Comment by throwawayffffas

> Aren't we already fully unified?

Clearly we are not fully unified. We still have 27 different budgets for example. We are still mostly borrowing as 27 different independent sovereigns for example.

> Ok, but you haven't told me what exactly the end goal of that "ever closer union" is.

That's what the legislative process of proposals, rejections and counter-proposals is all about figuring out what the end goal looks like, that's why we don't have an EU constitution and instead have the Treaty of Lisbon. The constitution was rejected in popular processes in France and the Netherlands withdrawn and an alternative proposal was made that actually made it into agreement.

You can frame that as they went around our back to do evil things. Or you know as a negotiation where both sides of an argument compromise. The key clue that this is a compromise between two sides is that no one is actually happy with the result.