One Europe: The Dream of Unity : Culture : Coat of Many Colors Shares Common Thread : A singular heritage has given a diverse Continent similar views on everything from food to sex.

ROME —  The 12 European partners marching toward unity are as different as fast bowlers and picadors, autobahns and feta cheese.

They deliberate in nine official languages, write in two alphabets (Latin and Greek) and drive on both sides of the road (stay on the left in Britain and Ireland).

Singularities are greater than commonalities. The 12 perforce share a commitment to democratic government and some version of market economics, but their union is more of head than heart. Their kinship is that of members of the same guild rather than of the same family.

In the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, a European professor could travel from country to country, university to university, delivering the same lecture in the same language--Latin. Not many people were educated then, but those who were shared the same intellectual foundation, the same religion and similar philosophical concepts, Bologna to Bath to Berlin.

Now, at a time of continental unity, some Europeans complain that all they seem to have in common anymore is what the Yankees have sold them. “The only pan-European culture is the American culture,” scolded a French TV anchorwoman not long ago.

Mais attendez s’il vous plait.

Just wait a minute.

True, Europeans slaver for Coke, queue for McDonald’s and Hollywood glitz, copy puerile TV quiz shows and Disney World. Young Europeans groove on MTV and go into hock for Timberlands (hiking shoes) and Levi’s.

But there is more to European culture than derivative Americanisms of the global village. In fact, there are powerful and deep common threads that unite Europeans in their diversities--and stamp them a different breed from Americans.

“We are owners and patent-holders of a common heritage which inspires other continents. Hundreds of thousands of people, billions throughout the world, are influenced by our culture, are attuned to our culture,” noted French President Francois Mitterrand, one of those who worry about the erosion of a European heritage he considers the essential “mortar” of continental unity.

Shared European traits are sometimes muted by the shrinking electronic world. Their intensity varies, country to country. But they are plainly writ; not denizens of sociologists’ lairs, but essential threads in the woof and warp of daily life, classroom to dining room to bedroom.

Basics like food, for example. For Europeans, food is ceremony, not fuel. Biergarten or trattoria, Athens taverna or Barcelona tapas bar, the distinctiveness and quality of the food is as important as the socializing that is an integral part of its consumption. West Europeans read the same health warnings as Americans, but you’d never know it from the groaning boards of butter and bacon at Frankfurt hotel breakfasts. Mere cholesterol will never drive a Frenchman or an Italian from cheese or keep a Brit from clotted cream.

Then there’s sex. Europeans--except for the British--don’t think that sex is dirty. They reject American puritanism with incomprehension; any beach is topless if any woman bather thinks it is a good idea. No one on the continental side of the English Channel will ever understand why Gary Hart could not run for president.

There is a distinctive European self-image and a European world view, the product of a turbulent history of invasions and conquests; of grandiose treaties and violent revolutions whose end results have been to reinforce national identities while at the same time extending a continental heritage.

There are contradictions in both. Europe was the producer, director, principal actor and anguished stage of two wars this century that marked the most terrible organized bloodletting in world history. Yet casual violence in Europe today is minimal by American standards: The per capita homicide rate is 20 times higher in the United States than in England, where the bobbies still go unarmed. More people are murdered in New York each year than in all of Mafia-plagued Italy, population 58 million.

Among the icons that transcend European national frontiers is Rome, the Continent’s first and perhaps most powerful unifying symbol. Roman ruins proudly linger, from Yorkshire in England to Diyarbakir in Turkey.

Even today, when Rome is a provincial city compared with Paris or London, it is still more than simply the Italian capital. Rome was the mother first of cultural, then of religious unity in Europe. It gave the Continent a common law, language and alphabet. To this day, virtually every country in Europe has an academy in Rome to which it sends bright young scholars to explore the shared continental past.

Among Europeans, there is an innate awareness of history that Americans lack. In Europe, the stones speak, engrossing witnesses to centuries of great savagery and occasional splendor. At Rome’s Campidoglio, Michelangelo built atop the work of medieval architects who built atop the work of the Romans before them.

“Once, day boating on the Columbia River, it struck me that amid such great beauty there were no stories. On the Rhine, there is beauty drenched with stories on both shores: Every town, every castle has its own story,” said Father John Navone, a Jesuit theologian from Seattle who lives in Rome.

