Obama's popularity: Euro-calling card

by Mark Silva

Simon Sefarty knows his way around Europe, and Washington, too.

As President Barack Obama prepares to embark for Europe next week - attending the G-20 summit and traveling from France to Turkey - Sefarty, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, poses the question:

Are European expectations for Obama reasonable?

"President Obama remains an extraordinarily popular figure in Europe,'' Sefarty writes. "In 2008, he was seen as the educator in chief, as the United States seemed to be giving the world lessons in democracy that were the envy of Europe's democracies.

"In 2009, he is still viewed as the kind of political leader the people of Europe no longer feel able to produce: personally charismatic, intellectually capable, and politically credible.

"Memories of John F. Kennedy's first visit to Europe in 1961 linger: the excitement, the adulation, and even the sense of Euro-Atlantic intimacy that seemed to prevail then.

"Admittedly'' he writes, "this might look a bit unreasonable on this side of the Atlantic, but as was the case with Kennedy, the president's wife, Michelle Obama, will likely steal the show and add further to the aura of a new president who is reintroducing the America that Europeans have always liked but which had seemed to desert them during the past eight years.''

But will this popularity translate into "convergence on issues?''

" Admittedly, personalities matter, but they do not always matter decisively,'' he writes. "Paradoxically, Europe's expectation that the U.S. president is "more like us" may argue against the need for the Europeans to move closer to U.S. policies that are themselves expected to move steadily closer to those of Europe. Still, unlike his predecessor, Obama at least provides for a spontaneous willingness to get along even if he alone cannot produce a shared willingness to go along. There is a will now, even if the way is not always self-evident.''

Does Europe's "moment of weakness'' make it ripe for concessions to Obama?

" That depends on what Europe's alleged weakness amounts to. Surely, the neo-con view of the gap between U.S. power and European weakness has been discredited. The Euro-Atlantic couple is united by both its power and its weaknesses: whatever hard, soft, or smart power is lacking on one side of the Atlantic can hopefully be completed by the capacities found on the other side.

"Admittedly, Obama cannot fail to notice troubling signs of tensions within the EU institutions--of political turbulence in most of the European countries, of bilateral rifts between several of the most significant EU members, and of economic disarray and anxiety everywhere. Exposure to Europe's issues of concern will be provided through Obama's visit to the European Parliament (a wise inclusion in his tour) and even more so during his brief stay in Prague, where he will be able to dialogue with the entire EU lineup of 27 nations that are struggling to become one....

"In the end, for Obama, as for any of his predecessors, Europe remains the United States' partner of choice: talks of an allegedly decisive G-2 between the United States and China, for example, are at best premature and at worse self-deceptive and even self-defeating. What is new and significant with Obama relative to his most immediate predecessor is that his popularity reinforces the United States' political, economic, institutional, and cultural intimacy with Europe; if nothing else, his trip will reinforce the public perception and understanding of that intimacy.''

Serfaty holds the Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geopolitics and is a senior adviser to the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. See the full article on Obama in Europe at CSIS.