USA presidential hopeful Barack Obama has managed to gather crowds in Europe, attract all the media attention and make me wonder what the great expectations are or if the Europeans will once more be disappointed, especially since the memory of Jimmy Carter is not so far in the past for most Europeans.

200,000 Berliners gathered expecting another American to say ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ but what they got is ‘I’m American’ and that’s what Europeans have to remember. If Barack Obama becomes the next president of the USA he has to be more American than any other president over the last decades. It's just how we understand this Americanism.

Nixon’s agenda was very American, so was Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s but American was the agenda of Roosevelt and Kennedy as well. And I have often written in the past that the last decade led by George W. Bush has hurt Americanism more than any other American president. His policies and actions have lost allies and most importantly lost the trust of us all.

USA and Europe, to use a cliché, have long been traditional allies but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t been competitors as well on many levels. They both have been leading a long race regarding commerce and financial control over the rest of the world; a race that sometimes brought tension with surprising results. It is natural that during those tensions both sides used everything they had including their influence to smaller countries and areas.

Don’t think that Americans are happy with the total control the Europeans have over telephone mobile technology and when you think of this technology remember that the biggest market for both countries for the last decades has been China and they both tried hard to get access to this billion figure market - Europeans are the ones who found the key first with mobile phones and through that they are pushing all kinds of products leaving the Americans far behind. The Americans, on their side, control weapons, another element to open markets and they are both victims of the Arabs through the oil market.

The European states are again often sharing in their relationship with the USA, the UK, especially during Tony Blair’s era, nearly became the 51st star of the US flag and the British left soccer to learn baseball. The French and Germans have shown more dignity by vetoing occasionally some of the American decisions and causing a lot of controversy on the American side with their reaction to the Iraq war and invasion.

The European Union remained numb most of the time led by two men you could easily call pawns of the American policy. Solana and Barroso, often with their decisions, remind me of employees of the American administration rather than leaders of the European Union, after all that’s why Solana left his comfortable seat in NATO to obey his master’s voice, to be the American hand inside European politics. Barroso, the failed Portuguese politician who turned president of the EU, has one and only one dream, to be American.

What remains? The European public, this very same public that gathered in Berlin to see the presidential hopeful for the US elections. This crowd doesn’t really mean much for the US hopeful, and I’m not talking only about Berlin but the general reaction Obama’s visit brought in Europe. This crowd means a lot for the European politics and politicians because what the man mainly brought was the air of change and hope that he will work like a domino effect and bring the change to the European politics also.

Perhaps that’s the message the crowds are trying to pass and perhaps this means the beginning of the end of all the politics as we know them.