Obama is "ein Berliner"

The U.S. election is inviting itself to Europe, showing that there are several ways of imagining the transatlantic relations. By questioning Barack Obama’s intention to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of German reunification, some leaders of the most conservative wing of the Christian Democratic Party seem to want to create an embarrassment for the Democrats and boost John McCain’s chances.

Erwin Huber, the leader of the CSU (the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU), has led the charge against the idea of Mr Obama speaking at the Gate. The CSU has traditionally been more to the right than the CDU. In the 80s it was very close to Ronald Reagan’s worldviews and a friend of many unsavoury right wing forces around the world. Its leader at the time, Franz J. Strauss was a friend of General Pinochet and of M. Buthelezi, the leader of the very controversial “tribalist” Inkhata movement in apartheid-era South Africa.
Besides the CDU is a founding member together with the Republican party of the Democratic Union, the international group of conservative parties.

The Social democrats, who are part of the ruling coalition, have welcome the idea of the Democratic campaign team. The mayor of Berlin has agreed.

The Gate might be an ideal backdrop for a speech about freedom…And it is not the monopoly of the conservatives who seem to think that the demise of Communism was their exclusive achievement. As if they did not remember the leading part of US liberals and European progressives in fighting the “Reds” at the outset of the Cold War. Just think of Arthur Schlesinger’s essay on the “vital center”.

The problem might be, from the CSU’s perspective, that Obama might develop a view of freedom that, we suppose, would have slammed the German social christians’ with regimes that late neo-conservative ideologue Jeane Kirkpatrick would have characterized as “acceptable dictators”.