Europeans think alike in thinking differently than Americans. Americans are pragmatists; can-do problem-solvers. Europeans are not only more ideological but also generically less optimistic. They are more cautious; more measured. Case in point: the U.S.-ramrodded Middle East peace talks.

“The European attitude is to search for a comprehensive solution and then try to implement it,” said Ralf Dahrendorf, German-born warden of Oxford University’s St. Anthonys College. “The Americans say, ‘Let’s start a conference and see what happens.’ The Americans may have played a leading role in Europe since World War II, but they’ve made no impact on European thinking in this area.”

Given the extraordinary weight of history, it is hardly surprising that Europeans have not only a strong sense of self but also a sense of place that distinguishes them from footloose Americans.

Europeans often move away from home to seek work but do not usually look for a place in the sun in which to retire. They go back to where they were born. They are closer to deeper roots than could exist in a young America.

Twentysomething Americans may exchange college credentials on first encounter, but--set your watch by it--Italians of any sex, age or class will identify their home regions, a key shaper of their personality, within the first few minutes of meeting. To Americans they’re Europeans, to the German they are Italians, to the Milanese, they are Romans, but to a fellow Roman, and to one another, they are from Trastevere, or Centocelle, or some other district of the city.

To this day, Italian is almost a minority language among Italians at home: They are as likely to speak regional dialects. Germany is a nation of down-home tongues, and, as George Bernard Shaw once observed, every time an Englishman opens his mouth some other Englishman hates him.

The European sense of self and place often extends to stronger identification with family, religion and class than many Americans feel. So, too, a sense of pageantry that bows to history: ceremonial changing of the guards in London, Siena’s Palio horse race in medieval dress, Munich’s Oktoberfest, the pfifferdaj folkloric fete of Ribeauville in Alsace and the yearly goat-tossing from the steeple of the village church in Manganeses de la Polvorosa, Spain.

All are local traditions that embody a Europe unified by a prized time warp existence. In what other continent can you leave a world capital and in two hours arrive in a 12th-Century town that not only has Gothic monuments but also a medieval atmosphere? When townsfolk don period dress for an annual uphill race with three 16-foot-high wooden hour glasses in the Umbrian town of Gubbio, you get the feeling that it is more than just dressing up.

Most Europeans also share a fondness for personal public display. Particularly in the south, Europeans sally forth into town for a stroll around plazas, piazzas or main streets to walk, gossip or have a drink with the principal intention of seeing--and being seen. Matches are made, deals are struck, reputations are ruined in the early evening paseo .

An overriding element of European-ness, and perhaps the one that makes integration both such a longstanding dream and one that is physically practical, is size.

By American standards, Europe is tiny. A drive of 1,000 miles--Washington to Miami, San Diego to Portland--in Europe can mean crossing half a dozen frontiers and hearing as many languages.

The density of population and the sense of space it engenders makes Europe a crowded canvas of vivid texture.

“You could lose the whole of The Hague in a few Kansas cornfields,” one expansive Midwesterner commented on his first visit to Holland.

Europe’s cramped space with endless detail and America’s endless space with sparse detail help define continental character in both places.

The practical sides of Europe’s cheek-by-jowl canvas is that everybody lives near everybody else. Peoples, cultures, religions are all familiar. Distances are close, so Europeans rely on public transport. They take the train. They even walk. Few drive in downtown areas of big cities. It is always unpleasant and often forbidden.

Paradoxically, language is something else that helps unite Europe. Europe is polyglot. Language is not a threat, but a tool. Most European high school students graduate speaking at least one other major language fluently.

As continental dreams of unity mature in an electronic age, the new Europe is bombarded as never before with outside cultural influences. Most of them American, perhaps, but many are also brought by growing numbers of Third World immigrants who already discomfit--and enrich--Europe.

But Europe’s own heritage is deep-seated, hearty and, as Mitterrand notes, widely admired. During the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, many demonstrators carried American flags into the streets, symbol of the basic democratic freedoms they sought. Tellingly, though, others waved the blue and gold European Community flag. That is a symbol of a different sort--the freedom to be part of a larger social democratic whole, without being forced into an American-style melting pot.

Today, as frontiers fall, history predicts that individual countries will preserve their own singular national identities even as they draw ever closer in the new Europe. And so, too, the underlying cultural icons that have so long colored their diversity with unifying thread.