THE US CONNECTION

Traveling abroad in recent years, I have become accustomed to polite but pointed questions about the perceived failings of US foreign policy and jokes deriding our current administration. Not so in Albanian Kosovo: in all of my travels, I have never experienced so much unflagging pro-American sentiment.

There is a long-standing relationship between the Albanian people and the American people. At the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson interceded in a plan that would have divided Albania up and given it to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy. Instead, Wilson advocated for – and got – Albania’s independence. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the United States took in a wave of Kosovar refugees looking to escape the increasingly repressive Yugoslav state, and in 1999 the Clinton administration not only led the NATO bombings meant to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians but also took in over 20,000 refugees fleeing the war. The second Bush administration continued this favorable attention by flooding the region with aid in the years since the war, acting as the driving force behind international support for Kosovo’s independence, and setting in place a very active Chamber of Commerce working on attracting American investment to the country.

The Albanian and Albanian Kosovar communities have repaid this American support at every possible opportunity. In Kosovo, there are streets named for Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark, Bob Dole, Madeleine Albright, William Walker, and Bronx Congressman Eliot Engel. American flags often fly on government buildings next to the new blue and yellow flag of Kosovo and the striking red and black flag of Albania. There is a replica of the Statue of Liberty on top of the Hotel Victoria. You can buy “I Heart America” t-shirts in Pristina. Albania was one of the first countries to offer troops for the US-led military offensives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when President George W. Bush became the first serving American president to visit Albania in June 2007, he was mobbed by adoring crowds. American visitors to Kosovo generally receive a enthusiastic triple dose of the famous Albanian hospitality: I met plenty of other Americans who noted with amazement how many people wanted to shake their hand, professed their love for America and their heart-felt gratitude for America’s support, or refused to accept payment for some service or meal because the customer was American.

This unabashed faith in America’s power to do good in the world reminded me of a man I met several years ago, when I was filming a short documentary about a group of friends from a gay country and western bar in New Orleans who had banded together to help repair their neighborhood after Katrina. Houcine was originally from Tunisia, but had lived in New Orleans for almost eighteen years, building a great career in New Orleans’ jazz world and becoming very active in his community. When I asked him how he had come to live in the United States, Houcine told me that coming to America had been a dream ever since he was a kid. He recalled that in Tunisia in the 1960s America was seen as the true force of democracy, and that the love for America was so strong that after JFK’s assassination, he and his friends and neighbors had walked for miles to gather around the closest television so that they could watch the funeral and mourn with America. Even as many of his neighbors in New Orleans became bitter or cynical about the government’s handling of the Katrina disaster, Houcine’s feelings about the United States were so strong that he found it difficult to criticize the country that symbolized so much to him as a youth and had given him the opportunity to live openly as a gay man as he never would have been able to do in Tunisia. As I listened to him speak, I was struck by the chasm between America’s standing as a global symbol of democracy then and now, and I felt sad that a generation’s worth of work to build legitimacy for U.S. democracy promotion abroad has been so carelessly thrown away.

Certainly, the United States’ foreign policy in Kosovo has not been without its detractors, and not every Kosovar that I met (especially Serbian Kosovars) believed that American policy in the region was without an ulterior motive. But as an American who has witnessed a lot of anti-Americanism abroad in recent years, particularly in Europe, it was certainly a surprise to see that the United States as a symbol and instrument of democracy still stands so strongly intact in at least one part of the world.