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To open the road to a prospect of this kind, and to come back to the starting point - namely how to combine strategic thinking with the technical aspects of the ongoing diplomatic negotiations - it is essential for the Intergovernmental Conference to tackle boldly a revision of the provisions on flexibility, or rather on "enhanced" cooperation. Those at present in force, painfully negotiated at Amsterdam, are not very usable since by guaranteeing everyone they end up not guaranteeing anyone, and encouraging cooperation outside the treaties and the common institutions. Nonetheless, paradoxically, the strengthened types of cooperation are not so important for the Community "pillar" they were initially designed for: at bottom, if we extend recourse to qualified-majority voting, the Single Market conceived fifty years ago by Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman and the common policies and institutions that accompany it will be truly completed, so as to be able soon to be extended to the candidate countries. Enhanced cooperation is instead crucial in the new "building sites" of the integration process - justice, immigration, security and defence - where the acquis still all remains to be created, and where, as with the Community twenty or thirty years ago, a certain initial level of homogeneity and convergence is essential. If it were easier - in relation to the possible "centre of gravity" already mentioned - to embark on enhanced cooperation perhaps using the institutions and the budget of the EU, that would constitute a major stimulus to "deepen" integration in an increasingly larger, more diversified Europe. That would among other things multiply the "magnet" effect of the "centre of gravity": partners not initially interested in enhanced cooperation, or not qualified, would soon see themselves encouraged to join in order not to remain excluded from the foreseeable benefits (functionally and politically). Basically, this is what happened - mutatis mutandis - with both the monetary union and Schengen, which ended up incorporating more countries than initially planned or imagined.
In short, the great enlarged Europe needs a vital core: as an instrument for integration, not division; and as an instrument open to countries interested in joining, as has been the case with the Community in recent decades.
This would in some sense mean going back to the future: enriched with visions, but also with concrete experience - of a new stage in Europe's never-ending course.