COLUMN ONE : Citizens Immune to Euro-Fever : On paper, the Continent is united. But in daily life, people show little interest in being part of one Europe.

The question seemed simple enough. “Can one be a citizen of Europe?” a visitor asked a class of German high school seniors.

The class flunked.

Not one of the 17- and 18-year-olds at the Friedrich Ebert High School in Bonn knew that they are legally citizens of the European Union.

Nor did they know that as citizens, they enjoy the rights to move freely within the union’s 15 member countries, to live anywhere they want and to vote in local elections wherever they live.

“We’ve never talked about the European Union, so I know nothing about Article 8,” said Andreas Gotze, 17, referring to the provision in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty that defines EU citizenship.

Precious few Europeans do.

Indeed, 38 years after the union’s six founding nations forged the European Economic Community, and four years after a larger group of 12 West European countries committed themselves to the European Union’s more ambitious goal of political and economic unity, there is remarkably little awareness among ordinary people that they now belong to a greater whole or that they share a common destiny.

This lack of awareness is a great irony of the “European movement”--an irony that diminishes its truly impressive accomplishments of binding together a continent that has often torn itself apart, an irony that could threaten its future.

On the one hand, barriers that divided member countries for centuries have been dismantled over four decades at a pace exceeding the dreams of even those most committed to the ideal of European unity.

The resulting single economic market has provided the region’s 370 million citizens with unprecedented prosperity and freedom of movement.

Anyone wanting to make the 1,500-mile trip from Berlin to Lisbon can cross the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Spain and enter Portugal without once showing a passport or being stopped at a frontier.

Michel Coemelberghs, 56, a courier for a Brussels delivery firm, needs only one long day to cover the 800 miles to the vacation spot in southern Spain that it took his father three days to reach 40 years ago.

On the other hand, the enormousness of these achievements appears to have done little to bring the lives of individual Europeans closer together or give them a shared set of reference points.

Yes, there is a European anthem (Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”) and a European flag (blue with a circle of gold stars), and EU citizens tend to carry the same maroon passport. But there appears to be little real attachment to any of them.

“You won’t find any surge of emotion from the strains of ‘Ode to Joy,’ ” said Terry Venables, director of the Euro-Citizen Action Service, a Brussels-based advisory bureau. “The idea of ‘citizens’ Europe’ has tended to be a gadget activity.”

The fathers of modern European unity, such as Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Paul-Henri Spaak, are hardly known outside a small circle of Euro-enthusiasts, while earlier would-be European unifiers--Charlemagne, Napoleon or Hitler--simply don’t fit as heroes or role models for a group of democracies in the late 20th Century.

“It is one thing for elites in Brussels (site of EU headquarters), Strasbourg (French site of the European Parliament) and some European capitals to identify with and work for a united Europe (but) quite another to attribute such sentiments and beliefs to the great mass of the middle and working classes,” said Anthony D. Smith, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and a specialist in the origins of nationalism and patriotism.

He argued that the absence of any underlying patriotic commitment to the European ideal, or any well-developed sense of a broader feeling of community among Europeans, means that even current achievements could easily unravel.

“Until this is there, the edifice of ‘Europe’ at the political level will remain shaky,” he said.

Europeans continue to define themselves almost exclusively in terms of their own nationhood.

Nightly television news broadcasts, for example, still concentrate on national subjects, except for occasional major events. The deaths of 11 Belgian U.N. peacekeepers at the start of the massacres in Rwanda a year ago stunned Belgium but went completely unreported on the main evening news in neighboring Germany.

Even on a rare night when Europeans did share a common experience--June’s elections for the European Parliament--television commentators in most countries largely ignored the results in other nations, focusing on the elections’ domestic political ramifications.

In schools, it is the narrower national histories and politics that dominate curricula of the next generation of Europeans. Of five secondary schools visited by The Times in Belgium and Germany, only one--in Brussels--had students who displayed any real knowledge of the European Union.

A teacher at the Friedrich Ebert school in Bonn explained his students’ lack of knowledge of the EU by saying there is no room for it in the teaching plan.

The ultimate determination of what goes into school curricula at all levels lies with national governments, a fact that inhibits broader teaching about the EU. There was an effort in Britain in the 1980s to require EU instruction, but it was beaten back.

