Be Skeptical When People Tell You What Whole Nations Think

The New York Times today features an Op-Ed about Barack Obama in Europe by Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin and author of Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.

Like a lot of Op-Eds, Neiman's piece is something of a miscellany and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, uneven. There are some good thoughts within it about the differences between American and German (or European...not the same thing but there's some slippage on Neiman's part) political culture.  But the whole thing is plagued by a tendency to see political cultures on both sides of the Atlantic as more monolithic than they are.

This is a problem, in part, because, for all of her interest in Kant, Hegel and forms of national solidarity (which I take it has much to do with her latest book), here's what most who read Neiman's Op-Ed will remember:

[I]t’s been hard for me to find a European, aside from two Harvard-educated friends in Paris, who confessed to excitement — not just about the visit, but the prospect of an Obama presidency.

I'm in the process of wrapping up a year in Germany teaching American Studies at the university level, and all I can say is that Neiman must be hanging out with a different group of Germans.  Many of my students seem very excited about the prospect of an Obama presidency (more than I am, truth be told). Of course, my students are probably demographically rather different than the Einstein Forum crowd. Almost certainly, they are younger and less intellectual.

But to my mind the most puzzling thing about the Neiman Op-Ed is not that it contradicts what a handful of Germans I've come to know think.  It's that it doesn't really account for the hundreds of thousands (including some of my students) who turned out to hear Obama speak in Berlin.  

Here's all that Neiman has to say about Obama's crowds (she says more--and more interesting things--about his speech itself):

In Germany, politicians in front of large, shouting crowds evoke images that nobody wants to see repeated.

Yes...and no.  Germany is rather famous for its Vergangenheitsbewältigung, that is its coming to terms with the Nazi past. And certainly Germans are very wary about mass meetings and potential demagogues. And yet, this is now the twenty-first century.  And younger Germans seem to me to have a somewhat different relationship to that past than their parents did.

At any rate, I need to get back to packing to return to the US. And I don't have the time, or the data, to do a close examination of generational differences in Germany or Europe.

But there's a larger, simpler point here: be very wary of anybody who, in a short Op-Ed, claims to tell you what an entire continent thinks.