Obama and Ozdemir: Breaking Barriers

BEIRUT -- 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 Özdemir, 42, was elected Saturday 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 low-wage, unskilled labor. No promise of equal rights, opportunity or citizenship-through-immigration 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 Özdemir 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 3 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.