Minorities Europe

They come at night, braving the treacherous strait in leaky 20-foot fishing boats called pateras . Paying up to $1,700 for the nine-mile illegal crossing to Europe's southernmost tip, many Moroccans ante up their life savings, gambling on a brighter future in a land rich beyond their dreams. Occasionally, winds and currents in the Strait of Gibraltar swamp the overloaded boats, tipping their human cargoes into the sea and almost-certain death. Occasionally, the Moroccans are caught by Spanish authorities and returned.

They come at night, braving the treacherous strait in leaky 20-foot fishing boats called pateras . Paying up to $1,700 for the nine-mile illegal crossing to Europe's southernmost tip, many Moroccans ante up their life savings, gambling on a brighter future in a land rich beyond their dreams. Occasionally, winds and currents in the Strait of Gibraltar swamp the overloaded boats, tipping their human cargoes into the sea and almost-certain death. Occasionally, the Moroccans are caught by Spanish authorities and returned.

In the essay "Movements and Campaigns," a tribute to the literary critic Irving Howe, the late philosopher Richard Rorty wrote that Howe's take on literary and artistic modernism was true of any political movement: "namely, that it 'must always struggle but never quite triumph, and then, after a time, must struggle in order not to triumph.'

President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin issued a joint call Wednesday for creation of a "credible Euro-Atlantic peacekeeping" force that could include American and Russian soldiers operating side by side to stop ethnic violence like that now ravaging Yugoslavia.

The Basque separatist killers have aroused so much fury in Spain with their latest escapade in terror that it is tempting to hope that they have finally overreached and collapsed under the weight of national contempt. Some prominent Spaniards believe so.

These comparisons of European social and political attitudes are based on interviews with 13,000 people across the Continent in a series of one-hour, face-to-face conversations conducted between the third week of April and the end of June, 1991. Survey teams commissioned by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press fanned out in nine countries and three Soviet republics (Lithuania had not achieved independence at the time).