A 1990 study, “Young Europeans,” carried out by the EU Executive Commission, discovered that in no member country could more than 10% of respondents ages 15 to 24 list the 12 nations that were then EU members. In Italy and Britain, the figure was 2%, in France, 3%.

This lack of awareness has helped keep horizons narrow.

Marc Fallon, a law professor at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain who specializes in the rights of European citizens, believes that despite their new treaty rights and resulting benefits, including mutual recognition of professional qualifications, only 1% to 2% of EU citizens live outside their home countries.

“There’s almost no difference compared to the past,” Fallon said. “All this was done to encourage people to move, but nobody has. The door is open, but no one is walking through it.”

In one sense, the reason for this is obvious: Language, culture and the Europeans’ strong attachment to “home” remain powerful barriers for most of those now legally free to start again somewhere else.

“There’s no such thing as a ‘European way of life’ as there is (an American way of life) in the United States,” Fallon noted. “National identities are still too strong.”

In one small measure of this diversity, the bestseller lists for fiction in the EU’s four most populous countries--France, Britain, Germany and Italy--contain only one book in common: “Sophie’s World,” Norwegian Jostein Gaarder’s tale of a schoolgirl’s correspondence with a philosophy teacher.

In fact, much to the dismay of many Europeans nearly four decades after the European Economic Community was founded, the lone cultural thread that runs through all European countries is American--from fast food to casual fashion to pop music. Seven recordings on MTV’s mid-April Europe-wide list of Top 20 hits were by American artists, the most from any one country; all 20 selections, including those by German and Belgian groups, were sung in English. Although familiar to a broad cross-section of the Continent, such phenomena are hardly the stuff to foster a greater European identity.

But there are other factors that have blunted any sense of shared experience among Europeans, so necessary for a viable political entity. Among them:

* From its inception, European unity has been a top-down revolution. It was a movement launched not by the masses but by a small group of idealistic technocrats working in the aftermath of World War II. It has been pushed forward ever since with a conspicuous absence of public involvement.

* The impenetrable nature of the EU’s key institutions, their remoteness and their penchant for secrecy mean that they provide almost no opportunity for ordinary citizens to feel involved.

Although the job of Executive Commission president is easily the most visible and most powerful in the EU structure, the choice of Jacques Santer of Luxembourg to succeed Frenchman Jacques Delors last year was brokered with all the openness of a 19th-Century smoke-filled room, then presented to Europeans as a fait accompli .

Similarly, last July, the EU’s Council of Ministers, a body made up of one representative from each member country, refused to disclose details of its new policy aimed at creating greater openness. The issue was a secret.

“The information deficit has become part of the democracy deficit,” said a former EU commissioner for information, Joao de Deus Pinheiro of Portugal.

* There have been no crucial defining moments in the EU’s brief history to engage ordinary people. It has fought no wars, has no charismatic heroes and has defended no cherished set of values or ideas in a manner that inspires the kind of supranational patriotism or loyalty that can bind diverse peoples together.

Instead, its battles to impose a value-added tax on British birdseed, erase an age-old Dutch candle cartel or override a German beer purity law have brought more ridicule than admiration.

“There is no European analogue to Bastille (Day) or Armistice Day, no European ceremony to the fallen in battle, no European shire of kings or saints,” sociologist Smith said. “When it comes to the ritual and ceremony of collective identification, there is no European equivalent to national or religious ceremony.”

Some observers believe that the answer to that lack--rather than manufacturing artificial Euro-holidays--lies in building more substance into such concepts as European citizenship and in making sure that younger generations learn about them.

As EU leaders discuss the idea of a European defense capability, the prospect of service in a European army has also been raised.

“Guarantees to human rights, civil rights and freedom of information need to be built into European citizenship, but also some duties,” said Venables, the Euro-Citizen Action Service director. “If it had more obligations, there would be a lot more information on it.”

Times researchers Isabelle Maelcamp in Brussels and Reane Oppl in Bonn contributed to this article.

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BACKGROUND: The Maastricht Treaty

The Maastricht Treaty, named for the Dutch city where the document was approved in 1991, promotes the concept of a single European citizenship. Under the treaty, the European Union--expanded this year to include 15 nations after Austria, Sweden and Finland voted to join--must work toward common policies in foreign affairs, security and eventually defense. There is also a timetable for monetary union, including a single currency, by 1999. And citizens of any member state are given the absolute right to live and work anywhere in the EU.