The insidious point, though is that it replaces the "US grip" by an "EU grip". By that I mean EU 'government' level over national states. I think that's actually the real aim like for many EU initiatives. The single curreny already pretty much nuked national sovereignty on key economic levers and this is a step further towards the dissolution of European nation states. The constant use of the term "sovereign" in Europe at the moment is highly ironic, if not a little 1984's doublespeak but people seem to swallow it hook, line, and sinker (see comments and reactions here).
European Union have been meaningfully created so that the enrolled countries economically depends on each other. It came with a lot of downsides (loss of national sovereignty is one of the biggest), also a lot of benefits (bigger market) and the most important of all of those, it came with the longest peace period of the continent in the human history.
It may seems that things are not going in the right direction and I'd agree but we are pretty rich compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, and we are still not at war against each other like we were in the last thousands years so I'll take that.
You don't need to destroy individual countries to achieve peace and prosperity.
We had prosperity befote the EC and we can, and did, achieve peace by a mindset shift after two world wars and free trade. There is a big difference between the original EEC and the EU, too.
Again these are all a posteriori arguments that are repeated ad nauseam to justify a federal Europe and to manufacture consent.
I agree that we can't (and will never) know if we could have done it better.
But the results are here : we are at peace, and compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, we live in overall great conditions and we are pretty much free. I'm not saying we don't have to fight to enhance things or to at least keep them like they are. I'm french so I know what it means to protest against basically everything ;)
I'm not saying we couldn't have done it better. But it's important to acknowledge what we really have before trying to get better things.
Me too, so I know that the country entered the EEC without any desire to disappear into a superstate but that's what's happening very insidiously, including because the country has had very weak leadership for decades.
That's not the case though. Currently, national sovereignty doesn't really exist in this regard as most countries don't have their own national payment system. Also, there already is a European system to settle transactions in Euro: TARGET2, though it is designed for use by banks and other financial institutions only.
Edit: the EU becoming like 1984 is not what we should be wary of. Our societies becoming like "Brave New World" (control through hedonism instead of straightforward repression) is a much more realistic scenario.
Doesn't strike me as bad, the alternative is for Europe to continue its slide into irrelevance (nobody cares about any of the small country individually, only united does it have some leverage against US/China/Russia)
There is a huge gap between an united front on key issues when deemed in mutual interest and this great bulldozing of national sovereignty and identities. I also think that using "keeping up with the US/China" to justify it is a fallacious argument: The integration policy comes first and everything else are a posteriori arguments to justify it.
Can you tell me when was it better than nowadays ? The EU is far from perfect, but still I'm glad to be born after its creation than before. Because my grandparents were born before and they know what it was to be at war.
I still fail to see the regulation inflation. It is not like there was an absence of regulation before the EU. But now once you comply with EU regulation, you have access to a significantly larger market than before, where you had to comply with national regulations.
So yeah, depending on what market your institution is from, you might see an increase in regulation. But changes are, once you expand beyond national borders, you have less regulation to deal with as compared to before the EU.
AI, RGPD/DSA/etc, yearly money laundering regs are a good example. They come on top of local regulations, they don't replace them. Each country still has its own special laws.
The original EEC was to help maintain peace through economic interdependency. Now the EU is very different with ultimate goal of full integration, i.e. a federal state. The single market is a step, the single currency is another step, EU Parliament, tax rules, now possibly defence matters, etc. Step by step but always in the same direction.
The EU started with the coal and steel initiative, which created a common market for those commodities. It was indeed "peace through trade", but mainly trade.
And the goalpost has since moved very far, I don't see really how preventing countries from sending back illegal immigrants or making same-sex marriage has anything to do with European peace.
The point made is still valid since the EEC was created in 1957 and, before it, the Coal and Steel Community in 1951. Of course it is also unclear what they had in mind with that phrasing, and perhaps it even varied depending on whom you asked: The UK government under Thatcher signed it but I think we can all agree that she wasn't aiming for a federal EU (her famous "No, no, no" speech in 1990 makes it beyond doubt). I think the people at large did not want nation states to disappear within a federal EU, either (and probably still don't).
It's still simpler to deal with EU regulations instead of dealing with the national regulations of each member country. The weaknesses of the EU are where the member countries are not aligned yet.
The problem is that it also prevents countries from reducing the regulations in order to foster local innovation, avoid disadvantageous rules (there are more lobbyists than bureaucrats in Brussels, for a reason) or adapt to a new reality (AI being a good case). Moreover, each country still have their own specific laws, the EU regs come on top, and don't decrease the amount of laws. And the EU votes a lot of laws, since its the main power it has, on average 7 per day.
Individual countries are free to scrap their own regulations that are redundant or counterproductive due to EU regulations. There are still a lot of domains that are not or under-regulated by the EU. Since that doesn't seem to happen, something on the national level is not working, and the utility of national legislation over EU legislation starts to seem doubtful.
