The World's Election

Timothy Garton Ash writes an insightful column noting that:
1) This presidential election affects the entire world, not just the U.S. - and
2) Obama is preferred 4 to 1 over McCain outside the U.S.

The World's Election
Timothy Garton Ash, SF Chronicle
Thursday, October 16, 2008

From my observation perch in Stanford, and as an English European turned 24/7-cable news-Webcast junkie, I notice that many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election. How curious. Don't they understand? This is our election. The world's election. Our future depends on it, and we live it as intensely as Americans do. All we lack is the vote.

The world may not have a vote, but it has a candidate. A BBC World Service poll, conducted across 22 countries this summer, found Barack Obama was preferred to John McCain by a ratio of 4 to 1. Nearly half those asked said an Obama victory would "fundamentally change" their perception of the United States. And it certainly needs changing. Over the two terms of President Bush, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a series of worldwide public opinion surveys, has documented what anyone who travels around the world knows: a substantial fall in the standing, credibility, attractiveness, and therefore power of the United States.

In the American context, Obama is black or African American. His candidacy exposes yet again how that thing anachronistically called race - meaning the legacy of slavery and segregation - is the hidden warp and woof of American politics. In the international context, Obama is three other things. First, he's one of us - the child of an increasingly mixed-up world, now aspiring to be the most powerful man in it. A true cosmopolitan: not just African American but also a little bit each of Hawaiian, Kenyan, Kansan, Indonesian. Second, he's not Bush. McCain is not Bush either, but a lot less not-Bush. Finally, he personifies everything that foreigners still love about America.

Back in Oxford, and traveling around Europe, I constantly meet young people who have grown up furious at the United States. "You know, I'm very pro-European," one British student informed me. Stirred by this rarity - a pro-European Brit - I asked why she was pro-European. "Oh, I guess mainly because I'm anti-American." But she wasn't really anti-American. I would bet my bottom euro that she's an Obamaniac now.

Culturally, socially and aesthetically, he represents the America that is deep in young Europeans' everyday imaginations, transported there by the soft power of American films, music, literature, and television series such as "Friends," "ER," "The West Wing," "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," and even "Star Trek," together with serial abuse of the word "like": You can hear it at any coffee shop in Oxford, and the speaker may be Slovak, German or Chinese. That someone from Obama's modest migrant background can make it this far also revives a potent, positive image of the United States as a land of opportunity - an American self-image that much of the world has internalized, however little it corresponds with the statistically recorded facts of limited social mobility.

Were he elected, we would discover within a few months how much of the worldwide hostility loosely tagged anti-Americanism really was anti-Americanism, and how much was just a violent allergy, shared by many Americans, to a particular president, a specific set of policies, and a certain version of Americanism. Yet this very popularity of one candidate raises the stakes in this election to an alarming degree.

Just because international hopes have been raised so high, the disappointment if Obama fails will be devastating. The shock will be even greater because of McCain's choice of Sarah Palin - who, like Bush, reinforces every European cliche about the otherness (cowboyness, hickiness, wackiness) of Americans. This disappointment might be unfair to the likely content of a McCain foreign policy, but in international politics, as in financial markets, the perceptions are a large part of the reality. If Americans were to choose McCain-Palin, after re-electing Bush in 2004, I don't think it's too much to say that a lot of Europeans would feel like giving up on them. Of course European governments wouldn't, and couldn't afford to, give up on Washington; but they would have to operate within the constraining reality of popular disillusionment.

This would matter to the United States at the best of times. It will matter a lot more in these times. Even before the financial crisis, the list of problems piling up for the new president's in-boxes (both the one marked Urgent and the one marked Important, to recall John F. Kennedy's distinction) was already formidable. Even before this crisis added perhaps a trillion dollars to an already staggering national debt, the relative power of the United States to achieve its goals on its own - unilaterally - had significantly diminished over the last eight years, also because of the renaissance of great powers such as China and Russia. Somewhere around 2000 may be marked by future historians as the zenith of American power. In such a world, the need for allies and international credibility is greater than ever.

Timothy Garton Ash is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and professor of European Studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is "Free World." This piece will appear in the forthcoming election issue of the New York Review of Books.