Columbia, Missouri

In the wake of Super Tuesday round two in the long, drawn-out campaign to pick the Democrats’ presidential candidate, every network TV station is chewing over the chances of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama becoming the first female or the first black commander-in-chief in US history. And every newspaper is full of flash analysis of the results of the primaries and caucuses in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The race is also headline news in Europe, trumping elections in Spain, France and Russia. It’s easy to see why. The fight pits a telegenic, idealistic, fresh-faced black senator against a cynical, hard-nosed former first lady with a sharpness matched only be her shamelessness. The number of delegates each contender has bagged is also evenly matched, raising the prospect of a nail-biting finish in the summer.

With months to go until the Democrats formally choose their candidate in Denver, it is ironic that Europeans know far more about Obama and Clinton – or simply ‘Hillary’ as she styles herself - than they do about political leaders on their own continent.

I recently asked a group of about 60 Belgian journalist students, who were overwhelmingly in favour of Obama, if they knew who the president of the European Commission was. Not a single student ventured forth former Portuguese premier Jose Manuel Barroso – who has been in the job for almost four years. The result would almost certainly been the same if asked to name the head of the European Parliament or the leader of any EU country except France, Germany or Britain.

It is the same story Stateside. In Columbia I asked a group of globe-trotting journalist professors from Missouri University whether anyone had heard of Barroso. Not a hand was raised – although one lecturer did say he held the presidency of the EU, which is not too far wide of the mark.

A few caveats: EUpeans come from 27 different countries and speak 23 different languages. The EU is poor at communicating, confusing information with propaganda and believing people are interested in process rather than results. There is no European media to speak of. The US president is also far more powerful than the European Commission boss. And with their bunting, rosettes, ticker-tape parades and rock-concert rallies, Americans are better at the choreography of power than Europeans.

But this doesn’t explain or excuse the level of ignorance about the politicians and bureaucrats whose decisions affect the lives of almost half a billion people.

It would help if the president of the European Commission was directly elected by European voters – rather than appointed by EU leaders. But apart from celebrities like Bono or a handful of ex-leaders like Tony Blair and Vaclav Havel, there are few potential leaders with Europe-wide name recognition.

An EU president, one of the innovations of the Lisbon ‘reform treaty’ would help give a human face to Europe, but he or she will be unelected and have few executive powers.

The real reason why Europeans know Obama and Clinton but not their own leaders is that the European Union has created EU institutions, policies and politicians without the existence of an EU electorate or demos. Politics is local, regional, national but rarely European. Hence the disconnect between the shiny EU institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg and the vast majority of Europeans who view the world through a national prism.

There are signs this is slowly changing. Thanks no no-frills airlines like Ryanair and Easyjet, Europeans are criss-crossing the continent like never before. Brits watch French and Spanish football players and afterwards head to the pub to drink Belgian and German lagers. Irish employ Lithuanian builders who employ Ukrainian workers to build their dream houses back home. Germans stand in local elections in Majorca, a quarter of a million young French flock to London for jobs in the ‘city’ and a Nobel-prize winning Turkish author becomes a best-selling author across the continent.

So there are signs that Europe – and Europeans – are coming together. But a United States of Europe is a long way off and the day when Italians, Slovenes and Latvians are as fascinated by European elections as American ones is a distant day.