The Obama Nobility

So Barack Obama’s love affair (or rock star story, as cousin of mine in the US put it) with the globe continues. What began with a rapturous reception in Berlin in the summer of 2008, when he was still a candidate running for the Democratic nomination has now reached the hallowed halls of Oslo and culminated in a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee has cited the President’s effort at multilateral diplomacy and reconciliatory foreign policy as reasons for the prize. They have also stated that the award is not prospective (for what the current US President may achieve) but retrospective (for his diplomatic efforts over the last year). Based purely on cold logic and his presidential and senatorial resume thus far, Obama’s claim seems quite thin. But the Nobel has a patchy track record when it comes to peace awards. Many past winners have been awarded after decades of work – Jimmy Carter in 2002 after his two decades of trying to (and partially succeeding in 1978) promote peace between Israel and its neighbors; Nelson Mandela at the very fag end of apartheid in South Africa. But equally many other winners have been greenhorns - German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1971 was awarded just after entering office like Obama, but his policy of engagement with Eastern Europe is said to have contributed, along with Mikhael Gorbhachev’s perestroika efforts (another Nobel Winner in 1990) to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the eventual end of the Cold War. Many awards have gone to those who haven’t really been the symbols of peace (a belligerent Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, for example) and many true worthies like Gandhi have been ignored.

So did Barack Obama, the individual – Harvard graduate, lawyer, community worker and first time Senator from Illinois, deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? No. But ponder this a moment – Did Barack Obama, the elected President of United States, deserve a nomination, if not the actual award for what he has stood for over the last two year since he threw his hat into the ring of the Democratic primaries? Perhaps yes. Here’s why –

Obama’s Nobel is as much his as it is of the Office he occupies and equally as much of those who voted to put him in that office. He is effectively, at the moment, a symbol of reconciliation of both the United States as a society and United States as the pre-eminent political power in the world. For a nation, that till four decades ago, was battling riots in the streets of its Southern states over whether blacks should be allowed to enter the same universities as whites, it is a reflection of America’s evolution as heterogeneous society and its final acceptance of ability over identity that Obama, an African American representing 13% of a segment of the population that till a few generations ago was officially existing as slaves, is now occupying the highest executive office in his land. Of course, you can turn around say that simply belonging to a disadvantaged community is no criterion for a Nobel prize. If tomorrow, Mayawati was to move into Race Course Road, we wouldn’t be petitioning the Nobel Committee for rewarding her in Oslo – we would perhaps all be applying for Norwegian or any other visa ourselves! 

But Obama’s significance, as I had mentioned in a post just after his victory in November last year, lies not in the fact that he won because he was black but in the fact that he won without putting himself forward as the ‘Great Black Hope’; he pitched himself as the Great American Hope and when the issue of race did present itself in the form of some embarrassing comments by his pastor in Chicago, the Democratic candidate went ahead and made a remarkably delicate but prescient speech outlining why race as an issue was a problem of not just whites but also of the blacks. On most domestic issues that tend to divide America down the middle, Obama has adopted a non-partisan approach, shying away from the arrogance that control over both houses of Congress can breed into presidents. On abortion, the president gave a brilliant address at Notre Dame University during summer outlining why despite being pro-abortion, he was willing to acknowledge that the other side has relevant arguments of consideration. On healthcare, he has been critiqued by left wing Democrats of trying too hard to get Republican backing for his legislation and thus opening the gate for irresponsible fear mongering being spread by the conservatives.

This approach has replicated itself into foreign policy where multilateralism is back into the dictionary of US foreign policy. Obama has held to his promise of reaching out to both Europe and more importantly to the Muslim world as well as to Iran. Has it borne fruits? Where are the results during the first ten months of the President’s term? On the ground, Obama’s ‘change’ has been limited. Washington remains partisan domestically in the Congress, North Korea still thumbs its nose at the US and Afghanistan is still a quagmire. So where is the peace and the world without nuclear weapons? Of course, it’s a bit unreasonable to expect Obama to solve all our problems.

The difference is in ‘perception’ and ‘recognition’ – intangibles which the George.W.Bush years in the White House have proved can swing global opinion and create nuisance for tasks undertaken, to give Bush (but not Dick Cheney) the benefit of doubt, with good intentions. Obama has attempted to change the global perception of United States both towards its allies and towards the conflicts it faces in Muslim nations. He has re-emphasized the importance of engagement over belligerence that rides rough shod over any opposition. More importantly, he has lent an ear to a world that had started to believe that America had put cotton in its ears as it undertook a cowboy march through Iraq and Afghanistan. We may not agree with Obama’s policies but we certainly can’t ignore that he himself acknowledges that he and his administration do not have all the answers and that he is willing to listen.

That approach is refreshing breath of honesty coming out of a White House that claimed to know all for the first eight years of this decade. In that sense, Obama has shifted the moral compass of the United States and its outlook towards the world from the vision of Alexander Hamilton to that of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, perhaps the most erudite man ever to occupy the White House, believed that the United States would be a beacon of leadership in the globe not because of its commercial and military strength but on the basis of the moral strength of the vision of its founding documents – the most significant of which (The Declaration of Independence) was authored by Jefferson himself. Jefferson, while being inward looking on occasions, favored engagement over belligerence and had a constructive global vision of his nation. Obama’s popularity to an extent is because of his recognition of the limits of Hamiltonian diplomacy and the requirement on part of the United States to urgently correct that perception.

As he faces three more certain, and four more potential years in the White House, Obama would do well to use the Nobel as means of momentum to a vision he has articulated. He would do well to remember the weight of expectations that he now faces as the honeymoon starts to get stale by the pressure of passing time. He would do well to treat the Nobel as a call to action. The prize is an endorsement of what he stands for but Barack Obama faces a challenge to leave a justification for posterity. For that, he would do well to read the words of another great US president – in the summer of 1864 as the American Civil War neared a battle of attrition and the Union started to gain a sustained advantage over the Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln admitted honestly in a letter that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me”, - in a justification of how he had married his personal vision of abolition of slavery with his higher responsibility of preserving American unity as the President; an accomplishment which historians often cite, came about only by the President’s sustained and deep commitment to the vision of a united America even in the deepest times of despair when the conflict seemed never ending and unity a lost cause. If Barack Obama sustains his marriage to his professed vision, he would do well to live up to a premature global honor that on this occasion has rewarded ideals and vision over factual accomplishments.

 

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