John Vinocur: Why Europe Feels Rejected by Obama
[John Vinocur is a journalist for the Paris-based newspaper The International Herald Tribune.]
Why would an American president not come to a celebration marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with it, the triumphant end of the Cold War — one of the high points of the United States’ and Europe’s common 20th-century history?
Whatever the exact answer — and it could be that a fatigued Barack Obama didn’t want the physical strain of a trans-Atlantic trip days before a weeklong tour of Asia — his absence from the Nov. 9 ceremonies in Germany has reinforced Europe’s fear that it has become an increasingly insignificant part of the president’s worldview.
This week offers a telling juxtaposition:
Mr. Obama, after giving Berlin a conspicuous miss, is concentrating by his presence America’s attention and future hopes on China and Asia. Virtually at the same moment, the European Union, in what’s plainly an effort to assert its relevance, will choose (with considerable difficulty and potential irrelevance) a common president and foreign minister for the first time.
Together, that’s hardly a guarantee of a warmer trans-Atlantic clasp of hands. Instead, it’s a remarkable contrast to Secretary of State James Baker’s proposal, a month after the wall fell, of a new, organic economic and political relationship between Europeans and Americans.
Now, Denis MacShane, a former British minister for Europe, who met with other Atlanticists at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Edinburgh over the weekend, describes the circumstances this way: “There’s a growing worry everywhere in Europe that we have the first U.S. president since 1945 to show no interest in what’s happening on this side of the relationship.”
That can be held up against a show-us-and-we’ll-get-back-to-you version of the administration’s view of European-American cooperation offered a week earlier by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department’s director of policy planning. Asked by a French reporter about where she situated a newly reorganized, constitutional Europe, Ms. Slaughter replied that there were enormous possibilities.
“But,” she said, “it’s up to post-Lisbon Europe to put its house in order in a way that would allow us to be effective partners. Europe’s choices in the coming months are going to be very important.”
That’s not what you’d call an embrace. It’s reinforcement for the idea that the president over his first year in office has shunned, or taken for granted, Europe’s initial burst of affection for him. The fallout — either attributed to the private comments of European leaders, or reflected in major editorial voices — is an expression of skepticism about Mr. Obama’s capabilities and the depth of the change he claims to represent.
In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper that knows Chancellor Angela Merkel well, has written ironically of how little has changed, outside atmospherics, from the Bush to Obama administrations in attitudes toward Germany. Over the weekend, it found that Mr. Obama’s America seems “to be taking pleasure in the idea of having a G-2 condominium” with China that would leave little place for a European share of global power.
In France, the tone has been harsher. Olivier Debouzy, a lawyer and former French Foreign Ministry official, wrote last week that foreign governments were “opaque” for Mr. Obama because he projected his own notion of American rationality on them. Mr. Debouzy asserted that the president also showed a sense of his and America’s superiority to foreign leaders.
“He expresses this by holding himself at a distance from them, which is unusual for an American political figure,” Mr. Debouzy wrote. “It makes personal relations with him complicated, a fact attested to by more than one European chief of state or government.”
The current issue of Le Canard Enchaîné, the controversy-loving French political weekly, which specializes in putting direct quotes into the mouths of French politicians — regarded with interest here although not as verbatim scripture — has President Nicolas Sarkozy saying:...
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Read entire article at NYT
Why would an American president not come to a celebration marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with it, the triumphant end of the Cold War — one of the high points of the United States’ and Europe’s common 20th-century history?
Whatever the exact answer — and it could be that a fatigued Barack Obama didn’t want the physical strain of a trans-Atlantic trip days before a weeklong tour of Asia — his absence from the Nov. 9 ceremonies in Germany has reinforced Europe’s fear that it has become an increasingly insignificant part of the president’s worldview.
This week offers a telling juxtaposition:
Mr. Obama, after giving Berlin a conspicuous miss, is concentrating by his presence America’s attention and future hopes on China and Asia. Virtually at the same moment, the European Union, in what’s plainly an effort to assert its relevance, will choose (with considerable difficulty and potential irrelevance) a common president and foreign minister for the first time.
Together, that’s hardly a guarantee of a warmer trans-Atlantic clasp of hands. Instead, it’s a remarkable contrast to Secretary of State James Baker’s proposal, a month after the wall fell, of a new, organic economic and political relationship between Europeans and Americans.
Now, Denis MacShane, a former British minister for Europe, who met with other Atlanticists at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Edinburgh over the weekend, describes the circumstances this way: “There’s a growing worry everywhere in Europe that we have the first U.S. president since 1945 to show no interest in what’s happening on this side of the relationship.”
That can be held up against a show-us-and-we’ll-get-back-to-you version of the administration’s view of European-American cooperation offered a week earlier by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department’s director of policy planning. Asked by a French reporter about where she situated a newly reorganized, constitutional Europe, Ms. Slaughter replied that there were enormous possibilities.
“But,” she said, “it’s up to post-Lisbon Europe to put its house in order in a way that would allow us to be effective partners. Europe’s choices in the coming months are going to be very important.”
That’s not what you’d call an embrace. It’s reinforcement for the idea that the president over his first year in office has shunned, or taken for granted, Europe’s initial burst of affection for him. The fallout — either attributed to the private comments of European leaders, or reflected in major editorial voices — is an expression of skepticism about Mr. Obama’s capabilities and the depth of the change he claims to represent.
In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper that knows Chancellor Angela Merkel well, has written ironically of how little has changed, outside atmospherics, from the Bush to Obama administrations in attitudes toward Germany. Over the weekend, it found that Mr. Obama’s America seems “to be taking pleasure in the idea of having a G-2 condominium” with China that would leave little place for a European share of global power.
In France, the tone has been harsher. Olivier Debouzy, a lawyer and former French Foreign Ministry official, wrote last week that foreign governments were “opaque” for Mr. Obama because he projected his own notion of American rationality on them. Mr. Debouzy asserted that the president also showed a sense of his and America’s superiority to foreign leaders.
“He expresses this by holding himself at a distance from them, which is unusual for an American political figure,” Mr. Debouzy wrote. “It makes personal relations with him complicated, a fact attested to by more than one European chief of state or government.”
The current issue of Le Canard Enchaîné, the controversy-loving French political weekly, which specializes in putting direct quotes into the mouths of French politicians — regarded with interest here although not as verbatim scripture — has President Nicolas Sarkozy saying:...
Read More...