For Europe, Obama revives positive image of America's unique identity

"The decline of representative democracy is not irreversible," adds Zaki Laidi, a French intellectual writing in Le Monde.

Many French say that American exceptionalism must now be considered through other lenses. The neoconservative impulse in Washington in recent years, described by retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich in his new book, "Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," is associated with an evangelical passion to spread democracy, to "remake" the world, by force if necessary. But after Nov. 4, the New World example is taking on the meaning of President Lincoln's "last, best hope of earth," or Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of a country that evokes universal values by example at home.

For political philosopher Pierre Hassner at Sciences Po in Paris, the election shows that the US "is exceptional no matter what it does. For now, the US is more powerful, rich, and well-meaning than others, so can it be an ordinary power? If America were a great power like any other, people in Europe would be very sorry. They want it to be exceptional. I am a Jew who lived under Nazis and communists in Romania. So I say, 'Thank God for America.' But in the last years, it has been difficult to reconcile this."

Paris intellectual André Glucksman slightly mocked European enthusiasm for the Democrat. While Americans gave Obama a "decent" 53 percent majority, the axis of Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Rome, and London "cultivated an absolute North-Korea style, quasi-religious 'Obamamania,' with 84 percent," he notes.

The exceptionalist concept dates to Puritan John Winthrop's "city on a hill," a New Testament idea famously picked up by Ronald Reagan that envisions a land of justice and freedom from coercive power. It signified a radical break with old Europe. Crevecoeur wondered whether the New World would produce a new kind of human being. De Tocqueville found 150 years later that "the mother has more authority" than in the European family, an inkling of later change.

The many uses of exceptionalism

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