a minority) themselves. Markovits knows Europe well, but I still think he misses the point – two points in fact.
One, he assumes that the joy over Obamas victory is authentic which, as far as as european realpolitik is concerned it certainly isn’t. The nice thing about the Bush Administration was that compared to him practically everybody looked good; no matter how bad your own politics were, you could distract from your own failures by pointing at the US where President Bush would inescapably do something even more stupid (btw. that german politicians could brag about the the well regulated financial sector in germany is due to the fact that they weren’t quite finished dismantling the regulations when the crisis hit. Now the crisis is blamed solely on the US).
As for the second point – well, have you looked at european politics lately? If we like progressive politicians that much then how do we explain Italys Berlusconi, Sarzkozy in France, the dopey duo of Merkel/Steinmeier in Germany?
Talking about Germany: we have anti-terror laws that are every bit as insidious as the laws in the US (and for rather the same reasons, for example they blur the difference between sympathizers,. suspects and criminals) , only we had them for almost 40 years – ever since the days of the RAF, a terrorist faction that killed some 60 people in its 25 year history. On abortion – Germany never had a Roe v. Wade, abortion in Germany is actually illegal. Only there are a number of cases where abortion (while still against the law) will not be persecuted. In the US there was a scandal when telecommunications companies, in violation of the law, handed over customer data to the state. This would be impossible in germany, i.e. it would impossible to cause a scandal – telco companys are legally obliged to spy on their customers.[1] Germans usually don’t even know about their own laws (the media is so busy commenting on the backwards US politics, they can’t spare time to educate their readers about the laws at home), but even if they were I strongly suspect a majority would approve.
So the point is not that europeans wouldn’t elect Obama because of this race – we wouldn’t elect him because of his politics. We could possibly deal with a black man[2], but somebody with his views we would call a populist and a damn commie[3], and there, not with the race thing, lies the real hypocrisy.
- Just for completeness sake, we do not have separation of church and state either, nor separation of powers - usually members of the government are also members of the parliament.
- There is a saying attributed to the late Bavarian prime minister Strauss - "I prefer a right wing foreigner over a leftist german"
- After the elections in the german federal country of Hessen Andrea Ypsilanti, the head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Hessen was accused of collaborating with the communists, since she wanted to form a minority goverment which was to be tolerated by the left Party Die Linke. The "communists" in Hessen are mostly former members of the SPD who favour a mandatory minimum wage which the SPD opposes.
