Obama's Africa Policy: The Limits of Symbolic Power

Abstract:The election of Barack Obama as the first African-descended president of the United States in 2008 was greeted with euphoria in the U.S. and around the world, including Africa. Little, however, changed in the substance of U.S.-Africa relations. This underscores the limits of the symbolic politics of race and presidential personalities in the face of the structural imperatives of U.S. power and foreign policy in which African interests remain marginal and subordinate to U.S. interests. The article explores the structural contexts of foreign policy-making in the United States and what might be expected from the second Obama administration.Resume: L'election en 2008 de Barack Obama comme premier president americain de descendance africaine a ete accueillie avec euphorie aux Etats-Unis et dans le monde entier, y compris en Afrique. Presque rien cependant n'a change dans les relations USA Afrique. Cette situation souligne les limites de la politique symbolique contre le racisme et du pouvoir des personnalites presidentielles face aux imperatifs structurels du pouvoir americain de sa politique etrangere dans le contexte de laquelle les interets africains restent marginaux et secondaires aux interets americains. Cet article explore les contextes structurels du faconnement de la politique etrangere aux Etats-Unis et ce a quoi on pourrait s'attendre lors du second mandat du president Obama.Key Words: 2012 presidential electionThe election of Barack Obama as the first African-descended president of the United States in 2008 was greeted with euphoria in the United States and around the world, including Africa and the diaspora. The imagery of an African American ascending to such political heights in the world's lone superpower, a country with a sordid history of slavery and segregation, was truly electrifying. Many saw it as a redemptive moment in the long march to freedom for African Americans and other marginalized populations, a historic achievement in their protracted struggles for full equality, civil rights, and citizenship. The improbability of the moment led others to pronounce the dawn of a postracial future, quite prematurely as it turned out.Four years later, the ecstasy that had greeted President Obama's 2008 election had dissipated as the ravages of the Great Recession took a disproportionate toll on the working and middle classes and racial and ethnic minorities and as the U.S. continued to fight costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama's eloquent rhetoric frayed from the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of imperial power. Africa and the pan-African world felt neglected, even betrayed. Nonetheless, the reelection of President Obama in 2012 was welcomed, if only because for much of the world and significant segments of the U.S. population-the coalition of beleaguered minorities, white women, and the battered fractions of the middle class-the alternative was too frightful to contemplate.If President Obama's election in 2008 was memorable for its extraordinariness, his reelection in 2012 was remarkable for its ordinariness. The great expectations of 2008 gave way to the diminished anticipations of 2012, which represented both the successes and failures of the Obama presidency: success insofar as reelection demonstrated that the election four years earlier of the first African American president was not a historical fluke; failure in that the first Obama administration had not realized many of its vaunted goals or the aspirations invested in it by the electorate and a world desperate for profound change from the harrowing Bush years.President Obama's reelection reflected the continuing realignment of American politics, in which the Republicanization of America that began at the turn of the 1970s-as conservative forces mobilized to undo the progressive agendas of the civil rights, women's, students', and gay rights movements-suffered significant reversal. Thus 2012 maybe remembered as the year the Republican Party's southern strategy finally crumbled. …