LONDON -- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democratic Party have done Europe a great service -- although it may not have been the one Schroeder intended.

By endorsing proposals for a full-blown European central government, patterned on the current federal system in Germany itself, the German leader has at last ignited a real debate about the kind of Europe people want to live in and how it should be organized.

Broadly speaking, the head of Europe's biggest and strongest member state wants to see the present European Commission upgraded into a proper government, with the present Council of Ministers metamorphosed into a kind of upper parliamentary chamber, along the lines of the present German Bundesrat.

Schroeder's radical proposals have drawn the predictable range of responses. From France there has been embarrassed silence. This is not the sort of superstate Europe that the French, any more than the British, really want at all. But on the other hand, seen from Paris' perspective, the Franco-German alliance is crucial and France does not want to upset its already delicate condition. So the less said the better.

From enthusiasts for "more Europe" there have been approving cries. From officials and bureaucrats who want efficiency and speed in reaching neat, Europe-wide, administrative decisions there has also been approval. This is natural enough. Anything that reduces the tiresome arguments between nation-state members and parochial national legislatures is welcome from the good administrator's point of view -- although not necessarily from the good democrat's.

From the more skeptical Europeans, notably in Britain but also Continent-wide, there have been murmurings of "We told you so." This, they say, is the superpower-superstate agenda unfolding. Some have gone even further, seeing in the proposals a dark plot to reassert German dominance in Europe, albeit disguised as submersion in a greater European system.

Behind all this lies a real dilemma. How is an enlarged Europe, composed eventually of as many as 27 very different and long-established nations, including all the new applicant states, ever going to reach decisions and maintain the momentum that zealous Europeans want? How can the need for order, clarity and efficiency at the center be reconciled with the equal or even greater need to keep the governance of Europe close to its grassroots and to popular sentiment inside each country?

Traditional thinking can see no answer other than strengthening and streamlining the central European institutions, as the Germans propose, and hoping that an enhanced European Parliament will somehow maintain the democratic linkage. That is the natural way that ordered minds incline -- toward projecting past nation-state patterns of governance on a supranational scale, thus building a better and more coordinated machine.

But as in most aspects of human social behavior, trying to replicate and extrapolate the past for the sake of a tidier future may be a flawed approach. Life, work and social evolution are never linear. The truly radical "answer" to the problem of organizing Europe's future may be that no answer is needed now. Self-organization and constant adaptation may be far better principles to follow in modern conditions.

Scientists and more farseeing economists are increasingly looking at the world in this way. Economies and societies, they say, are not machines, and neither is a grouping or entity as diverse as Europe. They are surely right. The mechanical analysis of human affairs, and the mechanical constitutional model of governance to which it leads, just does not match the reality of human social existence, which is constantly evolving and adapting, full of uncertainty and chance and, above all, of enormous complexity, well beyond the scope or grasp of the best official mind.

A shoal of fish swims and maneuvers, or a flock of birds flies, without any apparent control point, either internal or external; the same principles of self-organization apply to human affairs. The arrival of the information age, linking humanity, or the more advanced parts of it, in an amazing, interactive network of communication, vastly increases the degree of complexity and the potential, indeed the need, for self-organizing systems in place of conventional, "top-down" administrative structures.

In short, it is time for all those metaphors about "European construction," "new architecture" or more efficient and smooth-running systems and "solutions," so beloved of bureaucratic mandarins and official minds, to be banished from the book of governance and from the whole debate about Europe's future shape. The German ideas may be sincerely held and nobly motivated, but they belong to a past age, as do all the plans and passions of other Europe-builders and conceivers of grand designs for European order.

To argue that the opposite of these ambitions for large-scale, imposed coherence is isolation or chaos is to miss the central point. Primitive social groups have grown into societies, which have grown into nations, which may grow into something else, as yet unforeseen. But the impulse will come, as it always does, not from top-down organizational models but from the bottom and from the roots, from history and from individual cultures.

No one orders fish to swim in a shoal. No one invented the natural process of commerce and markets that binds humanity increasingly together. The best Europeans will be those who recognize, and go along with, the power of self-organization and give up trying to design machines to control the process and repeat the past. Such things will not work.

Not to recognize this will provoke a fragmenting backlash that does Europe far more harm than good.