Watching the French riots with a mixture of trepidation and schadenfreude, Europe's rulers have arrived at two conclusions.
One is that the violence is a peculiarly French affair, the product of color blind republicanism and bungling by an out-of-touch elite. The other is it will not happen here.
Both of these conclusions are questionable.
"The conditions in France are different from the ones we have here -- we don't have giant apartment blocks," said Germany's foreign affairs adviser Wolfgang Schauble.
Appearing to blame French police tactics, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Britain was different, too. When Italian opposition leader Romano Prodi suggested Italy could be next, he was accused of being alarmist.
But problems of discrimination, youth unemployment -- half of the detained French rioters are under 18 -- racial prejudice, religious intolerance and xenophobia induced by fear of terrorism and globalization are entrenched in most European countries, said Aurore Wanlin of the Center for European Reform.
And they have the potential to cause even more explosions.
"There is a debate in every society about how to integrate minorities and migrants, especially unskilled workers at times of economic difficulty," Wanlin said.
"But they don't agree what to do, so this debate is usually very quiet. There is a lack of visibility about the problem -- until there's a crunch like in France and suddenly it cannot be avoided. So you cannot say it will not happen somewhere else. It will, although probably in a different form," Wanlin said.
Undercurrents of antipathy are discernible across Europe. The Netherlands was traumatized by last November's murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
The killing crystallized fears about international terrorism and national identity in a country where 20 percent of the population is of foreign descent. It also led to attacks on mosques.
Like the Nordic countries, Germany prides itself on its integrationist approach to its 2.5 million-strong Turkish minority.
But joblessness in immigrant communities is double the national average and youth unemployment affects one in three.
Tensions were also apparent during a spate of "honor killings" that shocked Berlin earlier this year.
Spain, with 1 million Muslims, is struggling to repel illegal migrants from North Africa, a problem also faced by Italy.
After what he termed "the recent tragic events at Spain's borders with Morocco," Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero bravely proposed a "Euro-African ministerial conference on immigration."
At least Zapatero is trying to build bridges. Marcello Pera, speaker of the Italian senate and a devout Catholic, complained about "mongrel" Europe.
It is not a big jump from there to the incendiary comments of France's Nicolas Sarkozy about "riff-raff."
Europe's failure to agree on how to deal with its principal minorities, or even how to address them, extends to the EU itself, Wanlin said.
"The EC has been trying to develop guidelines on integration, but the issues are so sensitive that it has been difficult to find common ground," she said.
And while Europe's governments fumble, the rise of far-right political parties represented another trend that could trigger trouble, she said.
"The advance of the extreme right is an expression of a degree of racism in Europe but more deeply ... social malaise -- fear of anything foreign," she said.
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