The Qaranka online

25 July 08

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Senator Barack Obama told a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Berlin of his desire to see Europe and America consign their divisions to history Speaking in the heart of the German capital, a city famous for the wall that once divided it, the American presidential candidate sought to set out his credentials to become a future world leader with a message of hope and reconciliation.

"In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all too common," he said. "In America, there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe's role in our security and our future. Both views miss the truth."

In his long-awaited trans-Atlantic policy speech in Germany, the latest leg of a week-long world tour, the charismatic Democratic presidential candidate presented himself not as a White House hopeful, he said, but as a "citizen of the world", and Berlin as a city that has become a global icon.

"People of the world, look at Berlin!" he said, in front of crowds that stretched the 1,000 metre length of Berlin's Tiergarten, from the city's Victory Column to the Brandenburg Gate. But with the eyes of the world duly upon them, the citizens of Berlin gave the man they had waited hours to see a mostly polite reception.

Despite the hype surrounding the speech, it was greeted with applause, not adulation from the crowd that numbered 200,000 people according to conservative estimates. Speaking less than a mile from where President John F Kennedy enraptured Berliners in 1963, he warned of the danger of allowing "new walls to divide us from one another".

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," he said, emphasising his lines with clipped, precise movements of his hands as his words echoed through the huge crowds. "The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand," he continued, as applause began to ripple amongst his listeners. "The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand," he said. "These now are the walls we must tear down," he concluded to screams of approval.

But there were also many moments where the high-flown rhetoric of his speech prompted only a muted response from the German crowd. Through the relayed audio of the public address system, it seemed to finer points of his discourse were not always understood by his listeners. "Not everyone understood it perfectly," said Walter McGrath, an American-German watching with his 12 year-old daughter, Svenja. "I reckon they got about 60 per cent of it." Not all of the speech, however, was intended to raise his audience into a frenzy.

While lauding Germany for the leading role it has taken in combating global warming and cutting carbon emissions, Mr Obama insisted that a famously peace-loving post-war Germany would have to embrace renewed military action in the fight against terrorism. "No one welcomes war," he said, but "the Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now."

As the crowd digested this gentle admonishment, Mr Obama roused them with a message that passionately anti-nuclear Germans have long championed. "This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons," he said. "The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom."

But while he characterised himself as global citizen, and Berlin as a global city, he also warned of the universality of the threat to both to Berlin and Washington. "The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil," he said. "The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all."

It sounded like a promise of the kind foreign policy engagement from the White House that Berliners have long demanded, and it got a big cheer, as Obama scrupulously addressed the issues, from climate change to Iraq, that have dismayed Germans during the eight years of the Bush White House. With that in mind, Obama also promised to bring hand over responsibility to the "Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close" and "reject torture and stand for the rule of law". While addressing the issue of concern in Europe, the pictures of vast crowds can only have been impressive beamed back to America. But while many listeners were at the event were also impressed, some had their illusions of a near-mythical Obama shattered.

"These were platitudes gone too far," said one German listener, 40 year-old Kai Diers. "It wasn't a great speech, but maybe it wasn't directed at us, but at America." Indeed, Obama did not shirk the duty of reminding an audience keen to believe that he will serve as a magical cure-all for the world's problems, that if elected he too will make some decisions as unpopular as some of those made by Mr Bush. "There have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. "A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden." Mr Obama's Republican rival Senator John McCain was meanwhile visiting a German restaurant in the swing state of Ohio. Mr McCain said that he would love to give a speech in Germany.

"But I'd much prefer to do it as president of the United States rather than as a candidate for president," he said. "We are campaigning across the heartland of America talking about the issues."

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