COMMON CURRENCY BUILDS ON COMMON CULTURE

KOIVU, Finland -- A search for the soul of Europe began on Juhani Persola's
snow-covered farm here on the Arctic Circle, where the only hint of
daylight this time of year is a smudge of pink that moves across the
southern sky around midday. The trek ended 2,400 miles away in Jose Luis
Silva's taxicab on the palmy southern tip of Portugal, where the sun is so
dazzling that the tourism office hands out skin-cancer warnings even in the
depths of December.

Yet despite the vast differences of light and latitude, a sense of identity
emerged that spanned the continent. "I am Finn, in Lapland, but now feeling
European," Persola said, the words coming out in a cloud of vapor that
circled the furry earflaps of her Russian hat.

"I am a European who lives in Portugal," Silva echoed, looking out from
behind his Italian designer shades. "There is a mentality now that rivalry
is disappearing, and we are all part of the same Europe."

Today, that sense of attachment to a single home called Europe takes a
great leap forward as more than 300 million people in 12 countries adopt
the continent's new common currency, the euro.

Replacing a dozen familiar currencies with a single money is a bold
economic step for the leaders of the increasingly integrated European
Union. But money, as a symbol of sovereignty and national identity, has
meaning far beyond finance. A common currency presumes a common culture --
or at least an aspiration in that direction. Can Europe, with its potpourri
of languages, customs, cuisines and ethnic animosities, qualify as a
cultural union?

Some possible answers to that question came in a reporter's trip through
the eurozone, a journey taken to discover whether the crisp new euro notes
amount to more than just paper in the pocket.

In today's largely borderless western Europe, the travel was easy. You
cross frontiers and never see a border guard. That's a result of the 1995
Schengen Agreement, which eliminates most intracontinental immigration
controls and lets a citizen of any member country travel, live and study in
most of Western Europe without a passport or a visa.

Everywhere on the trip, instant contact with every corner of Europe -- and
most of the world -- was available through the GSM (Global Standard for
Mobiles) cellular network, the European invention that helped phone-makers
here pass Motorola Inc. of the United States in the booming global market
for cell phones. And Europe's multibillion-euro infrastructure of new
bridges, tunnels, trains and highways made the continent more connected
today than ever.

Europeans in the past decade have fulfilled the dreams of centuries by
linking their mainland with Britain -- through the Channel Tunnel, or
"Chunnel" -- and the Scandinavian peninsula -- through the Oresund Fixed Link.

"Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, we would not have spent billions on
this bridge," the mayor of Copenhagen, Jens Kramer Mikkelsen, said,
pointing proudly toward the Fixed Link, a $3-billion, 10-mile-long
structure -- with a bridge, tunnel and man-made island -- that opened 18
months ago between Denmark and Sweden.

"But now we are no longer just Danes and Swedes. We are Europeans. We
needed to have that mental bridge before we could build the concrete one."

With all the new bridges, concrete and otherwise, it's not surprising that
Europe would develop cultural norms transcending borders and traditions.

Consider those famous European cuisines, for example. Yes, the Finns still
love a good reindeer steak, the French have a thousand different cheeses,
and the Greeks like to put olive oil on everything. But there is a common
European diet emerging.

From the top of Norway to the toe of the Italian boot, you find a standard
breakfast: a cup of severely strong coffee and the kind of sweet roll that
Americans, for some reason, call "Danish pastry." No Europeans -- not even
the Danes -- use that term, except for TV comedians making fun of
Americans. In Europe, that breakfast pastry is generally called Vienna bread.

The favorite quick lunch almost everywhere is a crunchy baguette sliced
lengthwise and turned into a sandwich about the length of a forearm. The
continent's standard snack is "frites," the food that Americans call French
fries. "I don't know where you get that 'French fry,' "complained Jacques,
the chief potato fryer at a sidewalk friterie in Charleroi, Belgium.
"Everybody knows that frites are all over Europe."

Frites are properly eaten with mayonnaise, particularly in the northern
half of the continent. But nowadays -- such is the power of U.S. culture --
ketchup is also common.

Despite Europe's world-renowned vineyards, the real national drink of
Europe is beer. Europeans consume vast quantities of black beer, white
beer, red beer, gold beer, cherry-, lemon-, and strawberry-flavored beer,
beer for breakfast, beer at bedtime, beer even at McDonald's. A beer with
your Big Mac costs about .90 euros, roughly 80 cents.

The Europeans cherish their many languages. Indeed, the European Convention
on Human Rights says that all people have a fundamental right to learn and
use the traditional language of their region, no matter how few speakers
might be left. The European Union has a regulation guaranteeing that
representatives of any member nation can use their national language in any
EU forum -- which means the translators at committee sessions sometimes
outnumber the speakers.

And yet, a common European language is clearly emerging: English.

Every European country requires students to take years of English in
school; other languages may be offered, but English is mandatory. As the
standard second language, English tends to be the chosen tongue when, say,
Greeks, Swedes and Spaniards get together.

At the European Central Bank, in Frankfurt, Germany, the official language
for all business is English. At the European Parliament, with elected
members from all 15 member countries, "I'd say about 80 percent of all
conversations are in English now," says Tom Lynn, a Briton on the
parliamentary staff.

