Who Are We?(Europeans "a state of mind")

On the last day of this year's Ryder Cup, the biannual showdown between European and American golfers, a strange cry rose from the crowd: "Eur- ope, Eur-ope." Unfamiliar as it was, the cheer appeared to work. Europe won. And at the award ceremony, the Ryder Cup committee played eight anthems--one for each European player, followed by the European Union's official anthem, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." It was, onlookers agreed, a long ceremony.

Nobody ever said creating a common European identity would be easy. Toward the end of his life, Jean Monnet, the architect of the European Community, said that if he had to build Europe all over again, he'd start with culture, not economics. And indeed, behind the diplomatic wranglings of last week's Copenhagen Summit lay a question of Hamletesque gravity: what makes Europe European?

Radical changes in its size, shape and makeup have left the region's traditional fabric looking threadbare. Fifteen million European Muslims--not to mention more recent immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America--have exploded traditional notions of Europe as a Christian structure built on classical foundations. America's overwhelming might, made all the more palpable by the war on terror, underscores that Europe's days as a Great Power are a mere memory. And next May's accession of 10 new members--many of them post-Soviet and relatively poor--will mark the end of the Union as a wealthy West European club.

Traditionalists fret that these new forces will be the death of Europe and its culture. On the contrary, they will be the making of it. For the people surest of what Europe means today are those at its margins, be they in Ankara, Bucharest or immigrant neighborhoods of London, Paris or Berlin. More than most, they understand that the new forces reshaping Europe free it from old-fashioned markers of identity--a particular landmass, a single faith or language. They're forcing Europe to evolve into a more open, multicultural and (dare we say it) more modern society--a state of mind rather than a giant nation-state. And here's the real surprise: these changes ultimately will make the Old World look a good deal like the New. For all its protestations, Europe is recasting itself in the image of its great "Other" to the West-- America.

What a twist of fortune. For decades Brussels kulturcrats have dreamed of building a European identity, untainted by McWorld. Like a modern Medici, the European Union funds a glittering array of initiatives, ranging from traveling dance festivals to digitalizing the Louvre's artworks to translating the works of Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa into Norwegian. The EU spends more than 500 million Euro a year on its cultural policy, which aims to tease out Europe's shared heritage while championing its diversities. "There is no one European culture," argues Viviane Reding, the EU's Culture and Education commissioner. "It's a cultural mosaic."

The cracks in that mosaic, though, are very real. A proposed Museum of Europe in Brussels foundered after a dispute over when Europe began. Greece objected that exhibits would start with Charlemagne in A.D. 800, leaving out Homer, the Parthenon and Plato. Transnational projects like the Strasbourg-based television network ARTE, brainchild of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, feel synthetic and elitist. (After a decade on-air, this "television without borders" still nods to national sensibilities, resorting to news broadcasts that alternate weekly between French and German anchors.) Nor have symbols like euro notes stamped with aqueducts and Gothic arches, or the gold-and-lapis flag, done much to create Europeans. The most recent Euro-barometer poll shows that only 38 percent of EU citizens think Europe shares a cultural identity.

Faced with numbers like these, the European Union cultural establishment has realized that it can't ignore deep-rooted local cultures to manufacture a synthetic European one. Film buffs still cringe at the memory of "Europuddings," contrived coproductions of the early 1990s that featured labored transnational scripts and cast lists that read like U.N. roll calls. (Remember "The Milky Life," a Spanish- German-French production set in ...