“Elected by a landslide and carrying the hopes of America, Barack Obama will soon begin to reveal his priorities on international relations for the United States. What place will Latin America have in these priorities? One shouldn’t expect our region to be on the list of his immediate priorities, but for a number of reasons, I think there’ll be significant progress in comparison to the lamentable legacy of George W. Bush, who frustrated the great expectations that he had created in our region at the beginning of his mandate.”
Is the first world - or what today is referred to as the developed world - really prepared to share decision-making power with the second and third worlds? If Sunday’s summit meeting in Washington did nothing else substantial, at least it seems to have convinced some people in the world’s up and coming nations that the answer to that question is yes.
“The current financial crisis appears to be the departure point for a more multilateral world, something that had nearly been forgotten. To put it simply: the rich world has given the signal that it will benefit if it begins to listen to the emerging world.”
“Brazil has a rather important role. The country should use energy and environmental issues to raise its voice in global decision-making - the first issue of which should be forceful action to freeze the Amazon [rainforest] at its current size. And the entire world should contribute to the cost of maintaining the largest tropical forest reserve on the planet. ”
(It has been a rough-and-tumble political season. Nerves are raw. Perhaps it’s time to dream a little bit.)
It doesn’t happen that often any more, but there are still times when my English-born wife gently—sometimes not so gently—awakens me in the middle of the night to tell me that I have been talking in my sleep again…in Spanish.
Invariably, she will ask me in the morning what I was talking about. Invariably, my answer is that I don’t remember, which most of the time is the truth. Needless to say, at my age of 68 she need not worry—not even about my dreams.
Dreaming in Spanish is sadly one of the last remaining vestiges that Spanish was once my native language, my mother tongue. Just as sad, the last time I was truly fluent in any language was 58 years ago, when I was 10 years. That is not to say that I am not proficient in English or in other languages. It is just that I am shamefully rusty at my native language; that I am no longer fluent in my first acquired language, Dutch; and that if you listen closely and read carefully, you will detect a slight accent in my spoken English or may notice some unusual constructs in my writings.
Some will say that this is a small price to pay for speaking several languages. Perhaps. But, when it comes to languages I feel like an orphan. Let me explain.
When I was 10, living in my native Ecuador, I spoke Spanish with the fluency that any 10-year-old has in his or her mother tongue. Spanish was the only language I spoke, with the exception of a couple of English and Dutch words I picked up from my Dutch father. These were words and phrases the meaning of which I did not necessarily know, such as “Such is life,” which my father pondered when he got into a philosophical mood, or “verdomme!” (damn!) on other less philosophical occasions. It was at that young age that we moved to Curaçao, in the Netherlands Antilles. Living in a Dutch “company town” and attending a Dutch school, my sister and I became fluent in Dutch in less than a year.
After four years of “total immersion” in Dutch, and after picking up some “choice” words in the local Papiamento (a delightful language derived mainly from Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and West African languages), our family moved to the Netherlands, where I finished high school.
By then, my acquired Dutch was already better than my native Spanish. Since Dutch is hardly a universal language, Dutch high school students receive two to four years of solid education in English, German, French and/or Spanish. Having two languages under my belt and with four years of studying other languages, the reader will ask, what is the problem? Well, I am not finished yet.
One of the more rewarding things about showing Americans what the rest of the world thinks about our nation, is to introduce people to newspapers that they would never ordinarily be able to read. For example, how many Americans have ever read a newspaper from the civil-war stricken Portuguese-speaking country of Angola?
This article by Altino Matos of the Jornal de Angola has an interesting take on the election of Barack Obama. While it suggests that the ‘American Media Machine’ chose Obama to alter our global image - it doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with that.
“The American communication system, one of the largest in existence, was quick to realize that it had to do something substantial and consistent to save the United States, considering the erosion of its image, which began primarily with wars in Afghanistan Iraq and the Middle East.
“The strategy for recovery had to come from the Democrats, but it couldn’t be based solely on words. It was essential to find a face that could incorporate these words and breathe life into a comprehensive program. In this way, the technocrats found in Barack Obama a man of the multitudes.”
‘We are All Americans.’ Most of us recall that phrase used by the French the day after September 11, 2001. After all of the events of the past eight years and the deterioration of America’s image, few would have predicted hearing it again. But we are.
Since the election of President-elect Obama, I have personally seen the phrase in at least three articles we have posted from around the world.
This article from Brazil’s Folha is not only an article of adulation for Barack Obama, but a staunch defense of the United States and a rejection of its critics.
“Never before in the history of this planet has a mixed-race person of African descendent been its most powerful inhabitant. Even though the polls have already indicated Barack Obama’s victory, it is so epic and multidimensional that it fills us with amazement and exhilaration.”
“So much the better that it’s the United States shining this renewing ray of light on the depressed global arena. Among the truly terrible things bequeathed by eight years of Bushism, perhaps the worst is the sharp and stupid anti-Americanism.
“As irrational as it is widespread, this nurtures, and for some it justifies, obscurantist and dangerous forces like Russian neo-Czarism, Chinese absolutism, Chavista petro-populism, Iranian nuclear messianism and Islamo-fascist terrorism.
“Absurd concepts such as that the U.S. is a nation of brute, ignorant and hickish people are spit forth by the supposed worldwide intelligentsia, despite the fact that the country has the best universities on the planet, is the biggest producer and consumer of culture, is the most innovative and creative nation of technologies, has the highest number of Nobel prize winners, invented the Internet and YouTube, and is by far world’s largest economy.”
For many people in the less-developed world, America, through the agency of Barack Obama - has lived up to its promise. Furthermore, the very poorest of the world’s people are today saying to themselves, ‘perhaps I can go further and farther than I thought.’
“The fact is that for millions of his U.S. supporters, Obama’s race was less important than other factors. This is more surprising to the rest of the world than it is to the people of the United States. It was always more difficult to predict an Obama victory for a British person who knows how far his country remains from electing the son of a Pakistani as Prime Minister, or for a Spaniard who knows what a long way to go there is before the descendent of a Moroccan moves into Moncloa [the Presidential Palace], or for a Japanese who knows how impossible it would be for the son of a Korean to be put in charge of the government. From this perspective, for a Black man to become President of the United States was simply unimaginable. This tells us more about the racism that exists in the rest of the world than that which still persists in the United States.”
“Naturally, the most transcendent change of all is Barack Obama. And this change will not only impact the United States. From now on, poor young people the world over - even those abandoned by their fathers - are aware that it’s not an impossible dream to climb the highest peak. Si se puede. Yes we can.”
It’s going to be a long and interesting night. WORLDMEETS.US will be covering the global reaction to the U.S. election every step of the way. We are keeping a particularly keen eye on Kenya and Indonesia.
Here are some initial headlines:
At the moment, the nation of Venezuela, governed [or ruled] by Bush’s arch-enemy Hugo Chavez, is one of America’s top suppliers of crude oil. So what do Venezuelans think an Obama presidency would be like?
“Obama will look for a way to liberate his economy from the tyranny of oil, even at the cost of his own automotive and energy industries. He will entrust supply only to time-tested friends like Canada and Mexico, which will be detrimental to only one Latin American country [Venezuela]. As for foreign trade: It was Clinton [a Democrat] who won final approval of NAFTA, so Columbia still has many possibilities. [Colombia is waiting for Washington to approve a similar agreement with them].”