Companies operating across borders in Europe routinely require staff to
converse in English. On MTV Europe, about 80 percent of the announcers use
English; the songs are primarily in English. English is the language of
European baseball caps, backpacks, T-shirts and tattoos.

Europe's common language has become so common it appears in unexpected
places. The current advertising slogan of the postal service in Belgium --
a nation largely of French, Flemish and German speakers -- is the English
phrase "Belgian stamps are cool." On the steep mountain pass that links
German-speaking Austria with Slavic-speaking Slovenia, a billboard
declares, in huge letters, "Hit my airbase!" This turns out to be a popular
sales campaign for an Austrian cigarette brand called Memphis Blue Lights.

"The thing about English is, you can use it anywhere in Europe," said Maria
Ortega, a ski instructor in the Pyrenees, where French and Spanish are used
interchangeably. "If I meet someone, I try Spanish. Then I try French. And
if it's not working, I say 'Hello.' That's the signal, and we communicate
no matter what country we come from."

English is particularly standard among the young, and the 20-somethings
chattering in the common language at clubs and raves also share a common
intoxicant: marijuana.

In most of Western Europe, governments have either legalized the drug or
simply stopped enforcing laws against it. On the sidewalks of London's
lively Brixton neighborhood, people will light up a spliff -- a word the
British use for "joint" -- in front of the police station. Why not? The
local police chief has announced publicly that it is not worth his time to
arrest them.

From the ski slopes of the French Alps to the beaches of southern Portugal
to the coffee shops of Amsterdam -- where menus list types of marijuana as
well as flavors of coffee -- the drug is the common element of

European youth culture.

Another tie that binds all Europe is a common sport. The Norwegians idolize
skier Bjorn Daehle; the French love bike racer Laurent Jalabert; the Dutch
are wild about speed skater Rintje Ritsma. Those are localized passions.

But fans from all three countries, and every other European location, are
particularly obsessed with soccer and with international stars such as
David Beckham, of England's Manchester United team, who probably ranks as
the Michael Jordan of Europe.

To many Americans, soccer in Europe suggests drunken hooligans battling in
the stands. That happens. But mostly, European soccer is a pastime that
draws tens of millions of peaceful fans every weekend and reaches

across all national borders. On any given Sunday or Monday, virtually every
European newspaper will have page after page of soccer results, reporting
on games from every country on the continent.

In a tiny farm village in Alsace, on the border where France and Germany
meet, a cable TV salesman, Jacques Laurent, gleefully compared European
football,as soccer is called across the continent, to America's pastime.

Laurent gave no quarter. "Baseball is a good game," he said, "but where do
you get the right to say it is the 'World Series'? You have just two
countries playing.

"In Europe, every nation plays football, every nation plays every other
nation, and every fan knows the teams and players from anywhere in Europe.
Football brings millions and millions together in a shared experience. I
myself have traveled to, let's see, nine countries at least, to see games.
Football is Europe, don't you see? If I meet somebody from Manchester
[England], I just say, 'David Beckham,' and we immediately have something
we share."

On the whole, Europeans also share a political vision. It is a familiar one
to Americans in many ways, with a firm commitment to democracy, free debate
and individual liberties.

But politics in Europe is considerably more to the left than the American
consensus, particularly on the role of government in daily life. Nearly all
western European nations today are run by center-left governments that use
high tax rates to provide high levels of public service. Even the
"conservative" governments in Italy and Spain are well to the left of the
U.S. standard on many social issues.

"One of the striking things for any European," says Jonathan Freedland, a
columnist with Britain's Guardian newspaper, "is the way Americans use the
term 'welfare state' as a pejorative. In Europe, we are proud of our
welfare states. People want government to provide health care for
everybody, college education, cheap transit, employment guarantees, all
those things. If it means higher taxes than any American would want to pay,
that's part of the bargain. This is the European way of seeing things."

What's not clear is whether these disparate elements of a pan-European
culture can ever lead to a Europe that is as united as another wealthy
transcontinental power, the United States. Europeans may talk, eat, travel,
cheer and vote in increasingly common ways, but the continent is still a
collection of sovereign nations.

European leaders speak expansively of making the European Union a new
"superpower" -- a global force equal to the U.S. politically and
economically. Two weeks ago, at the "Eurosummit," the prime ministers and
presidents of the 15 member nations launched a constitutional convention to
write a new charter for pan-European cooperation in numerous areas.

The convention is to consider such ideas as EU-wide tax systems and a
popularly elected "president of Europe." Even so, Europe is still far
removed from the kind of political unity that binds Americans.

"Europe has been engaged in nothing less than an attempt to invent a new
kind of political unit," noted Jessica T. Mathews, president of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in ashington. "Europe's
integration . . . is a gigantic exercise in pooling, even perhaps
redefining, national sovereignty."

If that is the goal, many Europeans seem ready to support it.

On that sunny beach in Portugal, Silva was shown a photo of Persola,
bundled up in the strange noontime twilight of northern Finland. He was
asked: do you two Europeans really have much in common?

"Well, I'll tell you this much," Silva replied with a smile. "If she came
all the way down here and rode in my cab, we'd both be using the same
money. Doesn't that mean something?"