Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 33

CITY OF GLOBALISTS

of-history civilizational consensus seemed
bleak. Yet once again, the forces of Western
consolidation would make their presence felt.
Progressive American intellectual elites, who
from the Cold War onward had been largely
uncomfortable with the American employ-
ment of force, echoed European complaints
against the American response to 9/11 and
openly criticized the Bush administration for
what they considered an overly zealous and
moralistic invasion, occupation, and rebuild-
ing of Iraq and Afghanistan. At the core of
their rejection of American interventionism
under the Bush administration was the mul-
ticulturalist rejection of unilateral political
activity and the multiculturalist demand of
moral equivalence among political actors.
The European Union did not suffer a
similar internal dissension that threatened to
reverse its course toward political homoge-
neity. An occasional challenge by renegade
nationalists, cautious assimilators, or local
groups protesting transnational demands
did not threaten to change the landscape of
European politics, and no prominent Euro-
pean national leaders dared challenge the
European political model.

I

f a Western multicultural and multilateral
political consensus in favor of transatlan-
tic political homogeneity were to be formed,
it would have to emerge from strains within
American political thought challenging the
American brand of liberalism that impeded
the ideational consolidation of the United
States and Europe. European critics of
American republicanism had always pos-
sessed an ideological ally in American pro-
gressivism. They hardly could have expected
that American progressives would be able
to catapult a little-known progressive state
senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, into
the global spotlight.
Then U.S. senator and Democratic presi-

dential candidate Obama traveled to Berlin
during the general election campaign in the
summer of 2008 and delivered a speech titled
"A World That Stands as One" that energized
the transatlantic multicultural movement.
Addressing his German audience "not as a
candidate for President, but as a citizen-a
proud citizen of the United States, and a
fellow citizen of the world," Obama praised
the partnership between the United States
and Germany that helped prevent the Soviet
Union from conquering Western Europe.
From the Berlin Airlift to the Marshall Plan
and the creation of NATO, Obama empha-
sized the cooperative spirit that allowed both
countries to work against the material threats
of starvation, poverty, and political annihila-
tion. As Berliners had done their duty, so
must peoples of the world do their duty in
working together to move forward. In one
fell swoop, Obama defined those forces that
menace the peoples of the world:
The terrorists of September 11th plotted
in Hamburg, and trained in Kandahar
and Karachi, before killing thousands
from all over the globe on American soil.
Cars in Boston and factories in Beijing
are melting the ice caps in the Arctic,
shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and
bringing drought to farms from Kansas
to Kenya. And poorly secured nuclear
material in the former Soviet Union,
or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan
could help build a bomb that detonates
in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan
become the heroin in Berlin. The pov-
erty and violence in Somalia breeds [sic]
the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in
Darfur shames the conscience of us all.2

Obama set global instability-caused
by moral agents whose intolerance com-
pelled them to plot, train, kill, and commit
33
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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