Tolerance across the Atlantic: how Europe and the US can learn from each other

Last week, Barack Obama made a triumphant tour through Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown each did their best to give a warm welcome to the Democratic presidential candidate. In addition, 200,000 people showed up in Berlin to hear Obama speak.

Towards the end of the week, Julie Sell and Margaret Talev at the McClatchy newspaper asked the following intriguing question: "Would Europe elect a black leader?" One reason I am excited about Obama's candidacy is that it belies European cynicism towards the American dream. As the democratic primaries have shown, the American answer to the question whether the country would possibly elect a black leader is, at a minimum, no longer an automatic no.

Sell and Talev imply that the same is not true for Europe. Although the article contains a few basic mistakes (for example referring to French Minister of Justice Rachida Dati as a "junior minister"), its overall premise that cultural hurdles make the prospects for non-white potential candidates very difficult are sound. As Sell and Talev explain:

European political systems also function differently than the American-style primaries. In Europe, tight circles of party insiders, who often attend the same elite schools, choose the national candidates. Critics say that makes it harder for outsiders, and minorities, to break in.

I am one of those critics. The current system not only prevents outsiders from breaking in, it stifles many new ideas as well, and there's ample reason for changing the current European model of electing leaders.

But the McClatchy question has an obvious corollary: "Would the U.S. elect a gay leader?" Unlike the U.S., attitudes in Europe towards the LGBT community have undergone a rapid evolution. A July 2008 "Special Barometer" of the European Commission found, for example, that "most Europeans would feel comfortable with having a leader who is homosexual in their country" (p. 59). Indeed, on a "comfort scale" from 1 to 10, with 10 indicating complete comfort, 36% of all Europeans would feel totally comfortable with this situation (giving a rating of 10 out of 10) while the EU average is 7.0 out of 10. This includes people from very religious countries in Eastern Europe like Bulgaria, Cyprus and Romania (whose populations' comfort rating is each less than 4). Conversely, the comfort level is very high in Western European countries like Sweden (9.1 out of 10), Denmark (9.0) and the Netherlands (8.8).

Sadly, asking the question "Would the U.S. elect a gay leader?" is to provide the answer: no it would not in the foreseeable future. Indeed, mainstream Democratic presidential candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have stated that they do not even support the basic right of members of the LGBT community to get married (instead, emphasizing their support for supposedly separate but equal measures like civil unions).

Obama's candidacy is built on hope and change. Applied across the Atlantic, one can always hope that as much as an Obama candidacy changes attitudes in Europe, an LGBT candidate for office in Europe might change things here. The current mayors of Paris and Berlin, Bertrand Delanoe and Klaus Wowereit, could very well be those candidates.