Seldom, if ever, in the history of the European Union have the member-states been involved in so many simultaneous reworkings of different aspects of the treaties, institutions, and of the character of the Union itself.
The challenges of enlargement (which this week had Sile de Valera worrying aloud in Boston) of the single currency and of new technology, the humiliation of Bosnia, and the hard reality of popular alienation from the Union - all these have encouraged soul-searching by leaders such as Joschka Fischer of Germany, Jacques Chirac of France, and Romano Prodi, the Commission president, on the long-term shape of the Union.
And so there's the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) working away on the leftovers of Amsterdam, preparing the institutions for another 12 member-states. There's a convention drafting a human-rights charter, a university rewriting the treaty, soldiers and diplomats building an army, bureaucrats reinventing bureaucracy.
Some of it is all about treaties and institutions. But some, more intangibly, is about creating new forms of governing collectively through peer pressure and mutual supervision of each other's budgets or social policies.
And the whole is more than the sum of the parts - in truth the Union is reinventing itself qualitatively under our very feet to a number of differing time-frames - the IGC and the charter to be agreed (or not) at the European Council of heads of government at Nice in December; then a new IGC or convention to consider a constitution, ahead of the first enlargement, probably in 2005; and the military are fleshing out the security and defence clauses of the treaty agreed at Amsterdam in 1997.
Enlargement has concentrated minds, with the possibility of up to 30 states in a Union designed originally for six. And, as Fischer put it in his landmark speech in May, "The consequence of the irrefutable enlargement of the Union is . . . erosion or integration."
The choice is to change or to fall backwards, Ireland's former commissioner, Peter Sutherland, argued in a speech recently. Europe had succeeded, he said, because we have shared sovereignty. "If it recedes into inter-governmentalism it will be lost."
There is evidence of such a drift. And to those, he said, "whose vision extends no more than to an inter-governmental entity, a collaboration of nation states maintaining traditional sovereignty unimpaired, one must say that such a system was never on offer and was not what they joined."
Ireland, however, is no enthusiast for radical integration or reform. In each of the major reform projects described here, the Irish approach is marked by caution verging on Euro-scepticism. And Ireland has a deep suspicion of the European social model.
Yes, we want to be seen as team players, whether in the euro or the new rapid reaction force, but we really don't want to change our Constitution.
Let's be pragmatic and minimalist and stick to the task immediately at hand, argues the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen. Leave the vision thing to intellectuals, he told The Irish Times. For intellectuals, read French.