Europe's History, Rewritten

In the end, however, blacks too conformed to the white majority's norms, if often subversively -- or tragically, as in the contemporary black ghetto's amplification of mainstream America's materialism, anomic individualism, violence and potentiality for nihilism.

In Europe there never was a single norm to which others were expected to conform. National cultures dominated because until very recently Europeans felt no doubt that Europe was the center of the world: Hence that their own national differences expressed universal differences.

The two world wars and the Cold War changed that idea. Europeans have been forced to recognize what they have in common to unite them, at the same time that Americans are being confronted with what divides them. This emergence of a sense of common European identification would seem fundamental to the achievement of a true ''Europe.'' What is striking is that so significant a reinterpretation of Europe's experience as presented in the Delouche/Duroselle volume should have come from an individual's private experience and effort. It would seem evidence that ''Europe,'' after all, is arriving.