Talk about a revolution

* January 6, 2009

US President elect Barack Obama gives his victory speech to supporters during election night in November.

Let’s hope Barack Obama lives up to his promise of more honest leadership.

Let’s hope Barack Obama lives up to his promise of more honest leadership.

IT SEEMS to have been forgotten, but it was one of the important events of last year — because it was that rare thing in politics, honest, and it gave a glimpse of what political leadership in the 21st century might be like. I am referring to Barack Obama’s speech of March 18.

It is not studded with quotable quotes, grabs and takes, pauses for applause. Many of the sentences are long and the intellectual structure is complex. It is honest in that it caused discomfort, even pain.

Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, had spoken in incendiary phrases about white supremacy in the United States and its link with Israel in the Middle East. In his battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democrat presidential candidacy, Obama was already on the back foot on the issues of race and support of Israel.

He disowned the pastor’s comments, but not the man. Moreover, he disowned the remarks in a sophisticated way. He placed Wright’s comments sympathetically in the historical context of slavery and racial prejudice that is a part of the American story, but remarked that they failed to take account of the dynamic for change in American society.

“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static,” he said. “As if this country … is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation.”

But the clergyman’s anger was real. “It is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races,” Obama said.

The speech should be a wake-up call to politicians and the media to think again about the way they conduct the political discourse. Some who were pleased to see Labor win government in Australia a year ago are now aware that the style of political debate here has room for improvement.

Kevin Rudd has seemed at times too ready to adopt the moral simplicity that was a feature of both John Howard’s and George Bush’s styles and which Obama showed so eloquently to be inferior.

This has been noted in respect of some domestic issues: pedophilia and pornography. It has also been shown in defence and foreign affairs.

Consider the Bali bombings. Bali has for many years been a special place for Australian pleasure-lovers, only a few of whom discover its remarkable culture. What one of the bombers said in court was true. Parts of Bali had become “dens of iniquity” and the commercial pleasures of foreigners were in danger of swamping the island’s ancient Hindu-Buddhist culture, which had withstood waves of Christianity and Islam.

No Australian politician could sympathise with the bombers. But Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club were symbols of Western power that many Indonesians who were poor, or strongly nationalistic, or religious, resented. The Obama prescription applied: the bombers were wrong and had to be punished — but their anger was real.

Had Rudd and his ministers ignored the popular appeal of eye-for-an-eye justice and acknowledged that the death penalty could be waived, it would have been a sign of both humanity and sophistication.

It might also have been practical and useful. The Bali bombers are now martyrs, their village burial sites shrines for dreams of future resistance. More immediately, the case for intervention against the death penalty on behalf of Australians in Indonesian jails for drug-smuggling would have been strengthened.

Obama’s complex mind and elegant style will be tested when he takes office. It is one thing to phrase speeches in a way that is suggestive, another to make policy that works. He is confronted with pressing and practical problems. But that speech last March is a portent because the world is in transition. The emotional appeal of one’s country, or one’s religion or race — right or wrong — is being tested by something even more basic.

For the first time in history, the world is truly global, but this does not mean that the responsibility for action lies outside national governments. Global bodies, such as the United Nations and its agencies, and Bretton Woods organisations, such as the World Bank, are influential players but do not have the authority to act. Two hundred or so nation states, with varying degrees of competence and viability, are still the world’s primary political units.

But today’s crises — the credit crunch and climate change — are forcing them to act in co-operation. In each case, international co-operation is a two-way process. Part of it is finding a solution that is consistent globally, part of it is self-protection, ensuring that you are not disadvantaged by what others are doing. This calls for a new kind of political leadership. If we look back, the rewards for political leaders who have tried to understand and work co-operatively with other nations, races and religions have been minimal. The charges of appeasement, sophistry and treason are part of the history of the nation-state, underpinned by powerful notions of sovereignty and independence.

The management of the current crises will determine whether we are still part of that history, full of wars and revolutions, where a crisis meant that some states won and some lost.

To use Obama’s terminology, are we still bound to a tragic past? Or are we able to create, with different political leadership, a different kind of history?

Bruce Grant is a former diplomat who has written on Australian foreign policy and international affairs.