What makes european, you know, european?

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SuperNova said:
I don't think there really is a unified european feeling. There's a deep divide between western and eastern Europe and a less drastic, but noticalble divide between nothern and southern Europe.
The nordic coutries as well as the north of Germany and the north of Britain share a lot of cultual ancestry being dominted by the vikings and keeping (knowingly or not) a lot of the old traditions alive to this date.

Much of the reason we celbrate christmas in winter instead of summer, where the earliest sources actually put the birth of christ, is because in order to break down Viking resistance, the romans assimilated huge parts of their culture and merged it with christianity. Sort of like: 'OH! Your most important holyday is the winter solistice and bringing light into the world on it's darkest day? Boy, do I have a story for you! By pure coincedence our lord and savior just happens to be born on the exact same day, and there was this star and everything!'
We actually see very similar things in Hatian and New Orleans christianity, where it got combined with Voodoo.

Then like other people have mentioned the roman invsion and christianisation of europe did a lot to forge a similar cultural heritage over a lot of Europe.

Nevertheless many of the country-to-country diffrences are staggering.

Divide between west and east have more to do with economic differencies, I think. Of course the ethnic differencies between people with eastern Europe having lots of slavic population and western not having. Which takes us to ethnic differencies between northern and southern Europe, when looking at the northern Europe pespective, Spanish/Portugese and Greece/Italian people aren't even white.