By Clare Premo

Like many American citizens, the French are eager to put Barack Obama’s victory into quasi-Messianic terms. Jean Daniel, director and co-founder of Le Nouvel Observateur, writes that the win is a “great deliverance” indicating that the world is about to change. In his article “What the World Expects from Obama”, Daniel writes with an assumption that the incoming administration will change the world, but does not specify how Obama’s new policies will affect other nations. To start, he cites the monumental domestic shift that has occurred. He points to the fact that the United States has rejected Bush and the WASP model by electing a black Democrat as proof of America’s acceptance of her multicultural and multiracial composition. He goes on to emphasize America’s potential for change under the new president, citing Obama’s future negotiations with world leaders and his sense of organization and calculation. Yet the mental leap connecting this revolutionary election to a new world order is not clear. It seems that Daniel, like many Europeans, may not really know what he is in for. Such a tremendous outpouring of hope and support is nice, but ‘change’ means many things to people all over the world, and it’s impossible for Obama to be everything to everyone.

Ezra Suleiman, director of the Center for European Studies at Princeton University, agrees. His commentary published in Le Nouvel Observateur, entitled “Hope, then Disappointment?” explains that Europeans may be misleading themselves. They are apt to imagine that Obama is cut from the same leftist cloth and that he intends to completely break with Bush policies. Europeans may be shocked if that’s not what happens. Furthermore, Obama’s main interest is to make sure that America stays a superpower. In other words, necessity, rather than ideology, will direct politics.

The concept of “change” might not take into account the fact that America has domestic interests to look after, but it seems fair to say that Obama will oversee a return to diplomacy. While France should not hold its breath and expect Obama to be a savior, it can hope for a return to multilateralism. Le Nouvel Observateur asked eight specialists for their predictions of what Obama’s presidency would bring, and the response titles are telling: “Reestablishment of the international prestige of the United States”, “Rejection of Unilateralism”, and “A vision of the world, a strategy to change it”. All suggest that France’s definition of change is really a code word for a new multilateralism. While Obama cannot be everything to everyone, he is certainly not lacking in nations wishing him well. One can only hope that with Obama’s enthusiasm and the world’s receptiveness, the world will witness a new form of diplomacy that will please Americans and foreigners alike.