Why all this unseemly haste to drag us into a United States of Europe?
But "shut up and sign here" might summarise better what the European project is about at the moment.
The good news is, of course, enlargement. New life for the economies of eastern Europe, and new hope for its people.
But what is perplexing is the headlong rush towards deeper political integration by an elite class of politicians and administrators. EU leaders barely stop for breath between signing one treaty and proposing another. And they appear unconcerned that public identification with the EU is at a record low.
It's not as if this new constitution was made necessary by European enlargement. The Nice treaty, you will recall being told, was the icing on the cake necessary to agree new voting arrangements in the EU's 'legislature', the council of ministers, in a 25-member EU.
The EU commission, France and Germany now say the Nice arrangements won't do.
They want a double majority voting system, under which decisions could be taken by a simple majority of 13 out of 25 states, provided they have 60% of the national population between them.
The extent of the influence this would give the French and Germans can be gauged from the fact that they have 40% of the Euro population between them.
But the new constitution does a lot more than change voting arrangements.
National vetoes are being lost in many areas. A new escalation clause will allow presidents and prime ministers to cede other vetoes without referring back to their electorates, and a new charter of fundamental rights threatens to undermine the role of national courts in determining human rights issues.
We're told that if we don't accept all this, France, Germany and other big countries will proceed with deeper integration and we'll be left (unhappily, we are to presume) behind.
What's their hurry? Ten new member states are about to join the union.
Each underwent difficult negotiations to prepare their political and economic systems for the discipline of membership.
They took on 97,000 pages of Euro legislation the acquis communautaire and they sold EU membership to their electorates. And then, before they're in the door at all, they're being asked to swallow another chunk of integration.
It's a bit like mortgaging your farm to get a bank loan, and then being told you'll have to put up the house as well. Surely the new states were entitled to some time to settle into their new situation, without having further challenges thrust on them.
Romano Prodi says we need new voting arrangements to allow effective decision-making when we have 25 members. But as the BBC's Jeremy Paxman acidly asked him last week, what's the point in new rules if you won't implement the old ones?
Last year, France and Germany got away scot-free even though their large budget deficits were in breach of EU stability pact rules. If it happened to a smaller member state, there would be a heavy fine.
In fact, any idea of the EU as a partnership of equal states went out with the Nice treaty, when we voted for enhanced co-operation. This allows bigger countries go ahead and integrate their laws more deeply, using the institutions of the EU, even if that may impact negatively on other member states.
That doctrine of enhanced co-operation explains the new truculence on the part of the French and Germans in particular. To get their way, they will use two bargaining chips: the possibility of enhanced co-operation if other countries don't play ball; and the next phase of budget negotiations, where they can make their money talk.
Despite French and German enthusiasm for integration, the latest Eurobarometer poll suggests that only 48% of the EU population an all-time low and, for the first time, less than a majority regard EU membership as a good thing.
However, even if the opinion polls don't provide Prodi, Chirac and Schroeder with a mandate, they seem happy to wrest one from a slumbering populace.
Yet, bizarrely, in the tonnes of newsprint and hundreds of broadcasts during the Irish presidency of the EU, two questions will stand out unanswered: why the push for deeper and deeper integration of the EU? And... where will it all end?
Few journalists even attempt to answer these questions. They seem content to treat the politics of the EU in a simplistic way, reducing the issue to squabbles over commissioners and voting rights because that makes Europe somehow interesting to the public.
But the problem is, how can we, the public, exercise power if we have no knowledge?
Why, for example, should we be worried about a two-speed Europe when we hardly know what it means? How come our political leaders and media don't tell us, on an issue-by-issue basis, what the end result of a two-speed Europe might be?
What would the implications be if Germany, France and a few others harmonised their taxation, prison policy, education and the rest? Indeed, for all we know, a two-speed Europe could work to our benefit. But... we don't know.
CHEERLEADERS for further integration do little to remedy the widespread ignorance about the aims and workings of the EU. True, they point to the benefits which have accrued from EU membership and the union's more laudable aims such as peacekeeping and job-creation.
These hardly amount to an argument that further political integration will benefit us. Integrationists think it is enough to wring their hands over the EU's communication problem and its boring image.
But if the EU is failing to sell its values and aspirations to the paying public (and the Eurobarometer survey shows that this is the case), doesn't it follow that the integration process should halt until it commands more support?
What explains the Faustian energy which drives the European integration project anyway? Alarmists worry about a German desire to flex political and economic muscle. According to this narrative, the stealthy integration of European states is a kind of Sudetenland for slow learners.
And there is French ambition, of course. Some French leaders have peculiar aspirations to grandeur that the EU obviously satisfies. Other commentators point to the club-like nature of European Union.
The growing integration of the EU means more power and prestige for national leaders who become the legislators of the new Europe.
The problem is, secluded away in meeting rooms and without any riding instructions from their national parliaments, our leaders become less accountable to us. The spirit of the EU is one of horse-trading and compromise.
In that kind of climate, negotiators from smaller countries find themselves sacrificing important national interests because to hold out, when you are getting other things, seems ungrateful.
The ultimate rationale for hasty European integration is economic, however. There must be no obstacle to trade.
Fair enough, but that certainly explains why, in the draft charter of fundamental rights which forms part of the new constitution, we find a clause which limits the protection given to fundamental rights where such limitations 'meet objectives of general interest recognised by the union.'
Whether we want to live in a community where fundamental rights can be compromised for the sake of advancing economic goals is another matter.
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