On one recent Friday night, a characteristically polyglot buzz filled the air in a Brussels pub. But at once a hush fell over the patrons, interrupted finally by a gale of laughter. Every person in the bar had turned to watch the British comedian Ali G on television. And they got all the jokes.

Some young Europeans see a downside to all this cultural convergence: it often feels like homogenization. Paola La Falce, 34, an Italian who works for Universal Music in Paris, recalls her first trip to the U.K. 15 years ago: "It was incredibly different from where I came from. But now the center of London is just like the center of Milan — it's the same Gap and Levis stores. I'm nostalgic for that period when you really felt like you were somewhere else. I'm all for a united Europe, but I think we're losing something at the same time." That ambivalence about the momentum of European integration — and in a larger sense, globalization — is widely felt. Young adults in all four countries surveyed by Time said they believed that by 2010 the balance of political power in Europe will tilt toward the European Parliament and away from national governments — to an extent greater than they would prefer.

So does this mean the European project is in trouble? Not necessarily. They may not entirely approve, but most 21- to 35-year-olds expect federal bodies to hold more power than national legislatures within 10 years. So for them, the argument is already settled. "For this younger generation, the E.U. is something taken for granted and not a cause," says Mark Leonard, 26, the director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a London think tank. "Our parents' generation experienced Europe pulling itself to pieces and lived with the constant threat of war. Now you don't need to focus on why the E.U. was set up in the first place."

That has some advantages. Europeans in their 20s retain only hazy memories of the ideological struggle that divided Europe for 50 years. As a result, many young adults in the E.U. tend to be enthusiastic about extending membership to Eastern and Central European countries. Says Sara Priem, 24, president of the Young European Movement, a British pro-Europe grassroots group: "It's one of those issues that's easy to be strong on because everyone agrees with it. The Berlin Wall came down when we were 10 or 11, so for us those in the east are part of Europe. There's no divide in our heads."

No one has benefited more from the steady erosion of that divide than those who lived on the other side. "Growing up in Hungary, you tended to think of Westerners as better than you were, but that feeling of inferiority has been overcome," says Balint Nemeth, 24, a Budapest native and student at the London School of Economics. "You don't feel you have to prove anything anymore."

Perhaps nowhere has technology made a more dramatic impact: Nemeth marvels that his friends in Hungary are "miles ahead of me in their familiarity with technology: they know how to surf the Web on their mobile phones and download all the music files they want. It's truly breaking down barriers." Czech teenagers today are as adept with wap phones and Sony PlayStations as their Western counterparts. Meanwhile, gearheads like Lubos Lavicka, a 36-year-old from Broumov in the Czech Republic, find that getting a job in Western Europe has never been easier, or more lucrative. His starting salary at a Munich software company will be upwards of $50,000. In the Czech Republic he made around $8,000.

That money gap raises fears that some talented East Europeans who leave for the West will never return. But even the most inveterate nomads, like Bilana Raeva, a 27-year-old Bulgarian who just completed an internship with the European Commission in Brussels, profess a desire to return home someday. "I feel at home everywhere, but when I go back to Bulgaria now, I feel like a tourist," says Raeva, who has already lived in Poland, the Netherlands and Spain. "But of course I'd like to go back. I want my kids to grow up in my country."

At the same time, nationalism is on the wane among the young professional cadre in Eastern and Central Europe. But that's good news for supporters of expansion. "I don't feel any national belonging," says Gabriela Novotna, 28, a lawyer in Prague. "We are all people living in Europe. It's all the same to me if somebody is German, French, Vietnamese or Chinese." She, for one, has no reservations about the E.U.: "The European Union will bring light into our lives."

Some researchers say the collapse of communism has also changed the way young adults throughout Europe, East and West, organize their lives and imagine their careers. Stefan Baumann, a manager of the Hamburg-based Trend Bureau, says that the disappearance of "an alternative to capitalism" has made the "primacy of the economy" the governing principle of their lives. Politics and ideology consumed their parents, but Europe's young professionals are now more likely to invest their jobs with social significance.

"Today's workers see work as a way to put their values into practice — where you work has become something of a political choice," says Richard Reeves, director of futures at the Industrial Society, a U.K. think tank. "For this generation, which box you put your ballot in on election day may matter less than which desk you put your butt behind every day."