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Nicholas Kristof recently extolled America as "more than a place. At its best, it is an idea." Following the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the zenith of American politics, this aphorism has never rung more true.

As a child, the American Revolution enchanted me. In the woods behind my home in New York I found relics from soldiers who had camped there. Their plight as a hopelessly outnumbered underdog fighting to attain the axiom that "all men are created equal" was an overwhelmingly romantic notion to me. It still is. Born in the same year that the government of Grenada was overthrown by my own, it soon became glaringly evident to me that if all men are created equal, they certainly aren't treated as such.

In college I received a liberal arts education. As the cliché goes, the classics hardly prepare young people for the "real world." Perhaps my laboratory, then, has been my experiences throughout Europe.

I first came to the Continent to study in the early days of 2004. There was something that intrigued me about the panoply of cultures, peoples, and languages living side by side - when only sixty years earlier they had done everything imaginable to annihilate one another. Meeting dozens of people from an assortment of European nations, who for the most part shared a common belief that war is a detriment to the advancement of humanity - the odd revolution or two aside - was something that I could relate to in both my sentiments and studies.

While I was visiting Madrid, the bombs of March 11th ripped through Atocha and resounded through the countryside. The popular sentiment, though at no point pro Iraq war, immediately shifted towards Zapatero and the PSOE's more placatory platform. Then the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the papers, and the people took to the streets in fulmination. In London, where I was living, the disgust was palpable.

Across the pond, the laboratory was producing different results. Upon returning to the US the contrast could not have been more astounding. New Jersey's native son, Bruce Springsteen, had come out with an album chiding the Iraq War and the Bush administration. I was disheartened to see the alacrity with which my college roommates, especially those from NJ, took to burning (yes, burning) all (yes, all) of his albums in spite of their Jersey pride and lifelong affinity for "The Boss." This stark disparity between American and European perceptions of the legitimate use of force is something I found astonishing.

Permit me to step back for a moment. These are obviously gross generalizations of two vast and varied continents. Of course not all Europeans abhor war and not all Americans are truculent barbarians (over three hundred and fifty thousand people gathered in New York City to protest in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq). But in democracies, at least to a greater extent than in other forms of governance, the government is representative of the will of the people – especially as seen in the rebuke of Aznar’s Partido Popular at the hands of the Spanish people on March 14, 2004.

No election in recent US history was as polarizing as 2004's. 2008 pales in comparison. Essentially a referendum on Bush/Cheney foreign policy, the resulting Republican victory at a tight two-percent margin split the nation and served as vindication for their pugnacious, neoconservative worldview. If it were Europeans that had voted in that election, the outcome would have undoubtedly been a landslide for Democrats.

I returned to Europe for much of the remaining Bush years. Not surprisingly, anti-American attitudes hadn't changed since I left. If anything, they had calcified. I took up residence in the Czech Republic, Switzerland and now Germany. Throughout, I encountered the same sentiment. There simply was no way to excuse a nation that had re-elected G.W. Bush. I more or less began to treat this as a given, a principle unto itself. I'd introduce myself as American. "But I'm from New York and I voted for the other guy," I would almost reactively proclaim. I wasn't ashamed to be American; I just didn't feel the need to be associated with the abominable hypocrisy of the Bush administration, and I was too enervated from the outcome to explain Rovian fear tactics.   

I realize this may have become a hackneyed statement by this point but on November 4, 2008 everything changed. Accompanied by over thirteen hundred people, I locked myself away in a 1920's theater in Berlin. From 10:30pm to 6:30 the following morning, my perceptions of America and its relationship with the world were forever transformed, almost in lockstep with the results that were trickling in from the US. I knew Obama was a fan favorite; after all, I was at the Democrats Abroad party.

Never could I have fathomed what I would see inside, though. As Obama's electoral vote count rose, so did the ebullience. Excitement soon gave way to pure euphoria. This was to be expected, especially from the Americans. But then I saw tears streaming down the face of grown men from Zambia, a fourteen year old girl from Berlin and her mother, Germans, Americans, Irish, white, black, old, young, everyone. The catharsis was overwhelming.
 
America the idea, that ineffable concept, was pouring from people's eyes. This confluence of historic moments had produced something I had never thought possible from my experiences of the past five years. Cheers. Cheers for America. Cheers for the American flag. Uproarious Cheers when Obama told the world, "God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America." Cheers for all things American. And above all Cheers for the idea that is America.
 
Jesse Schwartz is a graduate student at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, and an Editor at Atlantic-Community.org

Related materials from the Atlantic Community:

• From the Editorial Team: A New Day Rising after Election Night
• Nikolas Gvosdev: Improving Transatlantic Relations Requires a Frank Dialogue
• Jan Techau: America Votes, but Europe decides on the Future of Transatlantic Relations