ANNOUNCE that you work as a journalist in Brussels and you are likely to get a pitying look and a polite inquiry. “Do you find that interesting?” The implication is that only fans of watching paint dry could possibly answer “yes”. Right now the contrast between the dramas elsewhere in the world and the humdrum day-to-day business of Brussels is particularly stark.

As the world commemorated September 11th and President George Bush prepared to address the United Nations, the European Commission went about its normal tasks. It announced that it is looking at ways of harmonising car taxation; it trumpeted the fact that 80,000 pages of European Union law are about to be translated into nine new languages; and it signed a memorandum of understanding on “intermodal Pan-European corridor VIII”—ie, some roads and railways linking Albania, Bulgaria and Italy. Even the EU's occasional scandals tend to have a peculiarly dull stamp. The Americans had Monica Lewinsky. By contrast, the biggest scandal to hit Brussels this year is an accusation by the European Commission's chief accountant that the organisation has failed to use double-entry book-keeping.

But while the day-to-day details of EU affairs can be grim, the big picture is fascinating. Really. The Union has recently embarked on projects so ambitious that they challenge fundamental assumptions about both politics and economics. The euro is the first-ever attempt to create a real international currency (though Charlemagne himself had similar ideas). Until the new coinage began to jingle in pockets in 12 EU countries in January, it had always been the case, bar a few trivial exceptions, that a currency was issued by a country and backed by a national government and a central bank. With the euro, all that has changed. Will it lead to an economic government in Europe with a much bigger budget and tax-raising powers or will it establish a new way of managing currencies and monetary policy? This is not just a debate to engross economists. It will have weighty consequences for 300m-plus people who now use the new currency—and may inspire similar experiments elsewhere.

Not content with reinventing monetary economics, the EU is also remodelling the basic building block of global politics, the nation-state. It was Europe that invented the model in the first place, and Europe that now seems to be disinventing it. By joining the EU, European countries accept the supremacy of European law over national statutes. The EU tells the French when they may shoot small birds, the British how many hours they can work in a week, the Germans when they can subsidise their businesses. Delegates to a European convention are now pondering demands for a federal constitution for the EU.

Some believe that the Union is in effect turning into a new country—a United States of Europe—that will one day exercise power much as a traditional nation-state does. Others argue that the EU is doing something both less dramatic and more innovative. It is busy acquiring many of the characteristics of a nation-state, while actually creating something newer and more complicated. Either way, the consequences for the rest of the world will be drastic. A United States of Europe, if it ever came about, would profoundly shift the global balance of power. But a new hybrid political form, dependent on international law and deep co-operation between the older states, would create a political model which would challenge traditional assumptions about government all over the world.

So if the EU is so interesting, why does it seem so dull? Partly because most of the Union's formal day-to-day powers are technocratic: a merger to be approved or turned down; a trade dispute to be resolved; an environmental directive to be issued. But there is more of a connection between the drab details and the big picture than is often realised. Eurosceptics often argue that the integrationists promote their ambitions by stealth—by dressing up big political changes as mere technical adjustments. This argument can mislead. Sometimes it even smacks of paranoia. Sometimes, however, it is true. In a frank moment, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister, once described the EU's “system”. “We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens,” he explained. “If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

Brilliant, but also slightly sinister

What Mr Juncker and those who think like him are trying to do is, in essence, to drown opposition to European federation in a mass of technical detail, to bore people into submission. As a strategy, it has gone a long way. The greatest single transfer of sovereignty from Europe's nations to the European Union took place, in 1985, as part of the project to create a single European market. Even Margaret Thatcher, not usually slow to spot a trick, later claimed that she had not fully appreciated the ramifications of what she was then signing up to.

But there are signs that this strategy of integration by stealth has run its course. EU politicians and civil servants are genuinely rattled by mounting evidence that their Union is seen as remote and overbearing. They hope that their new convention will help them to “reconnect” with ordinary Europeans. In the process, that will raise basic questions about national and personal identity. Do people yet “feel European”? Or are national identities still much stronger? How far can the EU stray into sensitive new areas like defence and internal security?

In dealing with such issues, the conventioneers will also have to start addressing the question of whether the EU is a state in the making or some new form of political organisation. And then there is another possibility, little discussed in Brussels. The whole enterprise may ultimately prove impossibly complicated and begin to creak and break apart as a result of its internal contradictions. Now that really would be interesting.