Common currency? New flag? Nope. Try golf to unify Europe.

As America's golf stars take on the best from across the Atlantic this weekend in the Ryder Cup, get ready for one of the rarest sights in sport: Team Europe.

The biennial clash, which starts Friday at the Oakland Hills Country Club in Michigan offers something that no other major sporting tournament does - a single, unified lineup of players competing under a European banner.

For this one event, old animosities evaporate. Frenchmen cheer on Spaniards, Nordic rivals bury the hatchet, and Welsh and Irish surprise themselves by rooting for the English.

"It's bizarre, really," says Fred Aylett, a sports-bar manager in Bristol, England, who knows more than most about the proclivities and passions of the average sports fan.

"Everyone gets behind the European players and you've got all these Englishmen who are used to mouthing off about the Germans and French, and suddenly they're shouting their names" in support, says Mr. Aylett.

The fact that golf's Ryder Cup remains an exception highlights a strange quirk about European integration over the past 60 years. The Continent may have a common currency, a parliament, a single market, and a pan-European court. But sports seems to be more deeply woven in the fabric of local and national identities - and old rivalries still get in the way.

In soccer, rugby, ice hockey, even volleyball, Europeans would rather settle old scores by battling against one another than unify and take on other world powers.

So unwelcome is the general idea of Team Europe that when European Commission president Romano Prodi suggested recently that Olympians compete at the 2008 Games in Beijing under the blue and gold EU standard, it created a shudder across the Continent.

No matter that Europeans collectively won more medals than any other country at the recent Athens Olympics. The notion of a single European team was alien to a people who mostly put local affiliation first, national affinities second, and European sensibilities a distant third.

"There is no such thing as a European sporting identity," says Antonio Missiroli, a research fellow at the EU Institute for Security Studies who has written papers about the issue. "It is a tradition of Europe to have competition by national teams first ... and also to have competition for [local] clubs," he says.

Mr. Prodi's spokesman, Reijo Kemppinen, was at a loss to explain why Europe doesn't team up more often. "I wish I knew the answer," he says. "What the president was suggesting is - why not portray the flag of the EU at the Olympics alongside the national flags as a kind of symbolic expression of European unity?"

The unity around the Ryder Cup works because it puts great rivals on opposing teams, and creates an underdog (traditionally Europe, although it has won three of the last four contests) to take on the world's best (traditionally America).

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