Other examples are Catherine II, a German-born empress of Russia, British Conservative statesman Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, born into a family of Japanese immigrants, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant father.
And now we also have Barack Hussein Obama, born to a Kenyan father and a white American mother.
You no longer think about leaders like Napoleon or Stalin, the "tough administrators who left millions of dead bodies in their trail." Obama is definitely not like that.
Germans fear one of their next chancellors could be a Turk by birth. Russians recall that Mikhail Gorbachev proposed appointing Nursultan Nazarbayev, a Kazakh, as the Soviet Union's prime minister - which could have been a good decision, given what Nazarbayev has made of his once backward republic.
None of this has any bearing on Obama, because the United States was initially formed as a global alternative to Europe. The idea of a mono-ethnic state (Austria for Austrians, Russia for Russians) never worked, although many countries viewed it as a desirable norm. But norms were different in the U.S. from the very beginning of its history.
Obama said at the National Memorial groundbreaking ceremony that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had "pointed the way for us - a land no longer torn asunder with racial hatred and ethnic strife." Although America has made huge progress and Obama turned Martin Luther King's dream into a reality, the country is not simply a black-and-white picture. There are many more colors to it.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues, published a report, "U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050," in February 2008.
According to the report, the U.S. population will rise to 438 million in 2050 from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants. The share of African Americans is projected to remain at 13%.
In the 1990s, whites were expected to make up half of the population by 2050, because there were 85% of them in the U.S. in 1960. But the non-white population is growing faster than anticipated. Even if immigration slows, the Hispanic group will continue to grow because Hispanic families are traditionally large.
The number of whites will grow in the senior group, which means that their average age will be older than that of other racial/ethnic groups.
Every racial group in the U.S. has its problems and specifics, which the national statistics does not readily show. For example, Hispanics do not necessarily come from Spain, and the word Asians denotes immigrants from Vietnam, China and the Philippines, who are not always friendly with each other.
Whites are not a homogeneous group either, because it also includes Italians, Jews, Greeks and Eastern Europeans.
Many of the foreign born migrants come from Hindustan.
There are also many people without citizenship but with a Green Card, who also influence the balance.
Barack Obama does not symbolize a new status for America's blacks, but is rather a reminder of changes underway in the U.S.
How can the country's national ideology and foreign policy change in this situation? Obama is expected to make the crucial steps. The U.S. can no longer force its values on the rest of the world as aggressively as the previous administration did, and this can be said of the rule on how to refer to the country's black population. Obama will have to change the ideology of the white population, that strange inheritance of the 19th and the early 20th centuries.
Globalization will change the U.S. from the inside through changes in its racial composition. A more cosmopolitan U.S. population will adopt new values and customs. It is difficult to say what they will be like, but I am certain the U.S. will be a different country soon.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
