NATO'S bombing campaign against Serbia started on March 24th in the middle of a special European Union summit in Berlin. After 72 days of air attacks the EU envoy, President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, reported back to another EU summit in Cologne that Serbia had accepted the terms for a settlement.
Later the same evening it was confirmed that Javier Solana, the NATO secretary-general, is to become the EU's first head of foreign and security policy, officially Secretary-General of the Council of Ministers.
And yesterday's Cologne Council conclusions contain a declaration on the development of the EU's security and defence policies, including a commitment to absorb the functions of the Western European Union and to develop a capability to act independently of the United States, using NATO resources.
It certainly adds up to a dramatic development of the EU's security. The Kosovo crisis has acted as a catalyst for elements already there in EU treaty agreements. It has brought an urgency and immediacy to them, arising from the realisation that European states are not able to mount the sort of peacekeeping, peace-making and humanitarian tasks to which they are committed without US help.
Simultaneously their efforts to develop such capabilities have been given a boost by dissatisfaction among their electorates with having to rely so much on US leadership and resources, as shown in opinion polls.
There is also the dawning realisation of the costs of reconstructing the former Yugoslavia and including it and the Balkan region as a whole in European integration. That is the logic of the stability pact proposed by the German EU Presidency in recent months.
Germans are familiar with these issues, having borne the costs of unifying their own country over the last decade. Germany has also been to the fore in pressing for EU enlargement.
Yesterday's Cologne conclusions contain a commitment to speed up the process, particularly as it relates to the six states on the slower track of negotiations - Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Malta, Romania and Bulgaria - in deference to the Kosovo crisis and the costs entailed for the last two of these states especially. The Greeks blocked a more positive commitment to eventual Turkish membership.
In other respects, too, the Kosovo deal bears the imprint of German policy. The Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, strained his Green Party's unity by his passionate advocacy of the bombing campaign to prevent ethnic cleansing. There was no strong support in German public opinion for using ground troops, however.
But the Germans have all along been concerned to include the Russians in a settlement, corresponding to their geopolitical interest in its stability. They have also made the issue of United Nations Security Council approval central, after it was marginalised by Anglo-American hawkishness and unilateralism on Kosovo.
Both emphases led in the direction of choosing Mr Ahtisaari as EU intermediary. It was an inspired choice, given his own UN background on Namibia and peacekeeping (where he has worked with many Irish people) and his intimate knowledge of the Russian scene. The deal he brokered with the US and Russia presented the Serbs with an accomplished fact, which they could not dislodge or divide in Slobodan Milosevic's usual fashion. It all adds up to something of a triumph for German diplomacy, as they conclude their EU Presidency and hand it on to the Finns.
HOW should one interpret these developments within the EU? Are they a belated attempt to bring political and security capacities into line with economic and regulatory ones which have given the Union such an influential role in continental affairs? Are they, as some critics aver in Ireland, part of an agenda to build a federal super-state with a neo-imperial agenda? Are they the beginning of a European security and defence regime which heralds the break-up of NATO?
Is it the end of Irish neutrality, as the Government prepares to join the NATO-sponsored Partnership for Peace and signals its readiness to have Irish troops serving in Kosovo, or rather a necessary and belated modernisation of it after the end of the Cold War?
These are large questions, which cannot be answered in this limited space. They are posed more sharply by these events, which come in the middle of the European Parliament election campaign. It is as well to beware of dogmatic responses.
There are elements of all these tendencies at work, in Ireland as throughout the EU, simply because of political divisions over the desirable direction of change. But it is very much an open agenda: there is nothing predetermined, and many conflicts of interest involved. All the more reason to be involved in the discussion, as in the actions which flow from it, the better to influence how events evolve.
Certainly there is a determination shared now by the larger EU member-states to equalise defence capabilities with the US, after the Kosovo crisis. But as may be seen from the Cologne declaration this is not intended to supplant NATO.
Nor is it intended to exclude neutral states or draw them into a defence alliance. Article 5 of the WEU treaty will be left aside, and neutrals (as also non-EU NATO members like Turkey and Norway) will have the right to participate in political decisions and to opt out of military ones. Note also that the military tasks involved are restricted to peacekeeping, peace-making and humanitarian aid. Implicit in the EU treaty and explicit in Irish legal requirements is UN endorsement of such actions.
In a week which saw the death of another Irish soldier in Lebanon and the beginning of a process which may make UNIFIL redundant there, these developments make better sense of the Government's commitment to join PfP. Military inter-operability is the buzzword for the forthcoming Kosovo operation; and this is precisely what attracts Army officers and men to it as UNIFIL is run down and they remain anxious to maintain Irish peace-keeping skills in a new international environment.
Above all, one should have regard for the issues at stake in Kosovo. If ethnic cleansing and mass expulsions are to be banished from European affairs and the Balkans region included in European integration, a new type of security regime needs to be created, not modelled on Cold War territorial defence structures.
This will cost more; but much can be achieved by reorganisation rather than huge expenditures. Whether there is a political will to spend the large sums necessary to reconstruct and include the Balkans region in order to guarantee a peaceful future is much more problematic.