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A remarkable thing just happened in one of the leading Western democracies: A man of colour was elected to a major leadership position in a society that had often discriminated against his people. I am not speaking about Barack Obama -- I am speaking about the selection of a Turkish immigrant's son as co-leader of Germany's Green Party.

Cem Ozdemir, 42, was elected Saturday, capping a career in the German and European parliaments that started in 1994. In terms of breaking colour and ethnic barriers, this equals or even tops the election of America's first black president, because the nature of European society is so much less pluralistic and culturally, racially and ethnically less egalitarian than U.S. society.

Full integration in Europe, and the political triumph of men and women of colour, will be a much more difficult achievement than it has been in the U.S. because the nature of the societies and the place of minorities in them are very different from one another.

From the start, the American system held out the promise of racial and ethnic equality and opportunity. It was only a matter of time that we would see a black American president, because that land was forged politically in a spirit of equality - regardless of the fact that equality at first was only for land- and slave-owning white males. Blacks have now assumed almost every other major position in America.

The promise of equal opportunity has unfurled steadily in the past century for American blacks, Hispanics, women, Jews and others who had been formerly discriminated against in institutional and - often legal - ways. Critical barriers were broken when black men and women rose to the top of such traditionally white-dominated arenas as golf, tennis and baseball - all important symbolic markers in a culture where sports plays a role similar to tribalism in the rest of the world. By reaching the highest summit in the land, Mr. Obama dramatically capped a virtuous trend that had been going on for some time.

In Germany and most of Europe, the landscape is not so clear, the opportunity and the promise not so explicit. White Christian societies have absorbed men and women of colour or from alien religions mainly through colonial conquest or the imperatives of importing low-wage, unskilled labour. No promise of equal rights, opportunity or citizenship-through-immigration historically beckons immigrants of colour from lands to the south and east - even if the colour is only a light olive hue.

Turks, Italians and Spaniards, for example, travel seasonally to northern Europe to be "guest workers" in homes and factories, but are rarely given citizenship. They are attracted to jobs they do not have at home and appreciate the income and decent working conditions. Many leave their children and families in their countries of origin, and usually do not expect either citizenship or equality.

But a first generation has now seen its sons and daughters born and raised in Western Europe. Cem Ozdemir was born in southern Germany and educated there, in German schools. These now-native children of Germany grasp that they, too, are eligible for the bounty of equal rights and boundless opportunity in the lands that have inherited them - the lands of their birth. These children of immigrants are not immigrants any more; they are natives and citizens. They participate in civic activities and elections, demanding their rights not as Turks or Muslims but as Germans who take their constitutional guarantees seriously.

Germany now has 2.6 million Turkish citizens or residents, accounting for 3 per cent of the population. About 660,000 have become citizens since 1972, but they have rarely risen to the top of their professions. That has changed dramatically with a Turkish-German head of a major political party that stands a chance of sharing power in a coalition with Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. Federal elections are scheduled for next September.

The Greens and Christian Democrats already govern together in Hamburg, making power-sharing at the national level more possible. And a Muslim woman of Algerian origin is a cabinet minister in France - a similar sign of the slow but steady integration of citizens of Middle Eastern origin, usually Muslims, into European democracies.

This is exciting and historically profound, given the white Christian heritage of Europe that generally has not welcomed immigrants on a large scale. American and European democracies are showing their best faces these days.

Rami Khouri editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.