LONDON -- How can sense be made out of the senseless? How are the prolonged outbursts of mindless street violence and car-burning in town after town throughout France to be explained?

French commentators are clearly having a tough time answering these questions. A dozen different causes or reasons for the rioting and unrest have been advanced. The rioters are unemployed; they are the immigrants banished to ghetto-like suburbs of French towns (the so-called banlieues); they are Muslim extremists (or they are being led by them); they are resentful nonwhites; they are being manipulated and urged on by international terrorist groups; they are new colonies or states within the state -- and many other labels as well.

All have some truth in them, yet they overlook an even more fundamental explanation, which may apply not just to French car-burners but to restless minorities and ethnic groups worldwide: Simply that the information revolution, and the rise of the age of almost total intercommunication, has empowered minorities everywhere as never before. The mobile telephone and the Internet, with their enormous powers to challenge and disrupt every established institution and pattern of customs in a society, have become instruments of copycat violence.

In a networked world, a sinister, spiderlike central organization is not needed to promote and motivate violent action. The Internet, mobile telephones and numerous television channels are there to tell any local troublemaker how to get violence going, how to promote rioting, and how to torch cars and shops.

In the information age, the spread of e-enabled protest is instantaneous. What began in northern Paris one night was being tried out in countless towns and local communities the next -- and indeed spreading into neighboring countries, as shown by the almost simultaneous car-burning and rioting in Brussels and Berlin.

Analysts and social experts have been opining that the problem is all to do with the so-called French model for dealing with minorities -- namely, that the French believe in assimilating individuals from other faiths and cultures (i.e., Algerian, Moroccan and other immigrants), rather than deal with collective cultural groups and, through their leaders, build bridges to whole ethnic communities within the overall state. They note the French official claim that the state is colorblind, and therefore all, in theory, are equal -- without recognition as members of recognized minorities with different cultures and customs.

Across the English Channel, the British have been congratulating themselves on having a different model, whereby minorities are allowed to develop separately, almost to the point of being allowed their own laws in their own enclaves. This has been labeled "multiculturalism" and hailed by some as a success in handling the problem of a large and growing Muslim population within Britain.

But these congratulations may be premature and care needs to be taken before assuming that these so-called models are so different, or really exist at all. It is from this British system that four young Muslim men, British born, emerged recently to plant bombs all over London and murder more than 50 innocent people. And in many British cities the tension between ethnic groups is intense and the situation on a knife-edge.

Thus minority protest and resentment, on the one hand, and outright terrorism and killing, on the other, have become intertwined, and both have been constantly stirred, stoked and motivated by a network of poisonous information and incitement that now visibly penetrates the Islamic diasporas almost everywhere in Europe. The one not very comforting difference between Britain and France is that the British Muslim population is about 3 percent of the total -- so far -- whereas the French figure is nearer 10 percent.

But in both cases empowerment, vastly helped by information technology, has given the minority communities a new sense of internal identity, self-awareness and angry confidence, setting them increasingly against the societies in which they reside and against the established authorities of the state.

Where does the answer to all this lie? In deportation, curfews, curbed liberties and increased police powers? All are being advocated and tried in both France and Britain.

Recent British government attempts to bring in Draconian new powers for holding suspected troublemakers without trial for up to three months have been thrown out by Parliament as going too far to curb people's ancient liberties. But the British public remains deeply uneasy and anxious to be better protected in an age of increasing apparent anarchy.

But, of course, none of these measures touch on the real fundamental problem, which is that vast new minorities, with strongly different cultures and faiths, have settled and expanded all over Europe (with many more clamoring to come in), and that they have now been given connecting power and knowledge on a scale that previous immigrant or refugee communities never even dreamed about. Smaller groups can now threaten the larger host societies in which they are embedded with devastating effectiveness.

All this makes the state's task of integration -- and assimilation when possible -- and building social cohesion 10 times more difficult, although it is 10 times more necessary.

This is the bitter challenge that France has been discovering in recent days but that now confronts all Western countries. Japanese policymakers need to be watchful that this destabilizing condition does not spread in their direction as well.