THE INTERNATIONAL - International Indian

[ aRaB ViEW ]
Obama and Ozdemir:
Breaking Barriers
“Cem Ozdemir, 42, was elected recently as co-leader of the Green Party, capping a
career in the German and European parliaments that started in 1994. His path to
leadership is perhaps even more remarkable than Barack Obama’s.”
[ By Rami G. KhouRi ]
A
remarkable thing just happened in one
of the leading Western democracies:
A man of color was elected to a major
leadership position in his society that had often
discriminated against his people. I am not
speaking about Barack Obama’s presidential
victory. Perhaps as remarkable in the long run
as Obama’s win was the selection last week of
a Turkish immigrant’s son as the leader of the
major political party in Germany.
Cem Ozdemir, 42, was elected as co-leader
of the Green Party, capping a career in the German
and European parliaments that started in
1994. In terms of breaking color and ethnic barriers,
this equals or even tops the historic first
elected American Black president, because the
nature of European societies is so much less
pluralistic and culturally-racially-ethnically
less egalitarian than American society.
Full integration in Europe, and the political
triumph of men and women of color, will be
a much more difficult achievement than it has
been in the United States, because the nature
of the societies and the place of minorities in
them are both very different from one another.
The American system from the start always
held out the promise of racial and ethnic equality
and opportunity. It was only a matter of time
- when, not whether - we would see a Black
American president, because that land was forged
politically in a spirit and promise of equality - regardless
of the fact that for the initial centuries
the equality was only for land- and slave-owning
white males. Blacks have assumed almost every
other major position in the United States in recent
decades, including senators and congressmen
and women, Supreme Court justices, cabinet
ministers, secretaries of state, business and
civic leaders, and heads of the armed forces.
The promise of equal opportunity has unfurled
steadily in the past century for Blacks, Hispanics,
women, Jews and others in the United States, who
had been formerly discriminated against in institutional
and - often legal - ways. Critical barriers
were broken when Black men and women rose to
the top of such traditionally White-dominated
arenas as golf, tennis and professional baseball
team managers - important symbolic markers
in the culture of the United States, where sports
plays a role similar to tribalism in the rest of the
world. By reaching the highest summit in the
land, Barack Obama dramatically capped a virtuous
trend that had been going on for some time.
In Germany and most of Europe, the landscape
is not so clear, the opportunity and the
promise not so explicit. White Christian societies
have absorbed men and women of color
or from alien religions mainly through colonial
conquest or the imperatives of importing lowwage,
unskilled labor. No promise of equal
rights, opportunity or citizenship-throughimmigration
historically beckons immigrants
of color from lands to the south and east - even
if the color is only a light olive hue.
Turks, Italians and Spaniards, for example,
travel seasonally to northern Europe to work
as “guest workers” in homes and factories, but
are rarely given citizenship. They are attracted
to jobs they do not have at home and appreciate
the income and decent working conditions.
Many leave their children and families in their
countries of origin, and usually do not expect
either citizenship or equality.
But a first generation has now seen its sons
and daughters born and raised in Western
Europe. Cem Ozdemir was born in southern
Germany and raised and educated there in
German schools. These now native children of
Germany grasp that they, too, are in fact eligible
for the bounty of equal rights and boundless
opportunity in the lands that have inherited
them - the lands of their birth.
These children of immigrants are not immigrants
any more, but in a single generation
have become natives and citizens. They participate
in civic activities, sports, and elections,
demanding their rights not as Turks or Muslims,
but as German citizens who take their
constitutional guarantees seriously.
Germany alone now has 2.6 million Turkish
citizens or residents, accounting for three percent
of the population. Some 660,000 have become
citizens since 1972, but rarely have they
risen to the top of their professions. That has
now changed dramatically with a Turkish-German
head of a major political party that stands
a chance of sharing power in a coalition with
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Federal
elections are scheduled for next September.
In Germany, the Greens and the Christian
Democrats already operate an efficient ruling
coalition in Hamburg, making power-sharing
at the national level more possible. A Muslim
woman of Algerian origin is a cabinet minister
in France – a similar sign of the slow but steady
integration of citizens of Middle Eastern origin,
usually Muslims, into European democracies.
This is exciting and historically profound,
given the monotone, White Christian heritage
of Europe that generally has not advertised itself
as a nation that welcomed immigrants on a large
scale. American and European democracies are
showing their best faces these days.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of ‘The Daily
Star’ and Director of the Issam Fares Institute
for Public Policy and International Affairs at the
American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
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THE INTERNATIONAL INDIAN