In Civil Aviation, the Europeans came to sell more planes than the Americans do. This shows that the European spirit is efficient in the more and more symbolic world we live in.
In Nuclear Physics, Europeans have discovered two subnuclear particles, "W" and "Z" (Nobel Prize), when the Americans had the needed equipment (high- energy particle accelerators), but did not do the necessary experiment. The Europeans continue to be creative and efficient.
Let's see the reverse as well. The Europeans wanted to build a fighter-plane, to compete the US ones. Then they discovered that they haven't got the technology to make it 'invisible', haven't got enough money to build it and haven't got the background infrastructure to support this weapon system. Even the navigation system (GPS) is American. This is an example of the European adventurous spirit. This spirit can be seen in the building of the A380 (the biggest airliner in the world). We will see in a few years the result of the competition between the American perfectionism and the European spirit.
We have situations when perfectionism is in conflict with the European tolerance (the Americans are less tolerant than Europeans). The result is that in a few crucial problems of the long-range evolution of the society, the Europeans have a slightly reduced capacity of understanding what is going on.
E.g. in the Irakian problem, the European tolerant spirit produced a different reaction than the USA. I think that many Europeans are convinced that terrorism cannot be fought by dialogue, but their tolerant spirit made them sustain that. Here the Europeans have problems, which will grow along with the evolution of the society. The Europeans have no principial solution, as, actually, the Americans haven't either.
Let's summarize the European spirit.
The tolerant spirit, characteristic to Europeans too, has to be preserved as absolutely necessary in a symbolic society, but it can turn against the society in fundamental problems.
The liberalism, spirit of adventure and desire of knowledge are basic components of the European spirituality, and they cannot be given-up, as long as Europe will exist.
Europe will be in great danger anytime when it will distort the European spirit, as it had been defined above.
This evaluation discussion should be ended here, but unfortunately all I have stated up to now is not really correct in a scientific approach. As we know, a scientific approach is based on the existence of a declared local model. This local model has to generate the definitions of the terms used. Let's start building a local model, and then we can return to read the above statements.